[PLUG] Thoughts on Linux Distros & Desktop Enviro

[Mike C.]

Here's a blurb from an article I read on on /. that got me thinking 
about my decade long journey w. Linux distros./
"To little surprise, Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution 
running on the respondents' laptops.38.9% of the respondents were said 
to be using Ubuntu 
<https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=2017-laptop-survey>while 
interesting in second place was Arch Linux at 27.1% followed by Debian 
at 15.3%. Rounding out the top ten were then Fedora at 14.8%, Linux Mint 
in 5th at 10.8%, openSUSE/SUSE in sixth at 4.2%, Gentoo in seventh at 
3.9%, CentOS/RHEL in eighth at 3.1%, Solus in ninth at 2%, and Manjaro 
in tenth at 1.6%. The other Linux distributions had each commanded less 
than 1% of the overall response/"//

I suspect a lot of PLUG'ers are Ubuntu users. I tried various Ubuntu 
versions over the years and there was always things I didn't like such 
as upgrades, silly audio probs,  or that it ran slower compared to 
Debian based distros. So I mostly ran Debian and lived with non-fully 
functional Desktop Enviros, or wireless driver probs, or going into or 
coming out of suspend mode would b0rk up the works. I often had to hack 
on Debian, which at times was fun & interesting and at other times was 
really frustrating & annoying.

Last year I cam across Deepin. It's a Debian based distro w. their own 
Desktop Enviro. And not only do all the lil' things work as you would 
expect like w. a MS Win or MAC OS, it works well, is beautiful and 
fast/fluid. Rolling updates are quick & painless. I didn't have 
blacklist my onboard sound to use external speakers or figure out what 
the correct wifi driver to use is. Deepin has also made its DE available 
to most other popular distros.

After a decade of running Linux on personal computers, for me the dream 
of the Linux Desktop has finally become a daily reality for this quite 
happy user! It has been a most glorious year of running Linux. The best 
in a decade I can honestly say.

It's not my intention for this to be an advertisement but just a sharing 
of my experience of the evolution using Linux and the Desktop Enviro. 
Something which many Linux devs never cared about for many years.

Happy Linux-ing!

Cheers!,

Mike