My 40th Thread...Linux Life

[target2019]

Nostalgia for User Groups

Back in the day I'd drive 20 miles into the city to attend monthly user group meetings (PC, Unix, Mac) to stay up on computing topics and news. Even that wasn't enough, so I also went to Princeton Mac meetings and wrote for their monthly journal.

I wasn't aware of what google was doing on desktops. Have to stay up on this stuff better, somehow.

For a long time, our internal facing Linux distribution, Goobuntu, was based off of Ubuntu LTS releases. In 2018 we completed a move to a rolling release model based on Debian.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topic...le-got-to-rolling-linux-releases-for-desktops

Ubuntu really feels like the decline of AOL. I remember waiting for the install CD to come in the mail.
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/ubun...nosedive?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I subscribed to the lunduke journal.

What is The Lunduke Journal?
The Lunduke Journal is an On-Line publication focused on Linux, Alternative Operating Systems, and Retro Computing.
https://lunduke.substack.com/about

Almost missed "DOS Week" - LoL!
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/dos-week-begins-at-the-lunduke-journal#details

 

[target2019]

I've been looking at 5 or 6 additional subscriptions that came with the lunduke newsletter. Yeah, I opted in to everything? Most were of no interest to me, and now unsubscribed.

One that was interesting is Dan Scott (The Retro Millenial). He describes his Windows era here: https://retropunk.substack.com/p/my-personal-computing-history-part?utm_source=substack

The email also has a Linux era blow-by-blow, but I can't link to that article yet. Maybe later?

 

[teetee]

I keep meaning to add my recent (not good, but ends well) experience.

I've been using Linux/Ubunut/Xubuntu as my daily driver since JUNE 2010. Reinstalled the OS as newer Long Term Support versions were released, generally every two years. Used that first machine from 2010-2014, replaced it in 2014, and used that up machine up to DEC2021. So I've used Ubuntu/Xubuntu on several machines and through several upgrades. I also installed it on a few other machines for friends, and I've played with a few of the other distributions. So I have some level of experience and rarely had any signification issues. Crashes were really rare, I normally went for weeks/months just sleeping it, and mostly only would reboot so it could update a new kernel.

So when I bought a new laptop in DEC2021, and installed Xubuntu on it, I figured it would all go well. Sort of. But it crashed on me after a few days. OK, maybe just needs some updates. But it kept crashing, and I couldn't figure it out (though I'm not good at troubleshooting this stuff, partly because I've had so few issues!). I didn't want to take the time to research it, I ended up just shutting it down each night, and that kept the crashes to a minimum. It had also just been doing weird stuff, like pull down menus and scrolling might sometimes look sort of pixelated for an instant. I swear that some youtube videos would stutter if I drummed along on the desk - but it has an SSD, so it wouldn't be a hard drive skipping, and I couldn't track down any loose connections. Frustrating.

By the time I got serious about figuring this out, I realized that the 22.04 LTS was out, so I decided to just reinstall. I did that on my previous machine first to test it out, and get that set up and tweaked to my liking, so I could quickly convert my new machine with minimal time used to get it tweaked ( I'm *very* particular about how my panels and preferences are set up).

Bottom line, that install went well, I got it all tweaked and backed up, and it's been rock solid. No weirdness, no stuttering youtube, no crashes, no video artifacts. All's well that ends well.

This is my first machine with SSD. The biggest difference is that I keep an insane number of browser windows/tabs open, and within a day or so I've consumed all the memory and I start swapping out to disk. With swap on the HDD, the machine would just grind to a halt, just painful. But I could just quit the browser (sometimes that was even difficult to get the menu down, or to get it to respond to CNTRL-Q), and that would bring it back. I'd do a swap-off-swap-on, restart the browser, restore the session, and I'd be back in business.

But with the SSD now, even when I go out to swap, I don't even notice any slowdown (though there must be some, SSD is still slower than RAM). Lately, I haven't even bothered restarting the browser, I haven't seen more than ~ 3 GB out to swap, and it seems to run just fine.

So I have no idea whey my install of 20.04 was so messed up on this machine (an ASUS Zenbook Flip 15), and probably a re-install would have fixed it, but 22.04 has been good from day one.

-ERD50

It will need the complete dmesg from both 20.04 and 22.04 and compare the driver lines between them. My guess is one of the drivers loaded into the kernel in 20.04 was buggy and it may have logged something before the kernel panic message (crash) indicating the problematic driver / version.

 

[teetee]

To me Ubuntu has been downhill on quality and speed for several years now. Don't like snaps, don't like the Gnome 3 Desktop, the PPAs. It feels like they just don't care anymore.

My daily driver is Manjaro with the Mate Desktop (Gnome 2 fork). Helps if you are familiar with Arch since Manjaro is a more stable version of Arch and uses the same package manager. Have some Flatpak apps as well.

Arch plus xfce4 is my goto Linux. Before that it was Slackware with xfce4.

Now I am using Ubuntu with xfce4 and have alpine as the base image for app dockerization. I think Ubuntu just wants to try new stuff to stay competitive (different X server, different package management methods, etc) so the bugs can be fixed.

Doesn't me I like being the eta tester though. Thr part I agree.

 

[ERD50]

It will need the complete dmesg from both 20.04 and 22.04 and compare the driver lines between them. My guess is one of the drivers loaded into the kernel in 20.04 was buggy and it may have logged something before the kernel panic message (crash) indicating the problematic driver / version.

I think you are right, I had suspected the graphics driver, but I'm just not experienced enough to parse out all those messages. I had tried different drivers, and things seemed to change a bit, but still crashed. Seems a lot of 'error' messages are just a normal 'try this method #1, and if it fails, I must need to use method #2', to adopt to different hardware. So not really an error, just a routine process.

I dunno, but fortunately 22.04 has continued to be rock stable, so I hopefully never need to dig into those logs again!

-ERD50

 

[easysurfer]

Got That Distro Hopping Feeling Again

My memory failed me the other day.

Was surfing on phone middle of night (yeah, I know, bad habit) when I came across one of those articles of the best Linux distros. There was a mention of one that was claimed as fast, secure a really good one. Wasn't a well known name. I thought to myself, worth a try, will do in the morning. But morning came and went and I completely forgot. Thinking I may recall if I saw the name again I went to DistroWatch to see if any names sounded familiar. There are so many distros I can't keep track.

I may never recall what is the name of the distro mentioned. But along the way, I'm in the mood to play around with another distro to see if worth another distro hop or not. I'm going to try Sparky Linux.

 

[target2019]

Main features of Sparky
– Debian based
– stable or (semi-)rolling release
– lightweight, fast & simple
– your favorite desktops to choose
– special editions: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue
– CLI Edition (no X) for building customized desktop
– most wireless and mobile network cards supported
– set of selected applications, multimedia codecs and plugins
– own repository with a large set of additional applications
– easy hard drive / USB installation

https://sparkylinux.org/about/

The Rescue version looks tempting. If I can remember to set up a stick with that...

Multimedia center is very tempting too. I have an old library of MP3's on an XP system I rarely boot up.

 

[easysurfer]

I'm debating between whether to try stable or (semi) rolling release.

 

[jim584672]

I've been playing with Arch Linux in a VM. In the past Arch has broken on updates for me. Now they have an installer as an option, type ARCHINSTALL on the prompt when the iso boots up. Only try Arch if you like a challenge.

 

[easysurfer]

Did some kicking of the tires of SparkyLinux yesterday.

I currently use MX Linux and Linux Mint as my distros.

On the good, SparkyLinux does offer some things the other two don't for my setup. Namely, it handles hot swap HDDs well which MX does not. Also, Mint seems to have some problems with booting. So far from what I've seen SparkyLinux is ok with booting.

On the bad, the community of Sparky is a lot smaller than the other two. Checking their forums, Sparky has only about 13.5K posts. MX about 365K and MINT over 2 Million. For example, in Sparky I made a post as Sparky doesn't have (as far as I know) a way to via GUI turn on/off auto logon. Not sure how done via command line or profile edits either. I posted a question last night. Have had zero replies.

Moral of story, not a bad thing to distro hop and compare now and then .

 

[jim584672]

I have been using the XanMod kernel on Manjaro / Arch and the performance increase is very noticeable.

"XanMod is a general-purpose Linux kernel distribution with custom settings and new features. Built to provide a stable, responsive and smooth desktop experience.

Supports all recent x86_64 versions of Ubuntu / Debian-based systems."

https://www.xanmod.org/

 

[easysurfer]

May try with Sparky Linux didn't go too well. I'm back to distro hopping again.

This time, kind of going full circle hopping back to one the the first Linux distros I used. Linux Lite.

 

[jim584672]

May try with Sparky Linux didn't go too well. I'm back to distro hopping again.

This time, kind of going full circle hopping back to one the the first Linux distros I used. Linux Lite.

Debian based, so it should be very stable, but the packages tend to be old.

 

[easysurfer]

May try with Sparky Linux didn't go too well. I'm back to distro hopping again.

This time, kind of going full circle hopping back to one the the first Linux distros I used. Linux Lite.

Debian based, so it should be very stable, but the packages tend to be old.

The typo strikes again . I meant to say "My try with Sparky" as I already tried, and for some things it just dragged so I did not use.

Then I decided to give Linux Lite another try and like that. I currently use MX Linux and Linux Mint. MX on a laptop I use for remote desktop connecting. Mint on my non-Windoze desktop at home.

But recently, I was looking into testing a new remote desktop program called HopToDesk (a fork of RustDesk). I tried installing on my MX laptop but it didn't execute. Then when trying to update MX got missing libraries. I thought, fine I'll put HopToDesk on my Mint desktop. That installed fine. Then I thought, I'll try Mint on my laptop, but had issue trying to get the install to boot. Was able to get further than either with Lite.

Think soon enough, I may keep Mint as my desktop Linux, but replace MX with Lite. Each has pros and cons.

 

[Route246]

Confession: I work on Linux for a living, kernel internals, device drivers, memory management, etc. I have updates published in the Linux kernel archive, nothing active anymore in the current codebase. 99% of what I do with Linux is in a shell (command line) and I only use a UI when necessary (icewm and vnc). My personal platform is Mac which I use for web browsing, vncviewer to get to Linux, Photoshop and various video post processing.

That said, I usually use Ubuntu Server (currently 20.04) and packages when needed.

Have any of you found flawless/seamless experience with Linux desktops with respect to power management, sound, plug-and-play devices and/or copy/paste transparency? All of that stuff works on Windows, mostly works on Mac (exception being copy/paste) but, for example, can you play 4K video and have the same experience you would have on Win or Mac? I haven't seen this pulled of yet.

Just curious because I have hard-headed friends who hate Win and insist on using Linux desktop. I laugh when I see them trying because they know better but my response is always, "Hey, can you close the lid on that Linux laptop and will it behave as well as Windows or Mac? Does sleep and hibernate actually work on Linux?

 

[acronymous]

Confession: I work on Linux for a living, kernel internals, device drivers, memory management, etc. I have updates published in the Linux kernel archive, nothing active anymore in the current codebase. 99% of what I do with Linux is in a shell (command line) and I only use a UI when necessary (icewm and vnc). My personal platform is Mac which I use for web browsing, vncviewer to get to Linux, Photoshop and various video post processing.



That said, I usually use Ubuntu Server (currently 20.04) and packages when needed.



Have any of you found flawless/seamless experience with Linux desktops with respect to power management, sound, plug-and-play devices and/or copy/paste transparency? All of that stuff works on Windows, mostly works on Mac (exception being copy/paste) but, for example, can you play 4K video and have the same experience you would have on Win or Mac? I haven't seen this pulled of yet.



Just curious because I have hard-headed friends who hate Win and insist on using Linux desktop. I laugh when I see them trying because they know better but my response is always, "Hey, can you close the lid on that Linux laptop and will it behave as well as Windows or Mac? Does sleep and hibernate actually work on Linux?

Been running Arch Linux on my Lenovo Carbon X1 for a couple years now and all of those features work flawlessly.

 

[easysurfer]

I think kind of depends. I've never got power management to work properly with Windows 10. But somethings on Linux get me flustered too like so many different ways to install a program. Also, Linux depends on the distro. Some better than others. I haven't used a Mac in ages so can't really comment on that.

 

[donheff]

I used to use Linux quite a bit 15 to 20 years ago but got out of practice. I loaded Ubuntu on an old underpowered laptop a couple of years ago and use it for planetary astrophotography and sometimes on vacation. It works pretty well but I doubt it is as easy as Windows let alone a Mac for some of the stuff acronymous mentions. Still, if you hate Windows it is pretty good.

 

[ERD50]

.... Have any of you found flawless/seamless experience with Linux desktops with respect to power management, sound, plug-and-play devices and/or copy/paste transparency? All of that stuff works on Windows, mostly works on Mac (exception being copy/paste) but, for example, can you play 4K video and have the same experience you would have on Win or Mac? I haven't seen this pulled of yet....

Does sleep and hibernate actually work on Linux?

Sleep definitely works on every machine I've set up (using since 2009, my daily machine has been Linux since 2010). I have not set-up and tested hibernate on my current machine, since I so seldom use it, but it's worked on every other machine I've owned.

"power management, sound, plug-and-play devices" - I've had to play with the sound set up a few times on one machine, but it all seems to be straightened out now - that is now DW's main machine. Plug and play works better on my Linux than Mac/Windows - had an old scanner, Linux was the only thing I could get to work with it, and it was super easy.

"and/or copy/paste transparency" - not sure what this is? But I use a panel add on to give a history of stuff I've copied, which is super handy, I use it a lot. No problems I know of.

OK, googled that - copy/paste a transparent background? I've done it a bunch of times (adding a transparent signature to a document), so that doesn't seem to be a problem either. And I just tested now, copy/paste to a LibreOffice text document. no problem.

" can you play 4K video and have the same experience you would have on Win or Mac? I haven't seen this pulled of yet.... " never tried, my screen is 1920x1080, so 4K makes no sense for me.

Now, I haven't used Windows hardly at all for many years (only long enough to check it out and wipe it from my hard drive to install Linux), and I don't do much with DW's old MacBook Pro, so I'm not all that current on how well/bad those work, but they really don't seem to cause me any problems in Linux (Xubuntu 22.04 currently).

I can't imagine why you have so many problems with all this? Sure, there are some compatibility issues that come up, mostly on certain machines, but I've had very few problems like that.

-ERD50

 

[jollystomper]

...
That said, I usually use Ubuntu Server (currently 20.04) and packages when needed.

Have any of you found flawless/seamless experience with Linux desktops with respect to power management, sound, plug-and-play devices and/or copy/paste transparency? All of that stuff works on Windows, mostly works on Mac (exception being copy/paste) but, for example, can you play 4K video and have the same experience you would have on Win or Mac? I haven't seen this pulled of yet.

Just curious because I have hard-headed friends who hate Win and insist on using Linux desktop. I laugh when I see them trying because they know better but my response is always, "Hey, can you close the lid on that Linux laptop and will it behave as well as Windows or Mac? Does sleep and hibernate actually work on Linux?

I am in a similar position. The majority of my Linux work has been using it as a server or virtualization platform. Ubuntu tends to be my goto for quickly setting up a new Linux environment as I have experience with it on platforms ranging from PCs to mainframes, and I did not need much of a learning curve moving among those environments. But my main desktop platform is still Windows. I have toyed a bit with Linux desktops in the home computing lab, but more to learn as opposed to "production" use. Maybe I am looking for a "killer app" that is so much better on Linux desktop that I cannot resist .

But I will continue to try, having systems on a KVM makes it easier to switch back and forth, so I probably should set up one of my KVM attached systems with a Linux desktop and perform a better investigation.

 

[target2019]

Route246, acronymous, and jollystomper, nice to see new faces in this thread. Not that there was anything wrong with previous faces!

Linux users remind me of Unix guys and gals I met a very long time ago (1980's era), at the local computer society meetings. I specifically recall hearing the term "kernel" for the first time there. I had ventured into a UNIX presentation, and everything was well over my head. I returned to the safety of Mac desktops and such real quick.

 

[easysurfer]

Another day, another distro hop.

I'm not configuring a system using Linux Lite. I'm planning until I find a better (used subjectively) distro. Like Goldilocks, I'm still hoping for my perfect fit .

I had been using Linux Mint as my primary distro but that's been too buggy for me.

 

[target2019]

I downloaded and created USB boot. Ran live on my ancient boat anchor. But I'm up against all the bottlenecks - CPU, disk space, USB 2.

 

[jim584672]

My daily driver is Manjaro with the MATE desktop. I like the Arch package system and the AUR. Arch itself has always broken on updates and I have given it many tries. Manjaro fixes that and it is like Arch but way more stable.

 

[Sojourner]

Another day, another distro hop.

I'm not configuring a system using Linux Lite. I'm planning until I find a better (used subjectively) distro. Like Goldilocks, I'm still hoping for my perfect fit .

I had been using Linux Mint as my primary distro but that's been too buggy for me.

Which bugs were "bugging" you the most? I'm also running Mint and generally like it, but I'm curious to know what caused you to switch.