Views on Linux (from AmigaOS x86 thread)

[nicholas]

Until something goes wrong.  And it will.

The greatest tragedy in the opens source movement is it chose Linux.

My eldest son is 18 and has used nothing but GNU/Linux on laptops his entire life.

My 14yr old has used nothing but GNU/Linux her entire life.

My 8yr old has used nothing but GNU/Linux his entire life and he has autism.

My 5yr old has used nothing but GNU/Linux for her entire life.

None of them have ever had any problems that they can't fix themselves and they've never had any trouble doing anything they have ever needed to do.

Even my 3yr old uses only GNU/Linux and he has Down Syndrome.

You must not have the same levels of intellectual capacity as them.

[nicholas]

It means what its says.

Countless man hours wasted on Linux for no good reason than "its free".  Except its not.  People's time isn't free.  And lots of users have wasted countless hours to fix simple things in Linux.  A CD ROM driver update for example broke PCLOS- "Really? Works here fine, YOU must be the problem"..boots up Windows to get online to find a fix, 1 week later.  NO THANKS- life's too short.

Then there is Linux's "amateurishness" that leads to user frustration: I'm looking at my Mint 17.3 log in screen:  It says stefceplinuxStefceplinux.  Right under it there is a dialog box: It says in medium fonts"Login" underneath that a blinking cursor and in small fonts "Please enter your username".  Now I won't tell you as a user what is wrong with that, I'll let you work it out.  Let me say Linux's User-friendliness goes out the window from the very first login screen, in its "most user friendly" distro too.  Its a joke.

It was "gonna go mainstream" after Vista.  No, wait.  That was gonna happen "after Win 8".  No wait...now that 10 is stealing everyone's identity and sending to M$, its sure go mainstream any day now....

Enlighten those of us that don't have your astounding levels of technical competence and understanding, how is your name not displaying correctly on the Mint Display Manager the fault of Linux?

[nicholas]

Knew it.

You DON"T get it.

My user name is correct....the issue is why the F is the dialog asking for my user name, when my username is written right there on the screen just above the Login dialog box, FFS?  

So what does the user think when they see this?  Well the word LOGIN inside a dialog box that has ones username above it intuitively means that user account is selected and it now wants the password, but NOOOOOOOOO, it actually wants my username.  Again.  

So what do users do at the login prompt when they see their username already written above the dialog box?  They enter their password.  Which appears on screen for all to see AND is then written in BIG Fonts on a new password dialog box  

I repeat, "why is that the fault of Linux"?

[nicholas]

Seeing as Linux is apparently the cause of all your issues with the GNU OS use this instead.  No Linux to be found in it whatsoever.

https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/kfreebsd-amd64/daily/netboot-10/mini.iso

Or this. No Linux contained either.

https://www.osdyson.org/projects/dyson/wiki

Let us know how you get on without that terrible Linux causing all your problems.

[nicholas]

even though im pretty new to linux native, i have mostly ran it in vm as compiler environment tilllately, i cant agree with it. i was pretty surprised how useful and simple it may be even for creative tasks like multitrack audio recording or graphics. i consider it even more handy than windows i must admit. the problem is a choice of not overloaded distribution. for me it has been lubuntu so far.

My elderly parents used a first generation Intel iMac for ten years and when that finally packed up my uncle gave them his old core2duo laptop running Windows 7 and they could not use it without constantly ringing me for help.

I got sick of the calls so travelled the 100 mile round trip to their house and installed Lubuntu on it for them with Docky and a Snow Leopard icon theme to make it more visually familiar.

That was last summer and they've not called me for support once.

[nicholas]

So the choices were:

Remote Desktop and fix the pile of sh1te every single bloody day (usually more than once) or install Lubuntu and never ever have to fix it at all.

You would choose the first choice?

I'm not a masochist, nor am I a sadist wishing to inflict that level of pain upon pensioners.

[nicholas]

I was just thinking...

It's kind of funny that it was mentioned that Linux Mint is the most popular distribution.

Chronology went something like this;
Debian=OMG hard to install, old gnome in stable release! >
Ubuntu=Goal, to bring out a set release every 6 months of Debian Unstable, and keep Gnome current for desktop usage... (server edition using same Debian installer, because Debian reallyi wasn't hard to install, just for a long time was curses based, so had bad rep.  Strangely enough, Ubuntu server install still uses the curses based installer, rather than the gtk based one)
Then Gnome-shell was progressing and "OMG, we don't like this.  We'll create our own clone and call it Unity!"  But of course that's pretty much %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!tier than Gnome-shell, there is a reason no other distro adopted it.
Then came Mint... which then forked Gnome-shell to make Mate or Cinnamon (for some reason I can never remember which is the gtk2 based straight fork of Gnome2 or which one is basically GTK3+some gnome-shell stuff, but with gnome2's style of interface)  

So Debian > Ubuntu > Mint.  Problem is that Mint (with the exception of their poorly maintained Debian Edition) is based off of Ubuntu, and Ubuntu has, much like PCLOS it seems, makes terrible kernel patches that causes issues.  

I'd installed Ubuntu as a 'friendlier' Linux on a friends laptop and it literally ate the extended partitions that it was installed on.  I thought for sure that the drive was dying (it was kicking up a ton of I/O errors, when I mounted it with a  liveCD).  I ended up formatting the corrupted partitions and it was 100% fine after that.  Installed Debian and he's perfectly happy with it.

You really should try the Liquorix kernel on any Debian derivative that is used as a desktop/workstation.

 https://liquorix.net/

[nicholas]

Hmm, I wonder how many of those tweaks are in the SteamOS kernel.

Not sure how much they change over the stock Debian one.  I had thought liquorix as a distribution had died long ago.

Liquorix has never been a distribution.  It's a debian repo with builds of the Zen Kernel for easy updates.

Are you thinking of Lycoris Linux from the early naughties? They are unrelated projects.

This kernel build is much more noticeably responsive than the SteamOS kernel on the same hardware. It's kinda BeOS/Amiga style responsiveness.

[nicholas]

You're right, I was thinking of Lycoris.  interesting, I will have to give that a try, i genereally just stick to sid on my desktop and stesting on my more work related desktop systems.

The repo is supposed to be for sid so you are in luck, but it works on any debian version or derivative tbh. It only contains the kernel image and the headers. My kids and missus run it on their machines which range from core2duo with igp to sandybridge with nvidia pascal gpu and core m3 ultrabooks. All of them run a flavour of Mint.

I have it on a little Quadcore Atom Transformer T100 from ASUS with only 2GB RAM and a poxy IGP running GNUStep and the difference is like night and day.

[nicholas]

Only downside with Arch is the rolling version, there isn't any stop and snapshot a 'stable' version.  Thats why I went Slackware.  on all my 'production' boxen I run the stable snapshot version (14.2 currently) and just slackupg update for any security/bug fixes.  Arch is like always running slackware-current and always getting the latest software no matter what reason.
Either are still more stable than windows though.  Any either one you still have to tell it when to update not the other way around like windows.

With Arch being a derivative of Slackware you might be able to get away with installing this package.  Saves on compiling Zen yourself.  

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-lqx/

Yes I'm on a pimping spree, can't praise Liquorix / Zen enough.  

[nicholas]

Pimp away!  installed the liquorix kernel and it does seem a bit snappier!  Oddly it feels much like it did when I first installed my Debian system.  I think I probably went install crazy and have set stuff up that I don't really use, and should purge it out, but this reminds me of when I first got an SSD.  nice and snappy.  On the other hand my non-SSD installed Arch feels snappier than my Debian install does currently (seriously need to spend some time to figure out why, or just dump package list, re-install, then install what I actually use...)

Anyhow, thanks for the heads up, this is working quite nicely.

Glad you found it useful!

It's been the first thing I install on any newly installed system for many years now.

[nicholas]

Don't need to, I run Slackware

Well that's why I mentioned it.

There are no prebuilt Slackware packages of it AFAIK but the Arch package might work on Slackware.

[nicholas]

Linux for idiots: https://www.fosshub.com/Remix-OS.html/Remix_OS_for_PC_Android_M_64bit_B2016112101.zip

[nicholas]

Did a fresh installation of Windows 7 sp1 last night. Ran windows update at 10pm-ish and the were 207 critical updates. Left it running over night for 12 hours and it's still running now currently at update 174.

I have 47Mb fibre the machine has 2GB RAM, a 2GHz Core2Duo and an SSD so it's definitely Windows that's at fault.

Upgraded my son's laptop from Mint 18 to 18.1 at the same time and it took less than 10 minutes to download and install the entire operating system and upgrade every application he has installed.

[nicholas]

Oh and neither the WiFi Chipset nor the Ethernet had drivers from a fresh install.

Very amateur. Not impressed.