How many of you use Linux?

[Lostinspace]

I noticed that several of the posters here use Linux and I wondered how many there are and how you have found it. I also thought that I could give my own very inexpert impression as a start.

I use Linux Mint, which is really Linux for babies who want an easy setup with a friendly and helpful forum (there are worrying memes loose on the internet suggesting that this is not universal).

Even with Mint, there are some complexities. For example, I bought a new computer last summer and loaded Mint 20.2.

The graphics card didn’t initially work although things still displayed via software. I found out that the Linux Kernel supplied with Mint 20.2 was 5.4 and this did not contain the driver for my fairly new card (note that the Linux method of integrating the driver is more secure than the Window’s system of downloading drivers because a malicious driver has admin privilege and thus if you can persuade someone to download one, you have complete control). However, it was easy to upgrade the Linux Kernel to 5.11 after which the accelerated graphics worked.

Similarly, the wifi adapter supplied with the computer required using the terminal to install it. The commands needed were different for different branches of Linux but the Ubuntu commands worked for Mint as expected (Mint is repacked Ubuntu which is repacked Debian). However, I might have been in difficulties without an Ethernet cable to get started and search for how to online.

Then you find that Linux is probably worse than Windows for not running old programs. For example, I had used a program called Gnash to run .flv files (Flash animations) on earlier versions of Mint. I could compile it from source but it needed dependencies which were no longer supplied with Mint 20. However, after asking at the forum, I was able to get a new program called Ruffle which happily ran the animations.

Whilst Linux works with all the basic activities of browsing, handling email and word processing, there are a number of specialist programs such as Photoshop and Sibelius Music Notation Software – Sibelius – Avid and many games which cause problems. Sometimes Linux alternatives exist, such as GIMP for Photoshop but GIMP seems harder to learn and may not do absolutely everything (GIMP is getting better and a conversion to CMYK plugin now exists).

Perhaps the nicest feature of Linux is that I could buy the computer for £100 less. Unfortunately, I immediately lost 25€ by sending it to Mint, which brought back a thank you email from Clem. Of course I then realised that I need not have paid him just because I had loaded it on a new computer but too late.

 

[J-Sun]

I've been using Slackware since 2003. I'm happy.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I do on the family computer - I have no idea what version it is. We have used Linux since before Red Hat 9 and I know we had Ubuntu for a long time because it supported our media system but we now use Google Chromecast . There was another at the time of Red Hat 9 that I particularly liked but can't remember its name (there have been so many) I have never had any issues using it, personally but I live with a software developer who specialised in Linux Migration for a time helps. As a user it's not much different to Windows. Maybe its because I've been using it forever, I don't find GIMP as difficult as Photoshop.

 

[Elckerlyc]

Using Linux has its pros and cons. But so does using Windows. And technical issues are common among all platforms. Worse though -imho- is that Windows, if you want to use their latest OS, forces you to spent a lot of money on a computer powerful enough to handle their bloated system.

I am a happy Linux Mint* user, which runs on a 10 year old computer. The difficulty I had to overcome was an incompatibility with my NVIDIA GPU. Thanks to some bug in NVIDIA's drivers my system hung for 2 minutes every time I started it. Once I replaced that with an AMD card it took only 10 - 15 seconds to start up.
When you move from Windows to Linux, finding programs that feel intuitively a good replacement to you can be a problem. However, I think this is not something to blame Linux for, but the software suppliers who do not all consider to port their software to a Unix (Linux) platform. On the other hand, when you just moved to a completely different environment, you will simply need to take the time to overcome the differences and to get used to those and the need to use (to you) unfamiliar programs.
Except for playing games I have never found this a real problem and also never have tried to use Wine to run Windows-programs inside Linux. Too much bother and headaches, next to the downside of using it.**
About the availability of Linux comes with a Repository of available programs (some 80,000), all free of charge.
Furthermore, I have installed VirtualBox in Linux, in which you can run a virtualization of other OS-systems. I have installed Win7 and 10 other Linux flavours, to have a go at them. I also tried installing iOS, but that proved too much trouble, and XP, but couldn't find my registration key.

* To a Linux die-hard, who prefers to control everything by using the Terminal command-line, anything with a GUI is something for babies. They are the exception, the average computer-user demands to work with a GUI, so it's only logical and natural that Linux provides it. There are over a 200 versions of Linux, including several without GUI. Linux Mint is closest to how Windows works.
** Wine is a program in Linux that, with a lot of parameters to set, makes it possible to run Windows programs as if in their natural setting. It basically turns your PC in a Windows machine, sort of, with all the vulnerabilities that comes with that. In that case you'd better stick to Windows.

 

[Av Demeisen]

I used Ubuntu in its first couple of iterations. I wish I had the know-how to still use Linux, but I've been on an iMac since 2010.

 

[Pyan]

I honestly thought you were talking about the kid with the security blanket in 'Peanuts'...

 

[Lostinspace]

Since this is active again, I thought that I should offer by admiration for Elckerlyc’s lovely desktop. My own is boringly uncustomized as shown below.

I also noted that his computer was still running well after ten years. This is one of the great advantages of Linux. There is an extreme version at How and why I stopped buying new laptops.

PS. It seems to be easy to confuse Linus van Pelt with Linus Torvalds - Wikipedia

 

[Lenny]

I'm also all-in on the linux train, for about seven years - when I started my current job the only machine available at the time was running ubuntu 14.04, and when given the choice between a new ubuntu machine or a macbook, I went with ubuntu.

At the time I'd just bought a new graphics card, the GTX970, and my Windows 7 desktop was having a 'mare with the drivers - everything installed, but there was an issue with the drivers and the card shutting down the computer after some arbitrary length of time. Sometimes I'd go an hour of watching Netflix before it'd turn off, other times I might get five minutes of browsing before it died. So, switched my main machine to ubuntu.

These days I've got ubuntu 20.04 on my work laptop (and keep it updated with the LTS releases), manjaro on my personal laptop, and over christmas I did a fresh install of endeavour (like manjaro, it's a flavour of arch) on my desktop - been having a lot of fun updating my quickstart scripts, and exploring window managers (have settled on one called herbstluftwm with polybar as my status bar - primarily because I'm thinking of getting a super ultrawide monitor, and I couldn't fathom how to configure my previous favourite wm, i3, to let me split a large desktop into separate areas).

 

[J-Sun]

exploring window managers (have settled on one called herbstluftwm with polybar as my status bar - primarily because I'm thinking of getting a super ultrawide monitor, and I couldn't fathom how to configure my previous favourite wm, i3, to let me split a large desktop into separate areas).

As an fvwm nut, I'm curious (if you're not wedded to tiling WMs) if you've tried it. You can specify most anything about desktop or page sizes, so I'd be surprised if you couldn't do what you wanted, even though the usual aim is to have them be as big or bigger than your actual display when it seems you want the reverse. At least, there's little I've wanted or heard that someone else wanted that fvwm couldn't be made to do.

 

[Lenny]

As an fvwm nut, I'm curious (if you're not wedded to tiling WMs) if you've tried it. You can specify most anything about desktop or page sizes, so I'd be surprised if you couldn't do what you wanted, even though the usual aim is to have them be as big or bigger than your actual display when it seems you want the reverse. At least, there's little I've wanted or heard that someone else wanted that fvwm couldn't be made to do.

Tbh, that's the first I've heard of it! My initial manjaro outing was with i3-gaps, which I liked but ended up wiping because it was doing weird things with my boot drives in the bios. Then a community edition using awesome - decidedly not awesome. From that to an install of endeavour without the wm, and tried herbstluftwm. Others on my list (having gone through multiple "10/15/20 best window managers for linux") were bspwm, dwm, and xmonad.

What I want to do, which I've figured out with herbstluftwm on my current three-monitor setup, is take the single super ultrawide (say 5120x1440) and split it into distinct sections, which tile within themselves - e.g. 2560x1440 in the middle, and 1280x1440 either side. Any of those three can be subdivided within the area, or split into further distinct sections. I'd screenshot my current desktop, to give an example, but I haven't yet installed a screenshot tool.

I don't think i3 can manage it (you can use empty containers to give the impression of empty space, but in reality it's just a transparent window and acts as another object when tiling). Awesome is too set on the dynamic tiling to allow it. herbstluftwm is perfect with independent frames per tag (where the entire desktop real estate is your screen, and a monitor is just a rectangle of space in that screen that displays a single tag) and the ability to cycle through tags, though I have sacrificed dynamic tiling. That said, each tag and frame can be loaded with, or switched to, a preset layout, so if I wanted the traditional spiral, or a quadrant, I can build the static results of dynamic tiling (not a major concern, but I do like the wm automatically resizing things for me - like split a fullscreen browser in two if I drag a tab out). As a bonus, herbstluftwm also supports stacking windows in a frame, which I loved in i3 and missed in awesome, and floating windows (I'm one of those terrible people sat in the middle of mouse-only and keyboard-only!).

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I'm trying to figure out from the docs if the same could be achieved with fvwm. I guess you can define the viewports as in the example above. Question is, is it possible to display multiple viewports at once?

 

[J-Sun]

I'm not sure. (I just have a standard, simple, single, desktop=display, multiple-desktop thing.) There are links to places like the fvwm forums, irc channels, mailing lists, etc. at fvwm.org but, since I haven't really changed my configuration in years, I also haven't been to those, so I can only assume they're still active. They used to be very knowledgeable and helpful. Fvwm's notion of 'pages' might also be helpful. However, it sounds like you want a sort of tiled desktop with tiled windows within those and, while I think people have configured fvwm to be a sort of tiling wm, it's really designed the other way as a very windowing wm - I can put windows on any pixel of my desktop with one or a few keystrokes. As far as tiling, I tried a few way back when and actually got along pretty well with ratpoison (which, by it's 'death to rodents' attitude, is obviously anti-mouse and keyboard-only) but just fell in love with evilwm and then fell in love with an fvwm configured to be a sort of slightly souped-up, more flexible, not-quite-so-evil wm. Anyway, whatever wm ends up working for you, I hope you find your ultra-wide nirvana.

 

[johnnyjet]

Not a Linux user, though I've heard a lot of good things about it. Before I recently retired, I had worked in the industrial automation field for many years. There was a period of time--about 4 years--where I worked on Unix systems. Of all the operating systems I've worked on, Unix was my favorite. I've always wanted to give Linux a try, but I never had the opportunity.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I have used Linux to varying degrees since the late 90s. We had HP-UX, the Hewlett-Packard version of UNIX, at work. I would develop scripts on Linux at home and put them on the HP system at work.

HP-UX - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

It was kind of funny because an Indian guy was the official UNIX administrator and he pushed the idea that the HP was a "real computer" and the 66 MHz Pentiums that we were just starting to get were merely toys.

 

[J-Sun]

It was kind of funny because an Indian guy was the official UNIX administrator and he pushed the idea that the HP was a "real computer" and the 66 MHz Pentiums that we were just starting to get were merely toys.

Maybe a little bit of hardware/software shear there, but still...

 

[psikeyhackr]

I bought a version of the Coherent OS and played with it in the 90s.

Coherent (operating system) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Took me a while to remember the name.

 

[Lenny]

What I want to do, which I've figured out with herbstluftwm on my current three-monitor setup, is take the single super ultrawide (say 5120x1440) and split it into distinct sections, which tile within themselves - e.g. 2560x1440 in the middle, and 1280x1440 either side. Any of those three can be subdivided within the area, or split into further distinct sections. I'd screenshot my current desktop, to give an example, but I haven't yet installed a screenshot tool.

Anyway, whatever wm ends up working for you, I hope you find your ultra-wide nirvana.

An update to this - I got one of the stupidly ultra-wide monitors last summer, tried a few window managers, and did end up sticking with herbstluftwm. I gave fwvm a whirl, but from memory the single viewpoint didn't work for what I wanted.

Slowly getting everything how I want it, next up is listening to xrandr, I think, for monitor changes, so I can switch my work laptop to the same setup and still have it work on my home screen, office screens, and standalone, and switch between them when unplugged. 1080p screens currently work nicely, but my on my ultra-wide I'm having to live a life of floating windows everywhere - it's giving me ptsd flashbacks to macos.

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Something else I'm going to look into is switching my bootloader from grub. Anyone had experience with others?

 

[Vince W]

I've been using Slackware since 2003. I'm happy.

I started using Slackware in 1996, but switched to OpenBSD in 2005. I just updated my OpenBSD system to 7.3, which was released today. It took less than twenty minutes and worked flawlessly. I use cwm to manage the desktop.