My Linux kernel became dangerously old and needed to be replaced. I tried to postpone that as long as possible but I have finally managed to setup a Linux version that is more or less workable. I’ve chosen for Linux Mint this time and I already regret that. I started on Monday morning, went to a local shop and bought a 1 Tb SSD. A backup of the /home directory tree of approx. 700Gb took me all day. The installation was done in minutes but configuring it to my own specifications was quite a job.
I’ve been tweaking Mint for three days now and I know from experience that I will run into several missing programs in the next couple of months. Also some programs have their own window borders and need hacking.
I want a calculator that does not show scientific notation
I want a visible window border to know where to click when I resize it
Browser tabs in a separate bar to be able to drag the window by the title bar.
A separation between the black background of the terminal and the black desktop background.
In the screen print you can see that I was able to get most what I wanted but what a work. It took me all week to replace the old distribution.
The Cinnamon desktop was simplified too much. many of the settings that were available in earlier versions have disappeared. Developers want to push their new work as the new default even if it is not an improvement.
Chatgpt continuously wanted me to change settings that were missing. Every time I uploaded a screen print with the configuration dialog, chatgpt assured me that I was not crazy and that it really wasn’t there, that was a relief.
Mint 22.03 LTS will have to be replaced again in 2029. Hopefully we can just update it to a newer version instead of a new installation.
Are there any distributions available at all that do not need a new installation every 2 or 3 years?
One of the RHEL variations might fit the bill for you. I use AlmaLinux on servers including this Maker Forums server. That doesn’t mean it contains the exact UI you want, but you’ll get updates for a long time, and they also maintain the ELevate tool for upgrading.
Is there a gnome based desktop which has increasing customization? All I’ve seen over the last couple of decades is fewer capabilities and then forks with other restrictive spins.
I will confess that from day one I was not a fan of Miguel de Icaza trying to mimic Microsoft with gnome even when I was running OS/2 with XFreeOS2 and writing UNIX software for HPUX and dabbling in Linux. KDE is my preferred desktop but I’ve run and built custom bootable images over the years with some using gnome based desktops.
I use (and like) Kubuntu LTS on my PC that drives my CNC router. I’m reasonably proficient with Linux but I’m no expert, so having plain Ubuntu or Kubuntu has been my go to Linux if only because it is easy to find the commands to configure it from google when I need it.
Yeah, I use Linux Mint on an old MacBook Pro. It was an easy install, but it is’clunky’.. I’m no linux pro, so there’s that. The MacBook is from 2015 and was at the EOL for updates, so Instead of letting it goto the recyclers I installed the mint.
My previous laptop had Lubuntu installed, Ubuntu with LxQt, it was presented as light weight and I worked with that for approximately 4 years. Before that I had Ubuntu with Lxde, that worked fine but my laptop crashed and needed replacement. By that time I could not find Lxde anymore and work required me to fix it quickly so I quickly installed LxQt and could never get used to PCManFM file manager.
When I started to search for the next distribution I wanted to try Nemo as file manager. A few friends had Mint installed and were quite content with it, so I followed. I had already tried to install Nemo as the default file manager in LxQt but I could never fully integrate it.
That is exactly what I have seen. Not just with Linux, but also Windows is stripping functionality. I started using ms-dos in 1983, version 2.10. The business I worked for, embraced proven technology and did not support employees using Windows for workgroups at first. You will understand our disbelieve when in 1995 everyone had to start using Win95. I was stubborn and installed Win-NT 4.0 and used it until Win-XP was released, because I could no longer do my work without USB support. In my opinion NT4 was the most configurable version of Windows ever released. Since then, capabilities are stripped from every new version. Eight years ago I started using Linux and supported customers with a copy of their Windows environment in a VirtualBox with the same OS. I notice the same downward spiral in both Linux and Windows. Is it a way of fighting inflation? Do we get less functionality for the same money, or are the original developers retired and does nobody know how to maintain the software?
I have tried a Debian distribution years ago that had a “Redmond theme”. I don’t need an exact copy of the Windows layout but if you look at the screenshot above you might notice that I am still using [Menu button,Quick launch,Running applications,System tray] in the taskbar, exactly like Windows
(or do I have to write: Exactly like Windows had years ago?)
Miguel de Icaza wasn’t trying to mimick the Windows desktop, it was the technology in the coding of the project. He was copying their COM system, maybe DCOM and non C++/OOP techniques which Microsoft chose not because of performance,etc but because they needed to control developers(Dance MonkeyBoy Dance) and they did that by controlling the programming APIs which if abstracted under layers of OOP they lose control.
It was at a time when it was everyone else looking to technological advancements and Microsoft coming up with half-baked pseudo tech to their developers to keep them from jumping ship to all the cross platform tools and technology in the late 80s and through the 90s.
The Windows desktop and even the Linux desktops are archaic compared to what OS/2 had with its CORBA based OOPed WorksplaceShell. IBM even had it running on AIX, their version of UNIX so ports to Linux could have been possible but they never would open source it. I was hopeful of NEXT but Jobs went back to Apple and ended that. I used a bunch of Qt based apps so the LxQt Lubuntu is one of the LiveCD iso images I boot to test things.
I prefer an RPM based distro and have used CentOS for years without issues on my servers. For desktop, I use Fedora. I leave it as the developers wanted it and haven’t had any problems. Regarding the design variants e.g. Ubuntu etc I had nothing but trouble. I need my machines to just work. I don’t want to be fixing problems every day and getting nothing done. I’ve worked in IT for over 25 years and now just want an easy life When I upgrade my servers, I may try Rocky Linux. I’ll obviously test before I commit to that.
Going back to Fedora, the upgrade path is simple and you can upgrade two versions in front. It just works. Some say it’s cutting edge but my experience says, not really. It’s been extremely stable for me over the years.
Great and we know there are some other Red Hats(original one, not baseball hat) here but what desktop does it use?
I believe the OP was really predominantly not happy with the desktop.
I was really keen on RedHat until they announced they were no longer supporting the desktop. Turns out they were going to continue “supporting” it but not as part of their server business and I know a number of RedHat users who’ve told me it is a well supported desktop distro.
First of all, I want to emphasize that I make no claim to being a Linux expert. Unfortunately my main work computer has to remain windows because I need a particular program that I have not found a good substitute for in the Linux world. That being said, I have three or four computers running Linux of various flavors just to familiarize myself and to try and find one that satisfies all my needs.
I’ve tried many distributions, including Mint, MX Linux, Zorin, Elementary and others, and I’ve used each with various desktops available. Nothing really excited me to the point where I said this is the one until I installed Pop!_OS Origami with the new Cosmic desktop written entirely in Rust. Installation was simple, it comes with a good selection of applications and you can install virtually any application that runs on Debian. It is flatpak compatible.
The desktop is unbelievably fast. I have to say that again because there’s no way to get this across appropriately. The desktop is unbelievably fast. It is extremely configurable and most things that I’ve tried run without any tweaking. I doubt all of the parameters you want will come native, but I would venture to guess that everything you want is doable with very little effort.
System 76, the creators of Pop!_OS have been developing this branch of Linux for use on their own machines for a number of years now, and they consistently rank near the top in customer satisfaction. The cosmic desktop is just released as version 1.0, but it’s more than ready for primetime in my opinion. The Linux kernel is, I believe, the most current available and they keep it updated. Installing the updates usually doesn’t break anything. It runs on a long-term release model rather than a rolling release, so you do have to update every once in awhile to the newest version and newest kernel.
I’d tried Pop!_OS on some old Windows tablets I found on hackaday and it ran pretty well performance-wise but was too unstable. That was probably 1.5 years ago so maybe they’ve figured it out.
I’d ended up with KDE Neon on the tablets and except for Firefox killing the graphics driver too many times(Chrome runs perfectly) it’s been great. I will take a look at Pop!_OS again.
Really wish that OS/2 had made it in the market — once talked a customer through installing a printer over the phone by asking what they saw on screen, then telling them what to do when my only experience was installing it on their computer after building it.
If I was confident of:
installing on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 and allowing use of:
w/ decent handwriting, I’d buy it.
As it is, my next new tech toy will be a Raspberry Pi 5, and I’ll be using it for those tasks which it is suited for where possible.
My main problem with OS/2 and printing was that their parallel port driver only worked if your hardware supported interrupts (most didn’t at the time), and as far as I could tell, it sent only one byte per interrupt. It was glacially slow. Nearly unusable.
When I rewrote the Linux parallel port driver in the very early days of Linux, I made it optionally use interrupts but not require interrupts, and when an interrupt fired, would write until the printer reported that it was full, then wait for the next interrupt. Even without interrupts, using only polling, I used negligible CPU and had high throughput; using interrupts got slightly higher throughput because I had a signal to start sending sooner. That was like the tenth piece of C code I ever wrote, and I did it in a couple weeks of spare time while being a full time college student, and most of the couple weeks was fighting a bug where I’d missed an API change in the driver interface. It was really only a couple hours of work for a seasoned driver developer, and my impression at the time as a student was that whoever wrote the parallel port driver for OS/2 really just phoned it in, because it wasn’t hard for me to do orders of magnitude better work.
They may well have fixed this before they gave up on OS/2, but as far as I can tell it was the case at the time that OS/2 had any shot at commercial relevance.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there was a company in Redmond WA involved in that given the early ties and the need to have a functional WinOS2 subsystem. I’d picked up and started using OS/2 back in my college days too but by then I knew UNIX and DOS and GEM and VxWorks so it was seen as an amazing desktop OS for the hardware of the time. Late 1980s and early 1990s.
There’s something pinging me about the parallel port on OS/2 but it’s not coming forward in memory. But I did run most all my printing over LANs, even at home I had a small printer server box connecting 3 printers. My only recollection of a connected printer was a label maker and a small dot matrix I’d used to print checks.
Have you checked with Lewis Rosenthal at Arca Noae or better yet one of the forums?
ArcaOS runs in a VM now so maybe they still have a liveCD you could try if nobody can give confirmation on Pen/2 working.
I was around and active in the community when the Pen computing craze started and it was just another thing which soured the word “Microsoft” further in my mind. Read the book named StartUP and you’ll understand. I went to ComDex every year back in those days.
Kaplan went on to create the first online auction site called OnSale when the web was young.
StartUp is one of my favourite books, and I still have some old Go Corp. PenPoint stuff around, including multiple copies of their UI guidelines — the NCR-3125 I used to run it on was donated to the Smithsonian.
A nice matching book is ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue and the various things written on the Newton.
I’ve always seen MS Basic as the child BillyG had to keep forcing on people. BASIC sucked compared to other beginner languages and others had superior GUI element associations. But MS Basic was pushed, then Visual Basic.
Had Apple been a bit more visionary and understanding of the butthole BillyG was/is then they would have, should have, backported MacBASIC to the Apple II or provided some other compatible version.
It sucks to no end how much crappy software was pushed onto unknowing users because of the monopoly position MS had and how they used that position to eliminate far better software products.
I was a huge fan of Borland and Watcom becasue their products were far superior than others on the market. Seeing Borland poached to death by MS in order to try to kill Java and how terrible MFC was used to kill off so many compiler and OO framework products built my sour taste for everything that lousy company touches.
I worked for Borland technical support during it’s final collapse, I wasn’t a fan.
For years after I had a cutting from a spider-plant (cubicles, potted plants..) on my windowsill. I used to tell people that it was the 'last living remmanent of Borland
