• Re: What's Your Go-to OS

    From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to neoshock on Sunday, February 16, 2025 19:09:26
    neoshock wrote to paulie420 <=-

    The entire Linux and FOSS eco-system is currently just as divided as the U.S. is - I can't count the number of projects I've stopped using in the past year on one hand.

    Yes, its been some year in deciding what projects to support lately.
    It's one thing to make decisions on the the project itself (aka
    systemd), but when it starts with things like political views, it been quite ridiculous. These need to stay out of FOSS projects. I have been seriously thinking of going BSD lately, just not sure if I want to
    tackle re-learning things. Or maybe temple OS, LOL
    I sure hope I do not need to switch to LFS

    Slackware, for the win.



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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Gamgee on Tuesday, February 18, 2025 09:20:20
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: Gamgee to neoshock on Sun Feb 16 2025 07:09 pm

    Slackware, for the win.

    Slackware is cool because it is one of the few Linux distributions that works as a general purpose solution without having all its management tools be utter bullshit :-)

    I wish their release engineering was better. I think if it was, I would not have jumped to the BSDs myself.


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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Arelor on Tuesday, February 18, 2025 19:54:41
    Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-

    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: Gamgee to neoshock on Sun Feb 16 2025 07:09 pm

    Slackware, for the win.

    Slackware is cool because it is one of the few Linux distributions that works as a general purpose solution without having all its management tools be utter bullshit :-)

    Agreed!

    I wish their release engineering was better. I think if it was, I would not have jumped to the BSDs myself.

    Probably my biggest dislike of Slackware, right there. A real world
    example of how it sucks - I recently moved the BBS from an older machine
    to a new "mini-computer" with modern hardware/UEFI "bios". Installed Slackware 15.0 on it and it would not start Xwindows. Eventually I
    learned that the built-in video (Intel N100 CPU) was not supported by
    the 3-year-old kernel (ver 5.x.x). So I installed Slackware-current and
    that kernel (ver 6.12.6) worked fine. Yes, I know there are ways to
    leverage a 6.x kernel into an old 15.0 system, but that can break all
    sorts of other stuff. The BBS is operating fine on -current now and
    I'll leave it like that until 15.1 comes out. Hopefully in the next 6
    months or so. Anyway...



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  • From fusion@VERT/CFBBS to Gamgee on Tuesday, February 18, 2025 22:21:00
    On 18 Feb 2025, Gamgee said the following...

    Probably my biggest dislike of Slackware, right there. A real world

    mine is the .new and .orig files that get scattered around when software is updated lol

    before that it was kernel updates back when i had an nvidia card.. the instructions basically had you running some swap commands because parts of xorg had to be replaced, rebuilding the kernel driver (hopefully not accidentally to the old kernel version instead of the new one), and then swapping the new files back into xorg.. not really hard but was a nuisance when you accidentally miss a step and your desktop comes up @ 800x600..

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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Gamgee on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 03:27:07
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: Gamgee to Arelor on Tue Feb 18 2025 07:54 pm

    Probably my biggest dislike of Slackware, right there. A real world
    example of how it sucks - I recently moved the BBS from an older machine
    to a new "mini-computer" with modern hardware/UEFI "bios". Installed Slackware 15.0 on it and it would not start Xwindows. Eventually I
    learned that the built-in video (Intel N100 CPU) was not supported by
    the 3-year-old kernel (ver 5.x.x). So I installed Slackware-current and

    Yeah, if you are running on a desktop you may just as well install Slackware -current and treat it as a rolling distribution these days. Probably not a big deal since -current is very well maintained, but I personally like predictable release cycles.


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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 10:00:00
    Absolutely. I use ONLY Linux, and use a GUI for many things. I am also quite "fluent" at a command line, and use that for a LOT of things.
    They both have their purposes and it would be silly to not use both.

    Agreed. I have a couple of boxes (servers) I don't need the GUI on so I don't use it. Otherwise, I do. I prefer a simpler GUI (IceWM) to some of the
    other, "prettier" ones.


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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to fusion on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 12:57:32
    fusion wrote to Gamgee <=-

    Probably my biggest dislike of Slackware, right there. A real world

    mine is the .new and .orig files that get scattered around when
    software is updated lol

    I usually just ignore those... :-)

    before that it was kernel updates back when i had an nvidia card.. the instructions basically had you running some swap commands because parts
    of xorg had to be replaced, rebuilding the kernel driver (hopefully not accidentally to the old kernel version instead of the new one), and
    then swapping the new files back into xorg.. not really hard but was a nuisance when you accidentally miss a step and your desktop comes up @ 800x600..

    Oh yes, I remember that too. In fact I remember having to manually edit xorg.conf files and fiddle with resolutions, etc... "modeline"... UGH.

    Things have improved in that area, at least.



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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 12:57:32
    Dumas Walker wrote to GAMGEE <=-

    Absolutely. I use ONLY Linux, and use a GUI for many things. I am also quite "fluent" at a command line, and use that for a LOT of things.
    They both have their purposes and it would be silly to not use both.

    Agreed. I have a couple of boxes (servers) I don't need the GUI on so
    I don't use it. Otherwise, I do. I prefer a simpler GUI (IceWM) to
    some of the other, "prettier" ones.

    I like a little bit of "eye candy", and have been using XFCE for years. Cleaner and lighter than Gnome/KDE at least.



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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Gamgee on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 12:35:12
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: Gamgee to Dumas Walker on Wed Feb 19 2025 12:57 pm

    I like a little bit of "eye candy", and have been using XFCE for years. Cleaner and lighter than Gnome/KDE at least.

    I have my main PC at home set up to dual-boot between Windows 11 and Linux Mint. For Linux Mint, I'm using its Cinnamon GUI environment, but I'm actually considering switching it to XFCE for the themes support. I use exclusively Linux Mint for my BBS PC, and although it's technically set up to be a server, I use the XFCE UI on it, as I tend to like to use some UI-based software on it, and I'd heard XFCE is lighter than Cinnamon. I've had a look around and have been able to find several XFCE themes that I like (mostly, themes based on other operating systems such as BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X (Aqua) or even classic Mac OS), and it seems harder to find such UI themes for Cinnamon (though at some point I thought I remembered being able to find some for Cinnamon that I liked).

    Nightfox

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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Nightfox on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 16:29:02
    Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-

    I like a little bit of "eye candy", and have been using XFCE for years. Cleaner and lighter than Gnome/KDE at least.

    I have my main PC at home set up to dual-boot between Windows 11 and
    Linux Mint. For Linux Mint, I'm using its Cinnamon GUI environment, but I'm actually considering switching it to XFCE for the themes support.
    I use exclusively Linux Mint for my BBS PC, and although it's
    technically set up to be a server, I use the XFCE UI on it, as I tend
    to like to use some UI-based software on it, and I'd heard XFCE is
    lighter than Cinnamon. I've had a look around and have been able to
    find several XFCE themes that I like (mostly, themes based on other operating systems such as BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X (Aqua) or even classic
    Mac OS), and it seems harder to find such UI themes for Cinnamon
    (though at some point I thought I remembered being able to find some
    for Cinnamon that I liked).

    I think you'll like it, especially if you're already seeing/using it on
    the BBS machine. Cinammon is based on / forked from one of the Gnome versions, and I do like it best among the various Gnome offshoots
    (better than Mate for example), but for me XFCE is better and is what
    I'm used to at this point. In the end it's all a matter of personal preference, and on strong hardware it doesn't matter much. The
    "lighter" desktops are much better on older/marginal hardware. I'd say
    XFCE is a "middle-weight". :-)



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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Thursday, February 20, 2025 09:01:00
    Absolutely. I use ONLY Linux, and use a GUI for many things. I am also quite "fluent" at a command line, and use that for a LOT of things.
    They both have their purposes and it would be silly to not use both.

    Agreed. I have a couple of boxes (servers) I don't need the GUI on so
    I don't use it. Otherwise, I do. I prefer a simpler GUI (IceWM) to some of the other, "prettier" ones.

    I like a little bit of "eye candy", and have been using XFCE for years. Cleaner and lighter than Gnome/KDE at least.

    I have a laptop that I use Gnome on. It came with that as the default over
    10 years ago, before the big Gnome "upgrade" that made it real horrible. Because I have not done a fresh install since -- upgrading via apt instead
    -- I think I have a version of Gnome on that machine that can no longer
    be installed on new machines via apt. I recently got a new system and
    tried to put Gnome on it, but the "classic/lite" version it installed isn't what the laptop has. It was something newer, so I went with a mix of LxQT
    and IceWM instead.


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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Thursday, February 20, 2025 16:48:13
    Dumas Walker wrote to GAMGEE <=-

    Absolutely. I use ONLY Linux, and use a GUI for many things. I am also quite "fluent" at a command line, and use that for a LOT of things.
    They both have their purposes and it would be silly to not use both.

    Agreed. I have a couple of boxes (servers) I don't need the GUI on so I don't use it. Otherwise, I do. I prefer a simpler GUI (IceWM) to some of the other, "prettier" ones.

    I like a little bit of "eye candy", and have been using XFCE for years. Cleaner and lighter than Gnome/KDE at least.

    I have a laptop that I use Gnome on. It came with that as the default over 10 years ago, before the big Gnome "upgrade" that made it real horrible. Because I have not done a fresh install since -- upgrading
    via apt instead -- I think I have a version of Gnome on that machine
    that can no longer be installed on new machines via apt. I recently
    got a new system and tried to put Gnome on it, but the "classic/lite" version it installed isn't what the laptop has. It was something
    newer, so I went with a mix of LxQT and IceWM instead.

    Yup, I was a Gnome user LONG ago, in the Mandrake Linux days, if your
    memory goes that far back. Early 2000's. Loved it then. You're right though, it went through (I think) 2 version upgrades and became
    something I could no longer use. Reminded me of a Fisher-Price baby
    toy. ;-)



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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to GAMGEE on Friday, February 21, 2025 10:24:00
    that can no longer be installed on new machines via apt. I recently
    got a new system and tried to put Gnome on it, but the "classic/lite" version it installed isn't what the laptop has. It was something
    newer, so I went with a mix of LxQT and IceWM instead.

    Yup, I was a Gnome user LONG ago, in the Mandrake Linux days, if your
    memory goes that far back. Early 2000's. Loved it then.

    I do. Mandrake was one of the first distros I tried and I found its installer frustrating. It was the only graphic installer that would *perfectly* set
    up my video settings during installation. It looked so good I was very,
    very disappointed that the installer didn't set the desktop video settings correctly. It always came out an unusable mess. :(

    I wound up using Corel for a brief while (a debian fork, IIRC) before
    moving to Libranet, another debian distro. The maintainer of that one
    passed away, so I migrated to debian proper.

    Before all that, I used a CLI only Slackware distro called, IIRC, Zipslack.
    It ran "on top of" the DOS file system so you could play with it on a DOS machine. It was more of a command-line learning experience but it was enough to let me know I could handle migrating once the time came.

    Regarding Gnome:

    You're right
    though, it went through (I think) 2 version upgrades and became
    something I could no longer use. Reminded me of a Fisher-Price baby
    toy. ;-)

    YES! Honestly, to me, it looked like it was created for use on a touch
    screen system which, since I don't use one, made it real frustrating to try
    to use.


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