My old Dell xps420 has been a faithful beast these many years and Vista was ok, it did all I needed until they withdrew support and then it became increasingly cranky making me think it was time for a new PC but times are a little hard so i formated c: and put Ubuntu on it just to see if it had improved from the last time I tried about 5 years ago.

Well knock me down with a feather but Linux or Ubuntu has finally grown up simple to install all my hardware working and a pleasure to use and saved me a tidy wedge, I cant see returning to Windows when this is just so good and runs on a 7 year old pc like a swiss watch.

Well impressed so if your thinking of junking an old pc maybe give it a try.

If I could run Lotus Organizer and Quicken XP I’ll move over like a shot.

until you try to sync an ipod or garmin etc.

I have dual boot set ups on my netbook and old desktop. Running Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu.

So much faster and slicker than Windoze.

I only really use Windows for MS Outlook, you can’t put a MS Exchange account on Thunderbird which is a shame.

you can also run VMWare and install any flavours of windows OS you might need to for old apps etc.

gobuchul: if you want to access Exchange then you can use Evolution instead of Thunderbird, and the evolution-exchange plugin. That should work quite well, one of the main developers of it used to work with me and he basically wrote it to access our corporate email.

Been using Mint since the summer and it’s been great. No issues at all. Last time I tried Linux it was properly flaky (or wouldn’t work at all) with things like Eurosport Player but it now works perfectly.

Works well with my Garmin too. I don’t have an ipod but have no issues managing music, photos and backups on my phone.

I prefer Kubuntu to Ubuntu but then I’ve always used the KDE desktop rather than Gnome. Not used Windows in years: Linux at work, Mac at home.

I don’t think Ubuntu uses Gnome any more, it’s some horrific abomination called Unity.

I don’t use any apple products so no issues there, all work apps are run in google and google Chromium browser runs all those fine for me I dont play games, comes with such a wealth of apps its amazing and OMG its free and no big corporate telling me I MUST upgrade or death will ensue I hate the holding a gun to your head give us money or your PC/OS will fail horribly threats of Microsoft/Google.

Yeah, curse Microsoft with their free Windows 10 upgrade and regular security updates, and Google are always chasing me for money.

Most updates under Linux are much less painful than under Windows (or used to be up to Windows Vista) most don’t require any form of reboot, you just get the update, the current service stops, the update is installed and the service is restarted. The main exception would be an update to the kernel itself.

Most updates under Linux are much less painful than under Windows

They are when the updates are in a repository, agreed. But bugger me, it’s a pain in the cods when it’s not.

I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with Linux. I’m working with it quite a bit at the moment, and in many ways it’s fantastic but I swear they must make things deliberately obtuse sometimes. Installing software should be simple, but there’s a dozen different ways of doing it. Every time I do something new I’ve to spend half a day working out what arcane voodoo I need to learn in order to make it work. Apt-get / dpkg / wget / copy source files / compile / make / checkinstall / edit the config files (WHY do they never tell you where these things are located?) / move directories / set permissions / edit the PATH etc etc. I updated a web server from 14.04 to 16.04 the other day, it quietly upgraded PHP from 5 to 7 and broke absolutely everything, thank the gods for bare metal backups.

My current task involved copying the directory (where? who knows), then it transpires that the documentation is for the previous version and the new one uses composer – WTF is composer? – that’s another block of code and config files to piss about with.

Googling how to do things, there’s always 57 different ways of doing what should be simple, and of course only one of those is the correct / preferred way of doing it without hosing something else in an ephemeral way. I’m mostly working with the command-line, but even with the GUI it’s a minefield cos there’s umpteen different ones.

I’m not sure what Unity is based on (if anything) but it is pretty terrible so I use ubuntu-gnome on my ubuntu install, much better!

I get what you’re saying about things more difficult than they should be sometimes though. Quite often vendors who target windows/osx but support linux don’t do it with full gusto. Case in point, I recently installed UE4 which took a bit of effort in itself. Turns out there’s a bug in the latest release which affects linux meaning that one of the option menus crashes the editor. Took a fair bit of effort to find out that I needed to rebuild from source from the master branch not the release branch… Although, at least I could get round the issue and it wasn’t just a closed box and computer says no.

The composer issue isn’t really a linux issue, that’s a php issue I think as it’s just a php package manager and I guess the newer versions of php have just moved to using that instead of pear or whatever. Do get your point though…

Oh, I know. It’s just immensely frustrating.

For instance, one of the things I’m working on is adLDAP for doing AD lookups within PHP. One of its prerequisites is the PHP LDAP module. I read pages of instructions yesterday on how to install it, what files I need to modify, etc etc, before tripping over the fact that you can just apt-get install php5-ldap it and it works. Getting adLDAP itself installed involves copying a lib folder somewhere (/lib? /ur/lib? /var/etc/www? Somewhere else?) and then after doing all that it seems that this is for version 4 and the new version 5 (which isn’t mentioned AT ALL on the website) uses composer. Which version do I have? Who knows, it was a github clone. Now it’s come out in the wash that it requires a version of PHP different from the one I have so I need to address that before I can carry on. And this is before I’ve written a single line of code. FML.

until you try to sync an ipod or garmin etc.

I upload from a Garmin without problems. I don’t use Garmin Connect so can’t comment on syncing.

All I can offer you is sympathy Cougar! PHP documentation isn’t the best in my experience.

I upload from a Garmin without problems. I don’t use Garmin Connect so can’t comment on syncing.

I’ve not tried connect either but WINE is pretty good these days and WINE 2.0 was released in the last week. I’ve been playing the windows version of heroes of the storm with very few issues lately. It can be a bit of faff to install and setup, and programs often require config tweaks to get running though. WineHQ actually doesn’t seem to have much info on garmin applications so who knows if it’d work.

I know what you mean about updates, the core stuff is fine, it’s packaged correctly so that apt-get, rpm or whatever will handle it all correctly but the smaller devs often don’t do that and skip things like documentation because it’s “boring”. In those cases I’ll usually grab the source then “configure && make && make install”.

Sometimes it’s not just the smaller “kid in a room” type developers either. When I was setting up our media server it turned out that the software version was an old one and didn’t work with Samsung TVs (quite why Western Digital would release a product that wouldn’t work with one of the largest TV makers in the world is beyond me) so I needed to grab the latest version (and pay the license fee since the WD license didn’t cover upgrades) and install it and configure it and restart the server. Anyone who wasn’t used to the linux command line would have been stuffed!

Linux strength is its weekness. It can be configured for everything from a custom small single board computer to desktop to super computer cluster. Every distribution has their preferred method, even though there are only the two broad churchs of Debian and red hat every one still has a variation! Still prefer it to windows.

Arch Linux is pretty good at simplifying the building of software not in the main repositories, and main repos are well up to date with the latest releases.

On the downside installation is very hands on and technical (vs Ubuntu) and rolling release can force upgrades when trying to install packages, or upgrades might break something from time to time.

Still, my distro of choice for last 5 years or so, Linux user since 2001… and the Arch forums still make me feel like a noob.

Arch is what I use. With Cinnamon rather then Gnome/KDE or Ubuntu’s thing. But the wonders of Linux lets me have them all, and choose at login. Get bored of one, choose another.
Don’t recommend Arch for noobs though, unless they really want to get command line happy.

Don’t recommend Arch for noobs though, unless they really want to get command line happy.

This is where I disagree. It’s not about being a “noob” – it’s about how much time you have to waste spend fixing a tool so you can use the tool for what you need it for. If “doing things with linux” is what you use the tool for then it doesn’t matter, but if you use the tool for productive work, then everytime something goes fubar it’s a nightmare. Noboady gets really excited about their particular model of lawnmower because “fixing it is fun”.

So maybe use a really stable LTS version, but then deal with the fact that some packages you might need will be in versions that are several years old. So you either roll your own packages from source packages, use backport versions or use vanilla installers. All are overhead, and all can introduce breakages.

DISCLAIMER : I use linux and other flavours of unix (and, in fact, Windows) on a daily business, for work that earns me money.

Love/Hate for sure as of all the reasons everyone else has already typed out. I don’t mind when I’m being payed to figure it out but when I’m using it for personal stuff and it takes half a day of p!ssing about then that’s not cricket.

You wouldn’t blindly install updates on production servers anyway, or at least not without a contingency plan.

Like I said earlier, I recently utterly hosed a production system but the fix was easy, just rolled back to the VMware snapshot (and I had a full backup in case that went sideways).

I’m a Windows user at work, but Arch at home. Using the LTS kernel/nvidia pkgs works solidly. Installed it on parents and OHs machines too, no-frills XFCE on all for desktop works well for them as I maintain them.

You wouldn’t blindly install updates on production servers anyway

Or website themes. (sorry couldn’t resist).

wicki – Member
I don’t use any apple products so no issues there, all work apps are run in google and google Chromium browser runs all those fine for me I dont play games, comes with such a wealth of apps its amazing and OMG its free and no big corporate telling me I MUST upgrade or death will ensue I hate the holding a gun to your head give us money or your PC/OS will fail horribly threats of Microsoft/Google.

Sure, yeah. Free as long as your personal time is worthless. 😆

I’m about the biggest Linux geek at my company which develops Linux software yet even I can’t be bothered to run it on my desktop at home.

Basically I got tired of fixing broken video drivers, sound going out of sync with video, USB devices STILL not automatically mounting properly, broken package management, critical software being deprecated with no replacement, bugs being closed WONTFIX after 2 years and hundreds of ‘I’m seeing this bug too’ comments, poor battery life & hardware functionality missing.

Windows at work out of necessity. Linux at home for about 15 years now out of choice.

‘Full’ Ubuntu on my main machine (I’ve even got my head round Unity now) and a lightweight version of Mint on my old laptop. Linux software covers all my everyday/image/video/audio needs. Got a bluetooth Garmin so that pings rides across to my phone and uploads automatically.

Only issue I’ve got is now that a few game devs are porting stuff over (and Steam is now Linux native too), I can’t currently get any USB gamepads to work correctly – cue an hour or two poring over how-tos and playing in the Terminal which in itself is one of the fun bits of working with Linux.

Gah.

Seems I’ve got an old copy of adLDAP 4.0.4 because the link to the git repository on the website is out of date. Got the correct copy of adLDAP (same version number but not the same folder structure). Note that 5.0.0 is due “in a few weeks” but appears to have been abandoned two years ago. Purely by chance, I happened across a comment on a forum which mentions that there’s an adLDAP2 now, which there is, and it’s version 6 and incompatible with the version of PHP we’re running.

So, I’ll either have to update PHP on a production server to a version higher than the one provided with the LTS distro, or run with an old abandoned version of adLDAP. Which brings us to this mess.

It’s just this sort of feckaboutery that boils my piss with Linux, I’ve lost half a day’s work because no-one could be arsed to tear down a two year old web page or put a note on the adLDAP github, and because the page that sent me here couldn’t be bothered to give a URL so I had to Google it.

I cant see returning to Windows when this is just so good

Give it time… 🙂 Something will blow up in your face before long, causing you to regret ever starting this thing, but by then you’ll have too much blood and teasrs invested in it to simply give up…

The worst thing for me about Linux is (aside from all the pissing about) is when you depend on a piece of software, and the person (or even company) developing it then gets bored and wanders of to do something else leaving you without support. And, being Linux, almost everything is like this. Even commercial companies will give up on stuff when they feel like it.

cue an hour or two poring over how-tos and playing in the Terminal which in itself is one of the fun bits of working with Linux

I like command-line work, and it’s one of the appealing things about Linux to me. But having to spend that time messing around with things that really should be simple by now (like plugging in a game pad) is just insanity. Christ, Windows got rid of that nonsense 20 years ago. (Ok, it took time for the technology to mature properly, but still.)

Yeah, curse Microsoft with their free Windows 10 upgrade and regular security updates, and Google are always chasing me for money.

No free upgrade was available to me on Vista.

They have changed their policy. Not really fair to complain about what a policy used to be before they changed it to what you wanted.

Anyway – you still get something for your money.

There was never a free upgrade from Vista, just W7 and W8.1. (You can still get the free W10 upgrade btw, if you say you need it for accessibility.)

My laptop came with Vista, I bought W7 at an offer price when it was first released (something like £30-£40 I think) and so am now running on W10. Can’t really argue with nearly ten years of OS for that price (less the original Vista licence I suppose), and W10 is allegedly the last major desktop release as they’re moving to new-build updates instead.

My laptop came with Vista, I bought W7 at an offer price when it was first released (something like £30-£40 I think) and so am now running on W10. Can’t really argue with nearly ten years of OS for that price (less the original Vista licence I suppose), and W10 is allegedly the last major desktop release as they’re moving to new-build updates instead.

My laptop came with W7. A while later I “upgraded” to W8 and then W8.1
Last year Windows kept badgering me to upgrade to W10. It failed, despite the compatibility check saying it would be fine. I reverted back to W7 and tried the W10 update from there. It still failed. It then continued to badger me to upgrade to W10 so I formatted the HD and installed Mint.

Should’ve done a clean install of W10.

Another month on and my Linux adventure is still good.

I now have installed steam for Linux and have started playing ETW again for the first time in about 6 years, got my music on here rhythm box is enough for that Gimp and darktable for photo editing Chromium browser, and free Libre office suite, vlc for movies it’s all good!

No anti virus software no malware, my other half has a 2 year old laptop running Win 10 for facebook email and a few facebook games it runs like a pig compared to my 10 year old dell on Linux and is forever being infected with malware.
twice I have had to research problems once for video drivers i needed proprietary drivers for the nvidia card an old gtx550 and once for using flash in chromium.

It’s not as scary as i though it would be now i would like to find an old laptop to run linux any recommendations ?

and is forever being infected with malware.

User error then. You only get malware on iffy websites, downloads and emails. Have a word with mrs_wicki about it.

What matt says. And with user policies like “No anti virus software” I’m not surprised either. Just because it’s Linux doesn’t mean its invulnerable.

Anyway, glad you’re having better luck than I did, even with Win10 legacy hardware issues its still been a better experience than running Lubuntu.

What’s “ETW”?