What are you running and how did you get here (I'm back) ?

After a break of 16 months, I am back with Linux on my laptop.

I thought it would be nice to hear about your recent journeys with/to Linux, so please share.

Until last week, I ran Windows 10 on my laptop and it was pretty good experience, it was originally installed as an experiment as I had to upgrade my SSD, but Win 10 didn't break (a few small glitches) and ended up staying. Prior to that I ran Centos for large part of a year, which was not as good an experience as I had with Win 10 (and before that I had run Ubuntu for many years which varied between just about good enough to brilliant).

I still have my Centos Workstation in the attic running Plex and a few other ancillary tasks, which I have only had to physically touch once to install another printer. I did have a plan of waiting for it to break to install Windows 10, but its been boringly flawless and could not face juggling data off my raid 1 (XFS) setup.

But for a regular use desktop I found Centos (I used it at work and on my laptop prior to Win 10) needs a lot of configuration to get running well and is fiddly managing numerous external repositories to get the set of applications I want. I really do prefer the Debian/Ubuntu package Eco-systems. For example in Centos, XFCE was not configured well; missing some packages from Fedora and when the previous package/update manager was removed and replaced with the new Gnome one (a Redhat decision), Its like they forgot about other desktops, meaning the only way to update XFCE was from the command line, as a result Gnome is the only fully usable desktop in Centos 7 (even then you still will be hunting 3rd party repositories for desktop applications).

So back to my Laptop and I am now running Xubuntu 18.04 LTS.
With my preferred set of applications being more traditional (Firefox/Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Geany, Darktable etc), I could not see any advantages to Gnome and its modern application look.
I've always liked the out of the box configuration of Xubuntu, top panel just how I like it, whisker menu and an easy on the eyes colour scheme. The only tweak I have done so far is to set the top panel to auto-hide.

Cheers, Nick

 

Linux MX here, for watching torrented movies, surfing in unknown, sites, etc...
On a Windows machine I have a VM with MX for banking/shopping purposes.

 

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.



I've been running 16.04 since Boxing Day and upgraded over 14.04. I actually think Xenial is more stable than Trusty.

 

I installed my first Linux (ubuntu and then Linux Mint) back in 2009. Then came Windows 10 and I was lured by its stability and bling bling. And the fact that it is THE gaming platform. About a year ago I got tired of constant update problems and didnt want to do yet another clean install of Windows, so I decided to try Linux again. Installed Linux Mint again and it felt like home. Then I discovered Deepin Linux and fell in love with the Apple inspired look of it, it was so beautiful - and it is stable.

Funny story, I loved the look of Deepin so much so I decided to buy the "original". I bought an new iMac 27. Sure it was beautiful , but MacOS is very boring and the hardware specs is what I had 4 or so years ago on my PC. So I sold it a couple of months later. Retina is NOT boring though. It blew my mind.

Nowadays many games for Windows can be run with Steam Proton so there is not much need of Windows anymore, even though I use it for the games that can not be played on Linux, yet. (Yes I know, some of them probably can be played with Wine or Play on Linux, but I just want to install the install file and play, dont want to configure anything and that is exactly what I get from Steam Proton on Linux) The only thing I miss from Windows is Sandboxie and InstantRescue (and Macrium Reflect of course ).

 

I started out in 1999 with Slackware and that didn't go well for a Linux noob I installed SUSE and all was better. I used SUSE for a year then moved to Mandrake. In 2003 PClinuxOS came out and that was nice so I used that a couple of years until something happened to TexStar and the distro went wacky. I installed Linux Mint, used that for 5 years. Installed Arch KDE after Mint and have been happy. I still use Arch on desktop and MX Linux on 3 laptops (1 is wife's) and all is well.

I tried out most all the top distro's and IMO Arch and MX Linux are the best for my brain.

 

Kubuntu 18.04 with Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.04, Lubuntu 18.04, Lubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu Mate 19.04 and Xubuntu 18.04 in qemu/kvm.

 

I spend most of my time in Whonix instances. Whonix 14 is Debian x64 stretch with XFCE.

 

Over the years the only systems that have crashed completely for me beyond resurrection have been Manjaro, Windows7 and Condres. I’ve had odd glitches with other Linux systems but nothing serious and Windows 10 has been annoying but efficient enough and stable.

Work wise I much prefer Linux but my requirements have a pretty narrow focus so I’ve no need for any kind of kitchen sink distro. My main machine (Dell OptiPlex 3060) runs the KDE version of Q4OS 3.6 (Debian) which is dual booted with the KDE4 version of ROSA Fresh R10 which is still supported for another year. Funnily enough if you install their recently upgraded release (R11) you end up with something that doesn’t look so good or perform as well. Installing the previous release and updating gives superior results but be prepared for a long wait.

The Q4 system is faultless even with the Discover updater. The only minor glitch (with a combo of installed English language and Portuguese Brazil keyboard) was a need to manually edit etc/default/locale to get the date language into English (the available regional settings not able to do this).

I also have a notebook (LG-Gram) with the same dual boot setup.

My fallback machine is another notebook (Toshiba Portege R930) and that runs BunsenLabs Helium.

My Windows 10 desktop is no longer used full time but only to check queries from Windows users so I can’t comment on the current situation of this system in a work environment.

 

MX 18.2, Continuum from a pen drive with persistence.

I forgot to explain my journey with Linux. Basically for over ten years, it's been on Linux, off Linux, on again, off again...always dual-booting with Windows. Eventually I found xfce desktop environments are my favorite.

 

I'm moved from Windows, i've just get boring with it and many others reason like privacy concern, security.......
I'm on Manjaro Xfce 18.04 x64 with kernel 5.1.4-1.

https://i.imgur.com/7AZm7Ijl.png

rules.

 

I'm on Manjaro KDE. Very reliable (if you stay away from partial updates as witches' brew), polished and fast. And in case of problems (I don't have any) or configuration questions there is the excellent Arch wiki.

 

Your link isn't working for me.

 

Wrong url (.png is missing at the end)
Correct url: https://i.imgur.com/7AZm7Ijl.png

 

Oh right, thanks.

 

W7 >> Mint 18 >> MX 18 [all x64]
Each change has proved to be positive.

 

Oups, thanks @mood, link corrected.
@Daveski17, thanks for looking.

rules.

 

triple boot at the moment, Q4OS/kubuntu/windows 10, windows 7 in vm
i like the barebones aspect of q4

 

Looks good.

 

Linux Mint 19.1 XFCE as the main one, and Cinnamon DE on another partition.

 

Linux wise, prod and semi-prod usage includes Kubuntu 18.04 and MX Linux 18.x.
Mrk

 

After a bit of a gap from Sylvia just trying Linux Mint 19.1 XFCE (live). Running much faster for USB, than Sylvia.

 

Hmm, I use Slackware64-current. That means I bee a beta tester more or less. It's actually quite stable, but you do need to be able to handle things if something goes wrong.

Slackware64 is pure 64, no 32 bit included, that said, Eric Hameleers (aka Alien Bob) put together a multilib set of packages to add 32-bit capability to Slackware64. If it wasn't for Steam I'd skip that. I also have Alien Bob's ktown package. The recent update set of packages includes KDE Frameworks 5.59.0, Plasma 5.16.0 and Applications 19.04.2 on top of Qt 5.12.3. I have also compiled, created packages and installed a number of third party (non-slack) programs not included with Slackware.

How did I get there? Before Linux, there was Unix, this was my forte at the time, specifically HP-UX. In 1993, 94 I discovered Linux. The first was Yggdrasil. I played a bit with Debian (floppies), FreeBSD (CD) and InfoMagic Linux (CD) and of course Slackware. My first Slackware was downloaded to floppies (guessing 1.1 or 2.0). I think I still have the floppies in storage. Then came the CD version, the first of those that I still have is version 3.0 (first CD release) and have been with Slackware ever since. Over the years I have tried other Linux distributions, but always returned to Slackware. I gave up looking for another, sort of and exercise in futility for me at least.

Since this is in the 'all things UNIX' forum, I refrain for mention of the other OS's I used to had to use over the years.

 

My first Linux distro was Slackware 3 back in 96 purely for the purpose of running a Quake server