[PLUG] Distro suggestions

[Vedanta Teacher]

Your mileage might vary but; I use Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.X

Why? I'm not an "industry insider", I still work full time in a
factory (making components for memory chips in cell phones),
I'm out of town frequently, my parents are elderly & frequently
ill, etc, etc, I just have a full plate.

The ISO is easy to download & install, they have a large database
of programs to download & install, most things can be done through
GUI, there is a large community to query if there are questions, etc.
In computer terms: "It just works".

You can also make the desktop environment very 'clean' or 'lean' I.E.
free of clutter. Years ago I used Ubuntu but the desktop looked too cartoon
like.

And if Wes is reading they cleaned up the habit of Mint Cinnamon of
hoarding Kernels and clogging up the system, it was in one of their
postings if I remember. I don't need to go into sudo every couple
of months to clean things.

Blessings,

Paul W.










On Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 7:12 PM King Beowulf <kingbeowulf at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 6/29/19 9:20 AM, David Fleck wrote:
> > For reasons not necessary to go into here, this long-time
> FreeBSD/OpenSUSE user needs to move to a new laptop* Linux distribution,
> and I have the following choices:
> > CentOS
> > Fedora
> > Mint
> > Ubuntu
> >
> > I use CentOS in a text console / server at work, and it seems okay; I'm
> not familiar with the others at all. I seem to remember Ubuntu being
> described as more Windows-y than most distros, which I don't care for. But
> I'd like suggestions as to the pros/cons of the four listed above as laptop
> OS'es specifically.
> >
> > (*ThinkPad Edge E531)
> >
>
> On 6/29/19 5:18 PM, wes wrote:> however I would point out that Canonical
> is big enough to
> > interact with Microsoft at a high level and not be swallowed whole by
> them.
> According to financial data, Microsoft is big enough to purchase
> Canonical with cash.  Thus, the joint venture (Windows subsystem for
> Linux) can very much result in MS acquiring Canonical whole or in part.
> After all, IBM gobbled up Red Hat.  I'm surprised MS hasn't nabbed a
> distro yet.
>
> As for "Distro suggestions,"
>
> 1. Make a list of what you need to do on the laptop
> 2. consider bleeding edge or whether stability, long time support (LTS)
> is needed.
> 3. need a binary software repository, from source or compile yourself?
> 4. Do you need extensive support resources?
> 5. Stick with what you know.
>
> Go with CentOS. It will work fine and you are already familiar with it.
> Where Fedora is the upstream bleeding edge edition feeding Red Hat,
> CentOS is basically the free community edition of Red Hat.  An
> interesting post here:
> https://www.linux.org/threads/linux-org-is-sticking-with-centos.20515/
>
> Also, this fetish in the Linux community "that your kernel and
> libraries can fall behind the curve after a while" on LTS type distros
> is nonsense.  Few here on this list run bleeding edge hardware where you
> may need the latest kernel etc for support. Same goes for much of the
> F/OSS toolchain and software. For distro included application software,
> again, that depends on you use case as to how new it needs to be. New
> and bleeding edge is not necessarily better.
>
> [shameless plug]
> From the specifications of your ThinkPad Edge E531, I'd run
> Slackware64-14.2, but that's just me (and a few other nut jobs here).
> Released in 2016, Slackware has received updates (security and other as
> needed) EVERY MONTH. As have versions back to 14.0 (released 2012!) . It
> has a vibrant community for support, lot's of software on the install
> DVD/USB (you may not need anything else), and Slackbuilds.org to take
> the sting out of 3rd party software installation.  I have it running on
> a 20yr old HP P4 as a server, Lenovo P510 laptop, Lenovo Thinkscentre MT
> as a media center, MSI Atom netbook, and my home built i7-6850K box
> (32GB DDR4, 6TB HDs, 2 nvidia GPUs, 3 LCD, etc etc for hobby (science,
> games) and normal household work).
> http://www.slackware.com/security/list.php?l=slackware-security&y=2019
> [\shameless plug]
>
> Some interesting reading:
> https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=514
> https://hackaday.com/2018/01/30/making-the-case-for-slackware-in-2018/
> https://www.slant.co/versus/2705/7505/~slackware_vs_centos
> https://blog.microlinux.fr/slackware-centos/
>
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