• Re: What's Your Go-to OS

    From neoshock@VERT/VINTAGE to Accession on Thu Feb 13 19:44:00 2025
    - Archlinux: A rolling release that feels future-proof. Plus, the AUR g me tons of flexibility.

    I swear by this one no matter where you put it. If you want it in a container, or in a refrigerator for that matter. I've even used the arm version on a few rpi3's in the past. ;)

    Well, it looks like I might be switching my containers to Arch. I finished running the Phoronix-Test-Suite benchmarks and unfortunately they were not very conclusive. Many of the tests failed on most of the systems, so there were only a few tests that worked on multiple systems. However, the tests that did work on more than one system had Arch performing better.
    Also I am very familiar with Arch, so I don't have to learn new ways of doing things. Also am an interested in using cockpit for remote administration which they the Cockpit crew test on Arch. The only concern I have is if you do not update regularly, you need to go through the process of getting the new keys for the repository.

    For those of you interested in seeing the results. https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2502139-NE-2502130NE27

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  • From MRO@VERT/BBSESINF to neoshock on Fri Feb 14 11:25:46 2025
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: neoshock to Accession on Thu Feb 13 2025 07:44 pm

    I swear by this one no matter where you put it. If you want it in a container, or in a refrigerator for that matter. I've even used the arm version on a few rpi3's in the past. ;)

    Well, it looks like I might be switching my containers to Arch. I finished


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  • From neoshock@VERT/VINTAGE to MRO on Fri Feb 14 17:14:00 2025
    https://imgur.com/wvtIQTx

    LOL, BTW

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  • From paulie420@VERT/BEERS20 to Arelor on Sun Feb 16 12:54:00 2025
    Debian has been operating as a political institution since more or less the systemd migration. But then I think the systemd migration itself was very badly handled. I remember meeting some people from the Debian ecosystem back in the day and celebrating they had kicked those
    "fuckers" when some developers and packagers left over it. You'd think they were happy they were losing manpower.

    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.



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  • From neoshock@VERT/VINTAGE to Arelor on Sun Feb 16 13:34:00 2025
    For LXC in particular I tend to favor Devuan because it offers a Debian-li base - so third party services you bolt on it are likely to run - without carrying the bad babbage Debian has been accumulating as of late.
    Thank's for that info, I will look into Devuan. I have never heard of that distro, but looking at their website, seems like worth a try.

    Alpine is good but then it is less compatible with random stuff you might Ar> to deploy on it - it has a minoritary libc, for starters, so lots of
    precompiled solutions simply don't run on Alpine as they are.

    Yes, I agree. Originally Alpine seemed like was something I was going to switch all my containers, however it looks with the amount of work needing to get some projects working may not be worth the time. I might however use Alpine for simple services like Samba and ssh. All my other containers would mount those file shares. This allows me only needing to mount to one samba server to transfer files if need, rather than need to mount multiple samba servers on on desktop.

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  • From neoshock@VERT/VINTAGE to paulie420 on Sun Feb 16 13:59:00 2025
    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

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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to neoshock on Sun Feb 16 19:09:26 2025
    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 paulie420@VERT/BEERS20 to neoshock on Sun Feb 16 17:55:00 2025
    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.

    FOSS/Linux should be available and welcoming to ALL. Trans, cis, white, black, Asian, American, Canadian - you get it...

    IMO these projects who attempt to cancel ANYONE who won't stand up and hail their ideals are just BS bonfires that don't deserve my support, money or even usage...

    nixOS, ElementaryOS (who cares, its always sucked...), Red Hat, Mozilla... I could surely keep going. All BS who go as far as to push out the original devs!??! BTW: I certainly wouldn't license my way out of my own project, but its happening again and again.

    DEI is the same racism they were fighting 10 years ago. God - I've become so political, but its not because *I* don't accept everyone... come join 2oFB, EVERYONE. Just don't flip out when I discuss whats important to me.

    Sheesh... FOSS sucks, 2025.



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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to neoshock on Tue Feb 18 09:08:38 2025
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: neoshock to Arelor on Sun Feb 16 2025 01:34 pm

    Yes, I agree. Originally Alpine seemed like was something I was going to switch all my containers, however it looks with the amount of work needing to get some projects working may not be worth the time. I might however use Alpine for simple services like Samba and ssh. All my other containers would mount those file shares. This allows me only needing to mount to one samba server to transfer files if need, rather than need to mount multiple samba servers on on desktop.

    Depending on what you are doing, I find maintaining a multi-stack network sucks balls.

    Say you are operating a server farm. Screw that, let's say you are operating a big homelab (with 20 machines or so). If you are serious you might be using some configuration management scheme so you can manage your farm semi-automatically instead of having to go through every one of your machines everytime you need to push an upgrade or whatever.

    If you are using something such as Sake you need to define which tasks you want your configuration management solution to do. Stuff like defining an upgrade task that does apt update and apt upgrade on all your Debian-like machines. Usually that is easy enough.

    Then you realize you have an Alma Linux machine, and an Alpine machine, and this NetBSD over there, and a virtual router with some goddamn proprietary firmware. This means your instruction starts looking like (pseudocode follows:)

    upgrade () {
    if system is debian then do apt-get stuff
    else if system is alma linux then do dnf stuff
    if system is OpenBSD then do syspach and pkg_add stuff
    ........
    }

    This gets out of hand very quickly. Some automation solutions suffer this less than others, but still...

    So, in practice, I tend to recommend using as few platforms as possible just because it makes management suck much less. This means I tend to use a small number of operating systems for my VMs and containers (usually Devuan when I need Linux, OpenBSD when I don't) and exceptions exist only when there is no way arround it.

    Just saying because if you have more than 5 machines then you might consider thinning your stack rather than adding more Linux distributions to the mix.



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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to neoshock on Tue Feb 18 09:18:15 2025
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: neoshock to paulie420 on Sun Feb 16 2025 01:59 pm

    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

    Linux still has lots of fun projects to play with, but most often they are toy projects (such as KISS Linux and their clones) or laser-focused (such as Tiny Core Linux, which also has toy vibes).

    The BSDs don't require you to relearn that many things. Most of the userland is similar and I think if you are a poweruser in Linux land you will be up to speed with any BSD in a couple of weeks. The differences surface when you start doing intensive work (such as creating a package for a BSD) or trying to coherce Linux-centric software into running on your BSD of choice.


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  • From Arelor@VERT/PALANTIR to Gamgee on Tue Feb 18 09:20:20 2025
    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 Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Arelor on Tue Feb 18 18:52:04 2025
    Hey Arelor!

    On Tue, Feb 18 2025 15:18:14 -0600, you wrote:

    The BSDs don't require you to relearn that many things. Most of the
    userland is similar and I think if you are a poweruser in Linux land
    you will be up to speed with any BSD in a couple of weeks. The
    differences surface when you start doing intensive work (such as
    creating a package for a BSD) or trying to coherce Linux-centric
    software into running on your BSD of choice.

    I must say, the last time I installed FreeBSD (was within the past 6 months or so), I decided to try the 'all-binary' route using 'pkg', and was pretty impressed with the ease of use, and no worrying about dependencies, much like I'm used to with Archlinux. It was a much better experience than I've had in the past.

    Regards,
    Nick

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  • From paulie420@VERT/BEERS20 to MRO on Tue Feb 18 17:47:00 2025
    my problem with linux is not the OSes, it's development done on programs that i use with linux. some of these guys are screwballs, still developing older versions of things while also newer versions are coming out. that's chaos.

    I'm not a fan of a gui in linux; i prefer cli.

    While I do have a couple GUI Linux laptops, I mostly agree with you here... I use a MacOS station as my main system for the 'pretty' stuff - consuming media, creating media and local AI. Linux runs my servers, my VMs, my containers, my backups, etc.

    Linux is, and always will be, the king of the datacenter, internet and consumer products.



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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Arelor on Tue Feb 18 19:54:41 2025
    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 Tue Feb 18 22:21:00 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 03:27:07 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 10:00:00 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 12:57:32 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 12:57:32 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 12:35:12 2025
    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 Wed Feb 19 16:29:02 2025
    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 Thu Feb 20 09:01:00 2025
    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 fusion@VERT/CFBBS to Dumas Walker on Thu Feb 20 17:16:00 2025
    On 20 Feb 2025, Dumas Walker said the following...

    it installed isn't what the laptop has. It was something newer, so I
    went with a mix of LxQT and IceWM instead.

    you mentioned icewm before, and os/2 as well.. afaik it only ever came with a pseudo-warp3/CDE looking theme so i made one that's pretty much a pixel-perfect copy of warp4 if you want a copy:

    https://kirin.dcclost.com/~alex/warpalex.zip

    unzip in ~/.icewm/themes/

    you're stuck with a teeny-tiny picture of my cat's face as a start menu icon though.. i don't feel like swapping it out :)

    interestingly the original author of icewm also created "FTE" .. a quite popular os/2 text editor in it's time.

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  • From Gamgee@VERT/PALANTIR to Dumas Walker on Thu Feb 20 16:48:13 2025
    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 Fri Feb 21 10:24:00 2025
    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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  • From Dumas Walker@VERT/CAPCITY2 to FUSION on Fri Feb 21 10:57:00 2025
    you mentioned icewm before, and os/2 as well.. afaik it only ever came with a pseudo-warp3/CDE looking theme so i made one that's pretty much a
    ixel-perfec
    copy of warp4 if you want a copy:

    https://kirin.dcclost.com/~alex/warpalex.zip

    Oh wow thanks. I will need to check that out!


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  • From Nightfox@VERT/DIGDIST to Dumas Walker on Fri Feb 21 14:21:06 2025
    Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
    By: Dumas Walker to GAMGEE on Fri Feb 21 2025 10:24 am

    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 had tried Mandrake years ago, and the first version I tried was able to automatically detect my video hardware and was able to perfectly set up the video settings for me as well, but then the next version failed to do so, and the UI didn't work out of the box like it did with the previous version. I haven't used Mandrake since then.. I had seen a few Linux distros like that too, not just Mandrake. However, it seems that Linux distros are better overall these days.

    Nightfox

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  • From Accession@VERT/PHARCYDE to Dumas Walker on Fri Feb 21 18:49:38 2025
    Hey Dumas!

    On Fri, Feb 21 2025 15:24:00 -0600, you wrote:

    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.

    This was at the same time Windows 8 did the exact same thing. People with desktops were furious, so Windows 8.1 was released very soon after that addressed it. By the looks of it, Gnome has also addressed it, somewhat.

    Regards,
    Nick

    ... He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
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