Linux Distribution Experiment

[masterpeace]

Disclaimer : This is not a serious experiment , just 4fun and a bit of gambling so me and my work-friend can have the to-be-disposed laptop instead of 3rd party pawning service in the closing of October if we can produce good result .

With my other linux-noob-friend i made from the office who suffers the same problem with me , we actually ask our boss to use 10yo-tobedisposed-officelaptops that is sitting on the server room storage eating dust , and install different linux distribution we think the best (Linux Mint , MX Linux , Manjaro , Solus) to see which distribution will 'broke' first .

Each have the exact same specification and exact same model also exact same hardware setup (HP , dual core i3 , 4 thread , 2x2 GB ram , 512MB Nvidia GeForce , 60GB HDD (we replace it with 5yo 128GB SSD from the storage) ) .

I handle MX and Manjaro XFCE , my friend handles Mint Cinnamon and Solus Budgie . The task we handle are your office chores like data entry , document creation , document edit , document upload/download , e-mail thingies , creating presentation , doing presentation , and processing mined-data . We considers any work inhibition (like error with printing , can't connect to local network , can't access shared hardware , and generic noobish problem) as "broken" .

We only do basic modify , like codecs , nvidia driver , network register , and conky .

So this morning , about 4 day from the 2nd month mark , the experiment finally take first victim : my Manjaro installation finally break . It can't connect to shared printers after daily update . But there's already a solution on the Arch-wiki so it actually doesn't matter .

About the side-result :
boot up time (according to stopwatch , best of the 3) :
1. Manjaro & Solus (16.1s)
2. MX (16.6s)
3, Mint (17s)

operating workload temperature (wi-fi , libreoffice write , calc , thunderbird , mozilla , after 3 hours working nonstop according to conky)
1. Manjaro (65-66 C)
2. MX & Mint (65-67 C)
3. Solus (64-68 C)

might be lower if the dust cleaned and given thermal-paste thingies

operating workload CPU (according to htop after 3 hours working nonstop)
1. MX & Mint (45%~49%)
2. Solus (47%-50%)
3. Manjaro (47%-51%)

What my boss likes : It can reduce 5-year windows leasing cost , less problem with IT department , and can free some workforce

What Information System Department likes : reducing corrupt data? (they said something i don't actually understand but that's the gist) , and more time to do administration work shared with IT departement

What IT Departement likes : less time working on fixing laptop and more time to and more time to do administration work shared with Information System Department

My Boss favourite : Solus it seems he liked Budgie DE
Information System Departement favourite : MX & Mint (50:50)
IT Department favourite : MX & Solus
My Department Favourite : Mint
My Personal Favourite : MX
My Friend's Personal Favourite : Mint

But maybe we won't have Linux as official desktop at anytime soon since the parent company still have another 10 years of contract with microsoft . We the subsidiary of the child company won't have a much say about this sadly .

[Jerry3904]

Interesting, thanks for posting.

[JayM]

You should do additional rounds if the boss will let you: test several MX respins with different desktop environments, then Mint with MATE and Xfce, Manjaro with its different DEs, then Solus with MATE (You already did Budgie.)

IIRC there are Budgie, KDE, LXDE, LMDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE and Trinity MX respins, plus two Devuan respins (ASCII and Beowulf) plus Manyroads' Openbot respin.