I'd like to use Linux but...

it is a bit of a worry. i'm on the LTS of ubuntu so i should be ok until, what, 2015 (which is probably 2 laptops down the line). it's not just ubuntu and unity either - gnome3 uses a similar paradigm. never got on with kde since v4

i did try crunchbang, which uses fluxbox (which i'm familiar with) but the black theming made it unusable (too many reflections) and changing it was non-trivial.

I've not seen gnome 3 in action so can't really judge. kde 4 impressed me and gave me the shits in equal measure, but I've never been a kde person.

Linux Mint is probably the way to go now. I'm out of touch with the whole scene but that one comes up a lot.

Apparently I'm so out of touch I haven't heard of Linux Mint. What's it good at?

Last time I went to install Ubuntu it would, strangely, recognise my network card in "LiveCD" mode but not when actually installed, so I went with Debian because it recognised my card right out of the box, and I was fairly happy with it, but the epic waits for things to be deemed "stable" enough to go into the stable repository (which I was sticking with because otherwise something upgrades itself and possibly breaks, or breaks something else, every other day) are a bit tiresome.

(Mind you, most of my Linux use is command-line only - monitor is rarely plugged in, mostly just ssh in from a Windows laptop - so I realise that many of the big selling points of "use our distribution because it has nice themes and custom graphical widgets" may be a bit lost on me)

mint's traditionally been ubuntu with all the multimedia stuff added back in. last i heard it had promised to eschew the unity desktop bits that ubuntu have added and delay moving to gnome3 until it's mature. it also does something wacky with the menu which i don't like, it's like an entire panel that pops up. and it's a bit green.

http://www.linuxmint.com/img/screenshots/isadora/menu.png

wth

precise pangolin? it's a scaley anteater...

upgraded to ubuntu 11.10 today and couldn't get the window system to open because something was wrong with my nvidia drivers, messed around trying to fix things from the terminal for an hour before throwing my hands up, reformatting the OS partition, and installing 10.10 from CD. fuck unity.

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

the joy of linux

masochistic mule

lol exactly

just upgraded to 11.10....last chance for ubuntu

and yet of course i still have this pathological urge to delete all my config information and try to install 11.10 again from scratch what is wrong with me

yeah i've never upgraded without feeling there is something *wrong*

I use 10.5 but mostly I just check email and the Glen Matlock fansites - right solid as a bitch IMO

i also upgraded to 11.10 today. no mobile broadband now though. humpf. (reboots into the last LTS)

I didn't like the dash and lack of proper menu on Ubuntu 11.10 beta and 11.5 to such an extent that one of my computers is now ubuntu Lucid Lynx, and the other is Xubuntu 11.10 and I mostly only use Windows 7.

I've found the different flavors of Mint frustrating because of the lack of easier customization, software availability, and software upgrades. (that is part of the point of Mint though). I was looking into Arch because it's the cool contrarian distro lately, but that stuff is several levels above me.

I upgraded to 11.10 (first time I've upgraded an Ubuntu instead of reinstalling) and it was fine, apart from the installer interpreting a small problem with flash-plugin-nonfree as INSTALLER FAILED SYSTEM IS DEAD YOU CANNOT USE YOUR NEW SYSTEM PANIC PANIC which turned out to be a lie. Oh and gloobus doesn't work anymore.

masochistic mule

― the boomtown rats in The Wall (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, October 19, 2011 7:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

loll

got mobile broadband working. not entirely sure how (because i upgraded 2 things at once when maybe one would've been enough. usb-modeswitch and wicd). rebooting to working system, download .deb file, reboot to 11.10, dpkg, write down missing dependency, rinse repeat. tedious.

improvements to dash look like actual improvements, at least the button is bigger. and was the desktop menu there before? it has links to documents which will be useful. still don't think unity is for me though.

Trying to find a good low-memory distro for my partner to use on their ~10 year old Dell laptop that they'll still be able to use Google Docs with - been running Peppermint (kind've a Chromebook version of Mint), but it gets a bit slow/choppy at times (cld just be Google Docs, tbh) - anyone have any experience with Vector/CrunchBang/Puppy for this kind've thing?

i liked unity but this rollback to 10.10 (only rolled back there instead of to 11.04 because i had a burned cd of one but not the other) is actually the best thing that's happened to me this month; i'd forgotten how fast ubuntu ran pre-unity. which is my "rig"'s fault as much as the OS's, i'm sure, but whatever.

modem working seems to have been an anomoly. also couldn't find a screensaver, not a one.

now, where's that mandriva cd...

From my post a long time ago, fuse-ext2 mounts as read only and in spite of what is in the documentation I could not mount as read+write and I found other people saying they had the same problem, so I tried Virtual Box with Ubuntu 11.10 instead and after some difficulty with getting it to recognize the USB drive I was able to decrypt and untar the files and hopefully it will be done when I get back from lunch.

Virtualbox on fedora is a nightmare.

i downgraded modemmanager to the natty version, as suggested by a german ubuntu forum page, and my mobile broadband works again on oneiric. lol, progress.

WORKSPACES would be so nice in windows XP where I spend my work days

(virtuawin?)

virtuafuckdat

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

otm

oh god yes, that's my two decades of linux in a nutshell

yes.

Man, and here I am about to build an Ubuntu 64-bit system and use VMWare to run Windows 7. Am I crazy?

11.10 isn't too bad, just expect to hit a few unique bugs that nobody will ever fix.

Is there a good "So you've used Windows for the past 20 years but now you've seen the light of Linux" online guides or books?

I never finished. The decryption stopped twice at a particular file with the following message:

gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=05)
gpg: WARNING: message was not integrity protected
gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=7b)

I googled and found messages about possible ascii encoding errors. Is this an encryption error originating with the people who sent the files? Is there anything I should check first on my end? The checksums for the files match. They were transferred on a USB drive.

What file, and where did you get it from?

Is there a good "So you've used Windows for the past 20 years but now you've seen the light of Linux" online guides or books?

^^^^^ I've tried Linux every so often over the last few years, the last around 6 months ago, and I can't make head nor tail of it. A little something to help me find my way around linux after a lifetime of MS would be awesome.

Linux is damn convenient when you're and IT tech or programmer. anyone else here LOVES using Vim?

Raspberry Pi might be enough to make me learn.

vim is nothing to do with linux

technically you're right

yes, in the technical sense that it wasn't written on/for linux, the editor on which it's based wasn't written on linux, it's been ported to like 30 OSs so it's basically platform agnostic, and it's the default $EDITOR on the most popular unix os in the world (clue: not linux)

<3 u caek

<3

argh, I just like the damn thing! stop fucking nitpicking

I'm a disgusting savage that uses Emacs.

Raspberry Pi might be enough to make me learn.

Is this thing getting traction/publicity? I don't really follow tech news, but the project is closely associated with where I work so the I'm seeing Raspberry Pi mentions everywhere at the moment but I don't know what conclusions to draw from that.

the

Looks pretty cheap for what it is, but what are people looking at doing with them? Seems a lot like some of those hard drive-based media center things that just play video, like the ones WD sell, but without built-in storage.

maybe this should be the year I learn to do more than 3 things in vi/vim before running away to nano or a clicky windows editor like the big menu-loving girl's blouse that I am

(this will not be an editor holy war, as I am fully aware that nano isn't very good, but at least it tells you how to use it and you can't get it stuck in some lisp state machine mode or accidentally delete half your document just because you thought you'd try a half-remembered arcane key combo without looking it up)

I've been very happy with my Ubuntu experience so far. I really love how running processor-intensive applications doesn't kill my system, if I need to do something else at the same time the CPU cycles are just taken away from and given to me.

I'm running Win7 in VMWare anyway, though in the long-term I'd like to migrate entirely to Linux. But I'm still committed to my Windows music management software.

this is now running on linux. I'm glad they have

service

svcadm

no way would i run it on my desktop, tho