I'm going to try to replace windows 10.

m_cozzy said:
but I simply cannot be bothered when windows works out of the box.
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That's just it. You probably had similar issues when you first started using Windows.
You learned how to fix them and now it seems Windows works OOTB because you no longer have that learning curve, but the truth is you just know how to make it do what you need it to do.

It's no different with Linux, get past that initial learning curve and it will work exactly how you want it to work, every time.

BTW, Debian/Ubuntu/Mint is a **** distro to try and get an OOTB experience from.
Should have gone with SolusOS 1.2.
 
I'm of the opinion that Mint serves no purpose in the Linux world at all. If Cinnamon were a decent desktop environment it would serve a purpose, however every time I've tried it it's been a glitchy, buggy mess. As for their other flavours, why use a distribution that's merely a further abstraction away from upstream (in this case, Debian > Ubuntu > Mint) when the same desktop environments are already available as Ubuntu flavours? Solus...keep in mind that if you have an issue, it's likely that a Google will bring up results surrounding Ubuntu. A completely independent, rarely used distribution is not going to be the easiest to troubleshoot for someone who wants stability.

To be brutally honest the best out-of-the-box Linux desktop experience I've had has been Ubuntu and its derivatives, to the point where my recommendation for the desktop is either to use Ubuntu or jump straight to Arch. Either work out the box or let the user do all the work. With Ubuntu all I ever had to do was install the drivers in the Settings application and it's been all smooth from there. On Arch now which of course requires you to build your installation up manually, however it's the best binary distribution by a mile in my opinion, and everything I've ever required for my MacBook Air was already in the AUR. Getting Debian and Fedora working on the same machine is a frustrating and comparatively timely experience.

Nvidia being the vendor of choice for Linux machines is either a myth or a recent falsehood. I don't play games on Linux at all however it seems that aside from offering decent performance their drivers are buggy and Nvidia refuse to provide fixes for essential functionality. Suspend has never worked on my setup (though they've announced that it's "fixed" here two days ago), and audio always requires switching to another TTY and back if the display has fallen asleep. As SKILL says, stick with Intel and Kernel Mode Setting (i.e. don't install the Intel driver unless you need to), and all should work smoothly.

EDIT: Seems that the aforementioned suspend and audio issues are related according to this link. Not related to the thread however may be useful to someone.
 
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My experience of mint/cinnamon seems the polar opposite of yours then :p been using it years and it's just worked for me. And given that I see Mint as being awesome for not having Unity, which is just such a steaming pile of ****. If anything my problem is that as Mint is based largely on Ubunut I believe Mint 18 uses Systemd and I'm really not sold on that, customer decided they wanted it on their embedded system and it works ok but yeah, not sure :p

Arch is ok, but I kinda feel like if you're going down that route, especially with decent hardware, Gentoo is 'nicer', but that may be due to using it for years (with crappy hardware where an install took like 2 days) pre-ubuntu days.

I'm pretty much stuck with Ubuntu or a derivative with work just cause all the BSP releases and tools are designed around that and all the customers us it if they use any Linux distro. Thinking of changing that now I've been playing around with containers though, VM's have always felt a bit heavyweight even headless ones but lxc containers running ubuntu via Vagrant may be the future for me :)

On the personal stuff my fileserver and htpc both run Gentoo, v1 rpi on Arch and a v3 rpi on a homebrew Yocto install cause why not :p
 
Personally, as someone who has used Unix/Linux day in day out for the last 20+ years, I prefer OSX or Windows 10 on the desktop over a Linux based solution. I have colleagues who run things like Mint as their desktops at home (at work we use Windows 7) who are generally happy with it but they are tending to migrate over to Windows 10 now.

I don't get the hatred for OSX really ... it gives me a system which just works (and is perfectly usable with a 2010 Mac Mini with 8GB and a SSD) and gives me a shell terminal which means I can connect to any of my Linux VMs easily if I need too.
 
lamboman said:
Nvidia being the vendor of choice for Linux machines is either a myth or a recent falsehood. I don't play games on Linux at all however it seems that aside from offering decent performance their drivers are buggy and Nvidia refuse to provide fixes for essential functionality. Suspend has never worked on my setup (though they've announced that it's "fixed" here two days ago), and audio always requires switching to another TTY and back if the display has fallen asleep. As SKILL says, stick with Intel and Kernel Mode Setting (i.e. don't install the Intel driver unless you need to), and all should work smoothly.
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Most people would run either an AMD or nVidia GPU - have you actually tried ATI/AMD on Linux? I'm not sure what it is like these days as its 2-3 years since I've used that kind of setup but if you thought nVidia was bad.......... Intel are generally fairly solid on Linux if they meet your needs but tended to have more basic functionality.
 
Rroff said:
Most people would run either an AMD or nVidia GPU - have you actually tried ATI/AMD on Linux? I'm not sure what it is like these days as its 2-3 years since I've used that kind of setup but if you thought nVidia was bad.......... Intel are generally fairly solid on Linux if they meet your needs but tended to have more basic functionality.
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AMD these days are way way better than they used to be, performance in gaming isn't great still but the Open Source driver is up there with the Proprietary one in performance, and is regularly updated to support the latest GPU's, e.g. RX480 support was there before the card was released. There's even commits that are probably for the Vega gen cards being added recently.

nvidia on the other hand has decent performance with the proprietary driver, although iirc with the Pascal cards the driver with support came out a good few weeks after the cards were available. But the open source side is awful, no support at all for Pascal, Maxwell was only recently supported but with no 'reclocking' support so it's only at 2D clocks the entire time, Kepler gen cards are the only ones that really work even half-way decently with the open source driver.

As most distros will only give you the open source driver as a base install then AMD from that perspective are miles ahead, chances are you can just leave it as is assuming the distro is somewhat up to date, nvidia though you'll want/need to get the proprietary driver if you've got a card in the last few years...

Yes they've got the performance lead but as gaming is pointless on linux that doesn't really mean much, from a support/open-source perspective nvidia are now way behind AMD.
 
nVidia has never done "open source" and a good bit of the stuff required is deeply tied to their commercial IP. The proprietary driver always used to be pretty solid which for most people who just want a desktop experience and not dabbling is what counts.
 
As I dont like failing I tried again last night, this time with ubuntu 16. Problem free install, needed to manually add stuff for exfat & printer. However the printer didnt print, so maybe even though mint did it all automatically, that wouldnt have printed either as I didnt test it. TBH its got me thinking do I really need a big colour brother 3040 laser printer at home? Probably not. I can print from work when I need to, so may well sell this.
Nvidia works! Although maybe more to me adding a ppa repository, it downloaded a new driver and I now get the choice to pick either the intel or the nvidia card & all the menus are populated in the nvidia xserver control panel. The only reason I noticed nvida wasnt running under mint was my paused virtual machines from windows complained about 3d acceleration not being available when trying to resume them under linux. I didnt really think I need 3d for my work vm. I gather I can do something with bumblebee that will perhaps launch the nvida card when I run vmware workstation if I really need to. To be looked into.
Wake from usb keyboard seems to work now. Fans a little noisy still although ultimately I may well replace this gaming laptop with a sff quiet pc anyway.
Unity. Hate it, although maybe getting better after using it all morning :) I still prefered the mint 18 desktop, and may try it again using what I have learn so far.
 
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But out of the box what distro will install/get the latest nvidia proprietary drivers? my understanding is almost all will use the open-source drivers until you explicitly request the proprietary stuff.

In which case what's easier for people "who just want a desktop experience and not dabbling", something that works acceptably out of the box or something that may work, if they're lucky, for long enough to run some command to install drivers that actually work?

AMD used to do what nvidia do, but worse, the open-source side was non-existant and fglrx is/was worse than the nvidia alternatives. But since the open-source work I'd argue they've not just caught up but surpassed nvidia in everything except pure opengl/gaming performance. If/when I get to spec myself a new laptop for work or any other linux use I'll avoid nvidia like the plague :p
 
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m_cozzy said:
As I dont like failing I tried again last night, this time with ubuntu 16. Problem free install, needed to manually add stuff for exfat & printer. However the printer didnt print, so maybe even though mint did it all automatically, that wouldnt have printed either as I didnt test it. TBH its got me thinking do I really need a big colour brother 3040 laser printer at home? Probably not. I can print from work when I need to, so may well sell this.
Nvidia works! Although maybe more to me adding a ppa repository, it downloaded a new driver and I now get the choice to pick either the intel or the nvidia card & all the menus are populated in the nvidia xserver control panel. The only reason I noticed nvida wasnt running under mint was my paused virtual machines from windows complained about 3d acceleration not being available when trying to resume them under windows. I dnt reall think I need 3d for my work vm. I gather I can do something with bumblebee that will perhaps launch the nvida card when I run vmware workstation if I really need to. To be looked into.
Wake from usb keyboard seems to work now. Fans a little noisy still although ultimately I may well replace this gaming laptop with a sff quiet pc anyway.
Unity. Hate it, although maybe getting better after using it all morning :) I still prefered the mint 18 desktop, and may try it again using what I have learn so far.
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Sounds like the ppa installed the proprietary nvidia drivers, that same method should work in Mint as well as it's essentially Ubuntu underneath. Good to hear it's working though :)
 
Ubuntu is too problematic for me, resume from standby crashes occasionally, workspace issues, chrome has launched but I cannot get to it, odd screen res after resume on my mahoosive 30" dell. Plus I cant abide the windows controls being on the wrong side with no way to move them back to the right, thats just arrogant of the developers. Apart from that I was doing ok!
The lack of a decent google drive client is a big issue for me also.
So I wil give mint another bash tonight & if that fails I will try manjaro, I quite liked that during a brief test the other week.
 
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No, mint still wont work properly even with the new nvidia drivers, display is all screwed up and cinamon crashes every login.
So for me & my hardware, linux is still not yet viable.
I have no desire to try further distos & will put up with windows 10 again (with metered connection on so it stops updating) Hopefully android x86 on pc's will be a big thing within 5 years so so, now that really would be something!
So ends my experiment to free myself from windows :(
 
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You think windows is a frustrating OS yet plan on using one that takes half an hour to install a printer lol.

Linux always has been and always will be a server OS. It just doesn't have the level of support needed outside of that remit.
 
ScoTTyBEEE said:
You think windows is a frustrating OS yet plan on using one that takes half an hour to install a printer lol.

Linux always has been and always will be a server OS. It just doesn't have the level of support needed outside of that remit.
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Don't talk utter ****

It's like 5 clicks from start to finish.
 
I took my first plunge into Linux last August and never looked back.
I did a few weeks of reading reviews on the various distros, watching YouTube et al and despite it being tagged as not suited for new users I went with Manjaro. XFCE
I did a dual-boot install with Win 10/Manjaro on the SSD no swap file and I created a separate partition on my 1tb storage drive for the /home partition.
Can honestly say I have no issues whatsoever that I did not cause and even then I fixed self created issues rather swiftly. Not a coder and not used to the terminal and thankfully rarely even use that
so my 120gb contains both my OS and my storage houses my linux user partition as well as sharing the remaining 1/2 with both Operating systems so I only need 1 install of my games all my steam files are in the same place.

I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I have "Needed" to boot windows due to not being able to do something on Linux.
Manjaro came with all the drivers I needed as well as office media and even steam.

This past month I have installed it on 2 friends Laptops and another friends Desktop all 3 of them are pensioners and not tech savvy and all 3 love manjaro and have no desire to return to windows.
 
ScoTTyBEEE said:
Have you read the thread? Doesn't sound like 5 clicks to me.
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Sounds to me you don't know what you are talking about to be honest, You've implied that it took you half an hour to install a printer. Guess you was just trolling :rolleyes:

I guess this is what classes as hard these days :rolleyes:

 
I've used Linux for around 15 years. On and off as a desktop, my longest period was for about 4 years when I used it in work for web developing. I have predominantly used command line and know that far better than the graphics side. I'm no expert, I'd describe myself as an intermediate.

I've not had any major issues with it... ***BUT*** when there has been and issue it's generally Been very annoying, difficult to solve and a lot of faffing.

Only yesterday on my home PC I booted up Ubuntu. I decided to check for newer version as I'm about 2 years behind. Found it and the command run it and was told it may take several hours to upgrade. Said yes and left it.

After about an hour it failed during the upgrade. I was short on time so didn't look into detail why.

Anyway, ended up rebooting and now Ubuntu just crashes during boot up. I can get into the recovery mode so should be able to fix but just hassle.

It's a shame as I'm a really big fan of Linux and the whole open source world.
 
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