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Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Tue Apr 24, 2018 10:25 pm
by Dwedit
Had plenty of kernel oopses one time, turned out to be hardware failure/bad ram.

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 3:35 am
by Rahsennor
Garth wrote:Ahem—Ubuntu is Debian-based.
I know that. I also know they butchered the hell out of it for no adequately-explained reason - everything I listed is a problem I actually had, that disappeared when I switched to Debian. (The audio issues were actually fixed by removing PulseAudio, but Ubuntu wouldn't let me do that and Debian does.)

And that's not even including out-of-date and buggy libraries breaking my builds, making my code run at 0.2 FPS and wasting hours of my time searching for bugs that weren't my fault. When your unstable, bleeding-edge packages - which are nonetheless labelled 'stable' - are two years behind Debian of all distros, you're doing something wrong. (No I am not making that up - that was the state of SDL in Ubuntu in 2014. It was the straw that broke my camel's back.)

YMMV, obviously, but I've now been using Debian for about as long as I was using Ubuntu, and for me the difference has been night and day. If you don't want to play or develop games and don't like diving into the terminal every five minutes, I imagine it would be much smoother sailing. And hey, maybe they've fixed all the issues I was having by now - but given the attitude of the staff, I somehow doubt that.

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 9:27 am
by tepples
Garth wrote:Ahem—Ubuntu is Debian-based. I've been using Ubuntu for many years, and the few times I can remember it ever crashing was because I didn't have the computer set up yet for disc-swapping, and I ran my 6GB of RAM full. (I sure wish firefox would improve their memory-allocation and fragmenting.)
One thing you can do to improve Firefox's memory use is enable Tracking Protection. This works because some of the most common memory-intensive scripts in web pages are analytics and real-time bidding scripts made with the express intent of tracking viewers' history across websites for interest-based advertising.
Garth wrote:It used to be I only had to re-start a couple of times a year (when updates required it), but lately they've been requiring it much more often.
Meltdown, Bounds Check Spectre, and Branch Target Spectre led to a bunch of updates to Linux and core libraries in quick succession recently. Several years ago, a bunch of OpenSSL fixes also led to reboots, as OpenSSL is loaded by so many long-running user applications and services that it's easiest to ensure that all affected programs are restarted by restarting Linux.
Garth wrote:There are a few other minor irritations, like when I click on a .pdf and it sometimes asks me if I want to open it with my text editor.
If by "click on" you mean follow a link in a web browser, I think that's related to web servers that mistakenly serve things other than newline-separated ASCII or UTF-8 text as Content-type: text/plain. Or by "click on" did you mean in the native file manager?

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:37 pm
by Garth
Garth wrote:
tepples wrote:Have you tried sudo apt autoremove to purge unused packages, particularly old linux-image versions?
I'll look into it. Thanks. Is that the whole command? Is there anything I have to be careful of?
This didn't work, but it seemed to be because I have 14.04, not 16.04 which our son who's the Linux expert here wasn't fond of and I don't remember why. 18.04 is supposed to be out tomorrow, and he will evaluate it when he gets around to it.

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:39 pm
by Garth
tepples wrote:
Garth wrote:There are a few other minor irritations, like when I click on a .pdf and it sometimes asks me if I want to open it with my text editor.
If by "click on" you mean follow a link in a web browser, I think that's related to web servers that mistakenly serve things other than newline-separated ASCII or UTF-8 text as Content-type: text/plain. Or by "click on" did you mean in the native file manager?
I meant on a web page. So maybe it's as you say, their server, not my OS.

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 11:16 pm
by koitsu
Garth wrote:I'll look into it. Thanks. Is that the whole command? Is there anything I have to be careful of?

Code: Select all

(23:15:32 jdc@linux) ~ $ cat update_mint
#!/bin/sh -e

sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade
sudo apt-get -y autoremove
sudo apt-get -y autoclean
I'm not big on using apt or aptitude, though will tell you flat out there are some cases where they make tracking/figuring out package dependencies a *lot* easier (more user-friendly) than apt-cache or dpkg-query.

Re: Favorite Linux Distros

Posted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 5:37 am
by tepples
The shortcut apt for apt-get was indeed added sometime after 14.04.