General Computer Thread

[Amaris]

You might just hop on e-bay and buy a second hand PC for testing stuff.. So you can fiddle with stuff without busting your main rig all the time...

It's not busted if I can restore it fast enough.

I usually play around in virtual machines, but they don't really give you the same impressions you can get from dropping the OS onto bare metal. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to having a knockaround machine just for that purpose.

 

[Santaman]

It is rather convenient that way, that's how I ended up with Mint, tried a few distro's and in the end one was left which I now use.
Also, my testmachines are less powerful than my main machines so if it performs well on the old testrig it will run even better on the main machine.

 

[Amaris]

It is rather convenient that way, that's how I ended up with Mint, tried a few distro's and in the end one was left which I now use.
Also, my testmachines are less powerful than my main machines so if it performs well on the old testrig it will run even better on the main machine.

I love KDE. It's the only reason why I didn't stay on Mint. Cinnamon is good, MATE is okay, XFCE is usable, but KDE is where it's at for me, and Mint stopped having a KDE version years ago. Some folks say you can just install KDE over top of it, but it doesn't take long for issues to start cropping up as Mint has tailored repositories and little add-ons that muck around with KDE.

It's why I don't add desktop environments to certain distros unless those distros are made to be compatible with those desktop environments. I mean, yes, I *could* do it, but I have to take responsibility if and when some major conflict arises and messes up the entire system, and I'd rather not deal with that.

There are very few cutting edge distros that interface well with KDE. Fedora is one that does.
Kubuntu is another one that is more up to date and uses KDE (and has the massive Debian/Ubuntu repository), I strongly dislike Snap, and the more Canonical pushes Snap on people, the less likely I am to ever go back.

Now, of course, Fedora's talking about adding telemetry starting in Fedora 40. That's got me concerned, because while I like the people at Fedora, the steering committee, the user base, I'm not a fan of IBM, who owns Red Hat, who is upstream of Fedora, and who has people on the Fedora committee. So even if I trust Fedora, I don't trust IBM, and Red Hat's not seen as favorable because of their recent changes on their formerly open source code being made closed source.

Data is forever on the internet. Who I trust today I will need to trust tomorrow.

 

[Santaman]

^^ Very true, I don't want to have anything pushed by a company either, I left Ubuntu because of that, they had a few "incidents" over the years and that made me start using Mint, and yeah, I'm very much a "I want stuff the way I am used to" guy which is why I love Cinnamon, it has all the stuff the way I am used to.

 

[Amaris]

^^ Very true, I don't want to have anything pushed by a company either, I left Ubuntu because of that, they had a few "incidents" over the years and that made me start using Mint, and yeah, I'm very much a "I want stuff the way I am used to" guy which is why I love Cinnamon, it has all the stuff the way I am used to.

For me, Cinnamon (as awesome as it is) has two issues with it that keep me from using it regularly:

1. No ability to change the lock screen background, even workarounds rarely work.
2. The compositor is kind of bad for gaming, and I do play some games that I really enjoy.

If Mint came out with a supported KDE version tomorrow, even after spending this past weekend up to my elbows in distros and settings, I'd Picard maneuver to it so fast.

 

[Amaris]

Uh, well, Solus is back. They just released 4.4, and out of curiosity I downloaded the KDE Plasma spin of Solus 4.4, and after installing it on a virtual machine, I have to say it's fascinating. Solus is built from scratch, and uses the eopkg package manager, which has been simple to use so far. They are a curated rolling release, and have cutting edge updates (rather than Arch's bleeding edge).

It uses its own software store, and all the apps are curated and guaranteed to work with Solus. All of the most popular ones are there, and if you can't find that, flatpak is easy enough to activate and use to install whatever else is needed outside the repos. Also, no telemetry, and the community seems to be highly engaged and friendly.

I could see myself using this as a daily driver.

 

[Amaris]

Ended up not going with Solus. Ran it a few days in the VM, and while it has a lot of pluses going for it, it's so simplified that it actually takes away too many tools. The repository is limited, they use their own curated apps, and while there were still a lot of apps, if you wanted something outside of it, you had to either install Flatpak to use it, or compile it yourself.

More than once there were apps I needed that I had to compile, except all the compilers were missing! I had to actually install all of the compilers and libraries I needed just so I could compile the apps I needed.

So it's very much a walled garden. It is lovely, and as long as you stay inside the walls, you'll do fine, but if you need stuff outside of it, I've found it can be a bit frustrating. The eopkg manager was also a bit frustrating, as it was far more limited than, say, apt, dnf, or pacman. I read that eopkg is also used in PiSi linux, and it was also a niche distro.

Oh, and it turns out they have Snap pre-installed. That got an "ew! ew!" from me.

So I'll just stay on Fedora, and try to work with the community in rejecting the telemetry issue. I understand why devs need it, but so far the general consensus is that if the telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in, it needs rejected, and I think that's very fair. There should be no deception or dark patterns involved here. Fedora and the community is too good to start walking down the Canonical/Microsoft path.

 

[Santaman]

^^ *tries not to laugh out loud..*

 

[Amaris]

^^ *tries not to laugh out loud..*

Good thing I didn't do a full install, eh? A good distro sure is hard to find if you have specific work patterns. :P

I know you mentioned a little bit about it earlier, but do you think Fedora's heading in a dangerous direction with their telemetry proposal? As of this post, the committee presenting the proposal has revised it to be explicit choice (no options pre-selected), with the Share option in blue, being the recommended option, and the Do Not Share option in grey.

 

[Santaman]

Hmm, hard to say, yes there's a big cheese company behind it but everyone involved bloody well knows that users will drop you like a hot potato if you piss in their plants privacy wise.
Canonical has had an incident trying to collect data and they very soon quit that and made it opt in because the people weren't having that...

 

[Amaris]

Hmm, hard to say, yes there's a big cheese company behind it but everyone involved bloody well knows that users will drop you like a hot potato if you piss in their plants privacy wise.
Canonical has had an incident trying to collect data and they very soon quit that and made it opt in because the people weren't having that...

I get what you're saying, and let's hope Red Hat learns this lesson before they lose the hard built trust of the community.

Canonical lost a ton of trust because of their insistence on telemetry. Even though the community leads at Fedora say otherwise, I do believe Red Hat is pushing this, and that IBM is pushing Red Hat.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I've hopped over to Endeavour OS. It's like Arch, but with an easier to use installer and most things pre-configured so you don't spend hours setting up a system you need to run quickly. So now I use Arch btw.

I've been running EndeavourOS XFCE on a recycled Chromebook for about six months now. The only issue I've had was a retired keyring about a month ago that blocked updates entirely. Reddit helped me solve that — it was a widespread problem — and no issues since.

This is my system for writing on the go. I have a Markdown editor installed (Ghostwriter). And I can VPN into the office with it, if necessary. I didn't spend a lot (forty for the system, another ten for a 128GB solid state chip), so if it conks out, gets lost, or breaks, I don't feel like I've lost anything.

I bought a second Chromebook recently, and right now that has Mint 21.2 on it.

 

[Marc]

I've been running EndeavourOS XFCE on a recycled Chromebook for about six months now. The only issue I've had was a retired keyring about a month ago that blocked updates entirely. Reddit helped me solve that — it was a widespread problem — and no issues since.

This is my system for writing on the go. I have a Markdown editor installed (Ghostwriter). And I can VPN into the office with it, if necessary. I didn't spend a lot (forty for the system, another ten for a 128GB solid state chip), so if it conks out, gets lost, or breaks, I don't feel like I've lost anything.

I bought a second Chromebook recently, and right now that has Mint 21.2 on it.

much better options that the planned obsolescence that is a plague on the Chrome books.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

much better options that the planned obsolescence that is a plague on the Chrome books.

Indeed.

They're both Acer C720s, both touchscreens. The EndeavourOS one was manufactured in 2014, the Mint one was 2015. When I flashed the firmware, it asked me if I was sure and if I wanted to make a back-up, in case I wanted to turn it back into a Chromebook, I guess, and I was like, "Nope!" These will never, ever run ChromeOS again.

The Mint Chromebook looks like Windows XP.
https://twitter.com/allyngibson/status/1677318639408631812

In other news, Mint 21.2 is officially released. I updated my sources list on my desktop from Vera to Victoria, and now I'm on 21.2. Only hitch I ran into was the Timelet desktop broke. My desktop Mint looks like Ubuntu.
https://twitter.com/allyngibson/status/1614299481486376964

 

[Amaris]

Indeed.

They're both Acer C720s, both touchscreens. The EndeavourOS one was manufactured in 2014, the Mint one was 2015. When I flashed the firmware, it asked me if I was sure and if I wanted to make a back-up, in case I wanted to turn it back into a Chromebook, I guess, and I was like, "Nope!" These will never, ever run ChromeOS again.

The Mint Chromebook looks like Windows XP.
https://twitter.com/allyngibson/status/1677318639408631812

In other news, Mint 21.2 is officially released. I updated my sources list on my desktop from Vera to Victoria, and now I'm on 21.2. Only hitch I ran into was the Timelet desktop broke. My desktop Mint looks like Ubuntu.
https://twitter.com/allyngibson/status/1614299481486376964

Holy cow, you have no idea how tempted I am to make my desktop look like XP right now.
Fantastic work!

Also, I expect Linux Mint 21.2 will do very well. They've managed to make it even easier to use.

 

[Santaman]

If you want to get closer to XP then use the XP theme in combination with Cinnamox-Heather.. and yes I like that look on some of my ancient machines like an old Dell Optiplex 745 which was made in 2007 so indeed on the ancient side.
That one has a Core2Due E6600 with 4GB RAM and a 320GB HDD, I ditched the ATI Radeon X1300 dual head gfx card and dropped in a Ngreedia OEM Geforce 315 which is faster and has the usual VGA and DVI connectors.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Holy cow, you have no idea how tempted I am to make my desktop look like XP right now.
Fantastic work!

It's just the RedmondXP theme, though I adjusted the icon padding to tighten it up. The Icons are WinXP, and I've been slowly using symlinks to fix the icons that XFCE didn't pick up in the theme. I got the Quick Launch bar done, and I'll move on to the system tray eventually.

I also use Vivaldi for my browser and, at least on the Chromebook, it's using the Xperience theme.

 

[Amaris]

If you want to get closer to XP then use the XP theme in combination with Cinnamox-Heather.. and yes I like that look on some of my ancient machines like an old Dell Optiplex 745 which was made in 2007 so indeed on the ancient side.
That one has a Core2Due E6600 with 4GB RAM and a 320GB HDD, I ditched the ATI Radeon X1300 dual head gfx card and dropped in a Ngreedia OEM Geforce 315 which is faster and has the usual VGA and DVI connectors.

That's what I love about Linux! You can take a 20 year old machine and make it run like brand new, with up to date repositories, security patches, and everything.

It's just the RedmondXP theme, though I adjusted the icon padding to tighten it up. The Icons are WinXP, and I've been slowly using symlinks to fix the icons that XFCE didn't pick up in the theme. I got the Quick Launch bar done, and I'll move on to the system tray eventually.

I also use Vivaldi for my browser and, at least on the Chromebook, it's using the Xperience theme.

It's still very well done. I use KDE, and I've seen XP themes for it, I may just take a crack at it myself.

 

[Santaman]

Grampa does have his "I'm old! I'm tired! GET OFF MY LAWN!" moments though when it has to do a lot of things at once, a 2.4Ghz dual core does show its age/limits in 2023.
But it runs Mint 21.1 with Cinnamon, could have used XFCE but I dropped in the wrong USB stick so Cinnamon it was.. works well though.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

What is the actual appeal for chromebooks? Who are they targeted at?