What Linux Distros do you use

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I dual-boot Windows 7 and Mint 17 on my main desktop rig, and run Mint 17 exclusively on my laptop.

I'm running KDE 4 right now, though 5 looks good, and 3 was great.

I've installed many of the 'buntus, and most flavors of Mint going back eight or nine years. I've played with Puppy and PCLinuxOS in the past, but not recently. On an old netbook, I've tried running Lubuntu, Bodhi, Peppermint, Elementary, Zorin, EasyPeasy, Crunchbang, LXLE, DSL, and Manjaro.

PCLinuxOS was my gateway distro about eleven years ago, and I stuck with it and Puppy for a couple of years (in addition to Windows). I moved away from PCLinuxOS when KDE 4 first came out, but that DE has started to grow on me lately.
 
Originally Posted By: The_Eric
Unless you do something dumb like delete a video driver and lose your monitor... WHOOPS! Thanks again Garak!

Oh well, when my home system blew up the other day from the power outage and I put on Mint 17.2, I had a printer problem. It's supposed to be plug and play, and always has been, but they had a screwy driver version. Once I got the latest one from HP, everything was back to normal. It was something strange, since even redownloading and reinstalling the HP stuff through Synaptic didn't help. Such is life.
 
Way back when PCLinuxOS was good I used that for years, something happened to Texstar and PCLOS went crazy. Switched to Arch and now on Ubuntu. I've been Windows free for 15 yrs.
 
Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: The_Eric
Unless you do something dumb like delete a video driver and lose your monitor... WHOOPS! Thanks again Garak!

Oh well, when my home system blew up the other day from the power outage and I put on Mint 17.2, I had a printer problem. It's supposed to be plug and play, and always has been, but they had a screwy driver version. Once I got the latest one from HP, everything was back to normal. It was something strange, since even redownloading and reinstalling the HP stuff through Synaptic didn't help. Such is life.


Did you download the latest version hplip-3.19.9? That was the only way my HP printers worked properly.
 
Yep, that's what I did. I just went to the HP site and grabbed the .run file manually and dumped it in. I have a suspicion I did that last time, too, for some reason; I believe the printing was a bit fuzzy. I know the second last time (and earlier) was with Ubuntu and was plug and play. Something was obviously amiss with the drivers available on the repositories for the last bit. I never created a bug report, but perhaps I should.
 
Gentoo
None of my Linux machines currently have a desktop enviroment.
But I last used LXQT
I started off with Slackware. That was my first foray into Linux. I blew it up twice due to me not knowing what I was doing.
Then I did a Stage 1 install of Gentoo and haven't had a problem since so Ive never seen any reason to change.
 
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I use Ubuntu 14.04LTS/Unity on my home media/NAS PC. This was my first foray into Linux, and so far I like it; however, it drives me nuts sometimes when some programs just won't install on their own... you have to jump through hoops, download missing libraries, keys, etc. Coming from Windows, this is a nuisance.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
I use Ubuntu 14.04LTS/Unity on my home media/NAS PC. This was my first foray into Linux, and so far I like it; however, it drives me nuts sometimes when some programs just won't install on their own... you have to jump through hoops, download missing libraries, keys, etc. Coming from Windows, this is a nuisance.




What programs on Ubuntu are requiring you to jump through hoops?

With some very rare exceptions, the package manager downloads all the dependencies for you. For *buntu distros, it's hard to beat Synaptic for a graphical package manager. Much better than the Software Center.
 
Yeah, installing new programs or features is a hustle. I am yet to install the necessary stuff to be able to watch Netflix. Not sure about Chrome either.

One day I need to find an hour or so to investigate and install these things. In Windows, it would take less than 5 minutes.

Nerds love this, a busy person like me just gets annoyed.
 
Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Yeah, installing new programs or features is a hustle. I am yet to install the necessary stuff to be able to watch Netflix. Not sure about Chrome either.

One day I need to find an hour or so to investigate and install these things. In Windows, it would take less than 5 minutes.

Nerds love this, a busy person like me just gets annoyed.


Netflix works on Chrome, and Chrome for Linux takes about 60 seconds to download and install.
 
Originally Posted By: BikeWhisperer
What programs on Ubuntu are requiring you to jump through hoops?

It's been a while, so I can't remember all of the names. I believe it was TeamViewer, Plex, Selene Media Encoder, and some others that I just gave up on, but can't recall now.
 
Originally Posted By: BikeWhisperer
Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Yeah, installing new programs or features is a hustle. I am yet to install the necessary stuff to be able to watch Netflix. Not sure about Chrome either.

One day I need to find an hour or so to investigate and install these things. In Windows, it would take less than 5 minutes.

Nerds love this, a busy person like me just gets annoyed.


Netflix works on Chrome, and Chrome for Linux takes about 60 seconds to download and install.



+1

You can also get Amazon streaming video to run in Firefox by installing Pipelight to run Silverlight, though it's a little more involved. How-to Geek has the instructions (skip the Flash instructions and scroll down to the Silverlight section): http://www.howtogeek.com/204319/how-to-watch-amazon-instant-video-on-linux/ I've installed it on a few machines, and it works well.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
It's been a while, so I can't remember all of the names. I believe it was TeamViewer, Plex, Selene Media Encoder, and some others that I just gave up on, but can't recall now.

The only times I've come up with stumbling blocks are some proprietary packages (I think some of them you mentioned are proprietary; I don't think Plex is, though) or even some "lazily done" open source stuff. Proprietary can work fine on Linux if the outfit is committed to Linux. My HP printer SNAFU was in the distro itself and was easily fixable simply because HP had all the versions of their stuff on their site, easy to find, and with clear instructions how to use them and which printers are/remain compatible with which distros and which versions.

Even some open source stuff can just be handed off as source code with cryptic instructions, and that's no good for the average user.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: BikeWhisperer
What programs on Ubuntu are requiring you to jump through hoops?

It's been a while, so I can't remember all of the names. I believe it was TeamViewer, Plex, Selene Media Encoder, and some others that I just gave up on, but can't recall now.


Teamviewer doesn't require anything special. The .deb package installs everything for you. If you had problems, you were picking the wrong architecture package to install. With ubuntu, even if you are on 64bit, I think you have to install the multi-arch 32/64bit package and not the strictly 64bit package.
 
Originally Posted By: yesthatsteve
Originally Posted By: BikeWhisperer
Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Yeah, installing new programs or features is a hustle. I am yet to install the necessary stuff to be able to watch Netflix. Not sure about Chrome either.

One day I need to find an hour or so to investigate and install these things. In Windows, it would take less than 5 minutes.

Nerds love this, a busy person like me just gets annoyed.


Netflix works on Chrome, and Chrome for Linux takes about 60 seconds to download and install.



+1

You can also get Amazon streaming video to run in Firefox by installing Pipelight to run Silverlight, though it's a little more involved. How-to Geek has the instructions (skip the Flash instructions and scroll down to the Silverlight section): http://www.howtogeek.com/204319/how-to-watch-amazon-instant-video-on-linux/ I've installed it on a few machines, and it works well.



Took 3 tries and 30 minutes to install Chrome. The first try failed due to a missing file. Reinstalled it and it didn't work so had to remove and install fresh and it worked. If it is this difficult with a multi billion dollar company, I do not dare to think what it takes to install software from smaller developers.

Fortunately, the basic Mint package comes with most of the things I use.
 
Originally Posted By: Alfred_B


Took 3 tries and 30 minutes to install Chrome. The first try failed due to a missing file. Reinstalled it and it didn't work so had to remove and install fresh and it worked. If it is this difficult with a multi billion dollar company, I do not dare to think what it takes to install software from smaller developers.

Fortunately, the basic Mint package comes with most of the things I use.


Did you select the right architecture? If you are on a 64-bit distro and select 32-bit download, you get the issues you are describing. I think it defaults to a 32-bit download unless you click on the links to specifically see all versions available at the chrome website.
 
No, it was the same architecture. I don't know what went wrong.

In any case, I can confidently say that for an regular computer user, there is no reason to not use a Linux derivative, and open source software.
 
1. What distro do you use for your main computer? centos

2. What desktop environment do you prefer?Cinnamon

3. If you distro hop, what other distros have you installed in the past?mint, redhat

4. What was your gateway distro? slackware
 
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