On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 05:18:11PM +0000, Ben Koenig wrote: > Mint is a popular choice for people who are familiar with Ubuntu but don't > want these higher level changes.
On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 03:20:13PM -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I agree with Ben's observation ... I will agree more on the plug > list rather than the plug-talk list, because surprisingly, this > is actually about Linux and computers, rather than "Off-topic". > > It might be flammable, however, distro wars often are :-( > > See y'all over there ... Summary of below: Try Debian 12 Bookworm. --------------------------------------------------------- Hello again, Linux geeks! I am a recovering ScientificLinux/RedhatEnterprise/CentOS user, with many ancient machines and virtuals requiring modernization. I don't update often enough, one of the (not net exposed) machines is a 15 yo distro. I do NOT like streaming distros - my own code and kludges do not "stream". I do not know how to package them for automatic update, or even maintainability - my focus is on the differential equations driving them, numerical accuracy, and runtime (some run for weeks with multiple threads), not coding style, or lack thereof. My favorite programming language is solder. So that is where I come from. What's maybe interesting to the rest of you is where I plan to go. My first "Redhat camp escape attempt" was Ubuntu, since so many PLUG people use it. I considered Mint, but that is built on top of Ubuntu, and will only be better than Ubuntu until Mark Shuttleworth "snaps" derivative distros out of existence. Anyway, Ubuntu was and is a nightmare. Three minute boot, huge memory footprint, imposed updates that break things, especially my kludgy things. Mouse driven. Personally, instead of mousing menus, I type on keyboards. Mouses (the plural invoking the hardware, not the mammals) do not have "backspace keys", which is my most frequently used keyboard key. Stick your GUI in something else gooey ... and brown. In Ubuntu despair, I tried installing Debian 11 Bullseye on a desktop and a laptop ... and the SHIT WENT AWAY. The same GUI apps are available, but the underlying text functionality is available as well. I can use gnome3 or gnome2-like desktops, or boot to text. Boot takes 10 seconds. Shutdown less than 2 seconds. Suspend Just Works, but who needs it? Small RAM usage. Works fine with 20yo laptops. All the apps I need. WHY DIDN'T I SWITCH TO DEBIAN A DECADE AGO? Debian 11 works fine, but won't forever. Curious, I distro-updated a test machine to Debian 12 Bookworm. Probably incorrectly. The update scrolled thousands of lines of text and stopped about six times to ask questions. Questions taking time and web research to answer properly. What ARE they TALKING ABOUT? Nothing broke during or after update, but I would design the distro-update process to ask the questions up front, with explanatory text available. And if I would do that, there is probably a Proper Debian Way to do that. Ubuntu distro-update just broke. A reinstall and restore- home-partition was faster. Probably PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) for both of my amateurish Debian and Ubuntu updates. ALL (TOO MUCH OF) THAT SAID, where I plan to end up is a stack of old archived Redhattish SATA drives, ten deployed Debian 12 Bookworm machines (including ready spares and extra SSDs), 25 years of backups .... ... and one bare-bones Ubuntu machine, because a very few app developers target Ubuntu in Debian-incompatible ways. Migrating and translating those apps to Debian will need a "before" and an "after". I hope I find superior Debian apps, and the Ubuntu machine will gather dust. The Ubuntu MATE 22.04.03 LTS machine I have deployed now freezes and needs a (three minute) reboot about twice a week. Again, I am not an Ubuntu or a Mint adept, so Your Mileage May Vary. However, if you prefer speed to tailfins, think about test driving a Debian Bookworm system for a while. Running on an old jalopy 586/Pentium, it might just blow the doors off your 8-core 32GB-RAM Ubuntu race car. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
