My Journey into Linux Land

[Robotron2k84]

…

I've got an otherwise perfectly good 32bit laptop and want to make it a pure Linux but it wont take the 32bit Linux disc I burned or take it from thumbdrive or direct download and the trouble shooting instructions are all Greek to me. I'm looking at dozens of pages of documentation and manuals just to get 32bit Linux on a standard ex-Windows PC and no one seems to want to tell me how to "just make it work". Maybe I'll hire some kid off Craigslist to do it in 2 minutes and make me feel old and stupid. Did Bill Gates suddenly become the richest man in the world because he understood not everyone wants or can learn years worth of back end cryptic computer stuff just to make an unrelated program work, or at least understood stealing that concept from Jobs AND pushing it as a standard if mediocre system was the way to go?

Among many of the anti-trust lawsuits filed against MS, back in the day, was that they formed a cartel with the hardware manufacturers to create Windows-only hardware that lacked support for any other operating systems. Winmodems were the prime example, but many other types of hardware existed that drove the Wintel hegemony. That’s what consequently drove MS license sales on the PC platform, while essentially locking out competition. The PC was an open platform until that point.

Gates only understood playing dirty, and not competing on level-ground. A notable character flaw, going all the way back to stealing MSDOS from Gary Kildall, and the GUI elements from Xerox PARC. Of course Apple was also guilty of the appropriation of GUI elements, but its market position never allowed such malfeasance, nor was its CEO a blatant sociopath.

Linux, on the other hand had to very-often reverse-engineer the drivers of these hardware devices to provide limited functionality. In the downfall of Windows as the dominant O/S, and from a move to online / web / cloud as primary, Linux would utterly destroy Windows in terms of number of installs for > 95% of all computing on planet Earth, leaving only the desktop as the lone holdout of MS, with its y/y market share sliding into oblivion.

Just desserts.

[Big Chudungus]

Congress was grilling Gates on anti-monopoly, then he started making lots of political contributions and that went away. Many such cases.

But my point still stands about making stuff idiot or at least Noob friendly VS the vicious learning curve required for Linux. I'll give it a few more tries for "free download" but might end up buying a pre-loaded Mint thumb for $17 off Amazon. If I value my time at $2/hour will be a bargain.

My advice to Open Source/Linux community is "the software works fine and already does more than any 100 humans will ever need PERFORMANCE wise even on a 10yr old PC....need to focus on USER FRIENDLY, including "low end user" friendly". Since hardware is cheap and all sorts of odd things are becoming computers you shouldn't even need to click any End User Agreements" Always wondered why no foreign nationalistic govts like Japan, France, CHINA wouldn't make a big commitment to non-MS open source OS (and hardware). I'm thinking if one did that would soon make that the world standard and end up bringing in money for consulting. Its nuts that if strong point of Open Source is security that govts would use anything else. Also most govt use is fairly long term so steeper learning curve less of an issue.

[Robotron2k84]

…

But my point still stands about making stuff idiot or at least Noob friendly VS the vicious learning curve required for Linux. I'll give it a few more tries for "free download" but might end up buying a pre-loaded Mint thumb for $17 off Amazon. If I value my time at $2/hour will be a bargain.

My advice to Open Source/Linux community is "the software works fine and already does more than any 100 humans will ever need PERFORMANCE wise even on a 10yr old PC....need to focus on USER FRIENDLY, including "low end user" friendly". Since hardware is cheap and all sorts of odd things are becoming computers you shouldn't even need to click any End User Agreements" …

Even the Mac, which is arguably the gold-standard in user interface design and ease of use still has its technical gaffes that send you scrambling for the terminal to issue Unix commands. Not everything is nicely mapped and often the GUIs omit specific functions that only exist in their command-line counterparts.

Linux is brain-dead simple to what it was 20-25 years ago. So many distros work out of the box and detect the hardware without issues.

If you are having issues on an old laptop, maybe you have a wintel special and there is minimal Linux support for it. Generally there are How-Tos online for specific models that are problematic and how to get each part working. Linux, now, has the broadest of hardware support of any OS, simply due to the back-catalog of drivers that are available and not removed if you enable them in a custom kernel build. Sorry if this is more complex than you wish, but a computer isn’t a toaster, and some complexity is to be expected when running an OS that the hardware wasn’t designed for. If you want general ease of use and Unix’y-ness while not running Windows, get a Mac.

Reusing old hardware is generally a noble endeavor, but if it’s not worth your time, or you get no satisfaction in conquering such a challenge, then other avenues exist to recycle the hardware or donate it to someone with time to spend.

FWIW, Linux is almost exclusively a server and embedded OS at this point. Resources are allocated due to the perceived uses and developed towards those ends. The desktop space is one that Linux never captured, and it was because of the issues you describe, but also a lack of industry support for AAA applications. I don’t know of any company that is pouring money into the Linux “desktop” anymore. However, that doesn’t mean that Desktop Linux doesn’t benefit from the continued development in other areas of the OS. Those that offer a distro to support old laptops and desktops are by-and-large hobbyist groups or gratis efforts, so it’s not generally expected that such organizations offer top-tier support, any longer.

If you think Linux is bad, you should try to get OpenBSD running on non-mainstream hardware.

.

[randomBytes]

These days I think Chrome is the big player in browsers, I use that on my Macs.
On *BSD I use Chrome and/or Firefox - I'm sure they are available for Linux too.

[randomBytes]

User-friendly is a subjective term. User friendly to me means that commands that have worked a certain way for 30+ years, don't suddenly morph into something else. Color is one of my pet hates these days, every man and his dog want to add color support to everything - the problem is, the colors they select are totally unreadable unless you happen to use the same background color as they (X11 does not provide control of the window background color to an app running in that window). So I just turn it all off.

Most *nix these days are way more "user friendly" than in the past.
Though many Linux distros have an annoying habit of gratuitously putting things in non-traditional places - not "user friendly" to me.
But if you stick with on distro you should not care.

[Dirtlaw]

SanctoDog ... my hat goes off to you big time.

[SactoDoug]

I have noticed a few minor annoyances. Focus does being set when the start menu and some other items is not always properly set. Sometimes when I open the task menu with another application open focus will still be on the application when I open the start menu. If I start typing it is in the application instead of the search text. Other times when I open the start menu or one of the applets on the task bar they are on the screen but clicking on them has no effect. It is as if the Z setting on them put them below the screen so you cannot interact with them. I just click on them a second time and everything works.

Yesterday I set up hibernate. It was a little more involved that I expected. In Windows hibernate is not usually enabled either and requires some power setting changes to turn on.

(For people who don't know what hibernate is, it saves the current state of your system to a hard drive then shuts down the system. When you turn the computer back on, it loads the state back up and you resume exactly where you left off. For the user it is similar to sleep mode with a few advantages. The computer is completely shut down which means it uses even less power than sleep mode. Another advantage over sleep that hibernate has is that you will lose your session in sleep mode if power is interrupted while you will not if the system is hibernated since everything is stored on disk.)

I started trying to set up saving to a swap file but I could not get it to work consistently. I ended up creating a swap partition on my flash drive and setting that for the swap data. That has been rock solid.

Last night was my game night. I visit old friends and we play D&D 3pm to about 11pm. I bring my laptop to take notes, look up rules, edit my character sheet etc. Previously my laptop on Windows 10 would need to be plugged in around 8pm. Last night it went all night and still had 50% battery power when I shut it down at the end of the night! I could not believe that I did not have to plug it in and that it still had that much juice left at the end of the night. That was power efficiency similar to what I see when I use my Samsung A7 tablet. That is not something I expected out of my laptop.

[SactoDoug]

I created a share folder and connected to a share folder on my Win10 desktop PC. I had to install install Samba to do it but it is part of the Mint Distro software center. I found setting up a share and connecting to one about the same amount of effort as with Windows.

Setting up my printer for some reason was a little more difficult. I had to go to Brother's site and download the driver. The driver that came with Mint was not working. Once that was installed I had to select the binary connection. It has been working flawlessly since. When I was visiting a friend I was able to connect to his Epson printer and use it without any additional work. I guess it depends on the printer.

Right now I feel I have a fully functioning computer. I can do all of the basics. It runs the Linux compatible Steam games well. I am looking into adding VM software to run Windows or Android apps. I'll have to do a little more research into it.

[sigstroker]

I've often thought about switching to Linux, but then laziness sets in and I do nothing. 90% of what I do needs only Firefox, a spreadsheet, and a printer. My biggest concern is finding drivers to run my ancient devices. I have some trading software that I'm not sure about.

[Uncivil Engineer]

I've often thought about switching to Linux, but then laziness sets in and I do nothing. 90% of what I do needs only Firefox, a spreadsheet, and a printer. My biggest concern is finding drivers to run my ancient devices. I have some trading software that I'm not sure about.

Pick up a raspberry pi. They will run Linux and all you need is an SD card to install the OS. There are plenty of videos on setting it up. It's a cheap easy way to get a dedicated Linux machine while not breaking the bank.

When you out grow it is easy enough to repurpose it into a disk server or a game emulator. Or a video stream player for a television.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

[tlwhite0311]

I have been meaning to look into Linux but my reliance on Solidworks and Steam keeps me away.

For now.

[tlwhite0311]

Pick up a raspberry pi. They will run Linux and all you need is an SD card to install the OS. There are plenty of videos on setting it up. It's a cheap easy way to get a dedicated Linux machine while not breaking the bank.

When you out grow it is easy enough to repurpose it into a disk server or a game emulator. Or a video stream player for a television.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

[SactoDoug]

I've often thought about switching to Linux, but then laziness sets in and I do nothing. 90% of what I do needs only Firefox, a spreadsheet, and a printer. My biggest concern is finding drivers to run my ancient devices. I have some trading software that I'm not sure about.

I went the route that I did so I could test the waters. I bought a $25 flash drives which I am running Linux. I can boot into the Linux off the flash drive or into Windows. I have not noticed any performance differences running off of the flash drive. I did get a decently fast flash drive with 300 Mb/s read speeds. It is nowhere near 3500 MB/s nvme drives but it is as fast or faster than most platter hard drives.

Give it a shot. All of the software is free. If you have a 128 Gb flash drive laying around it won't cost you anything either.

[arrix]

I have been meaning to look into Linux but my reliance on Solidworks and Steam keeps me away.

For now.

As others here have done, you can set up a test rig on a flash drive, a live-cd, or even a VM. You can transition away gracefully doing this until you are comfortable enough to use Linux as your main.

[SactoDoug]

So an update came down today for both my Win10 systems and Linux Mint. I feel dread for my Windows system wondering what MS is going to screw up this time. On my Linux system I read the update's description below and thought, "hey, free stuff! This is great!"

This package contains a number of important utilities, most of which are oriented towards maintenance of your system. Some of the more important utilities included in this package allow you to view kernel messages, create new filesystems, view block device information, interface with real time clock, etc.