Is Linux fighting back?

[Mauser]

Linux "fighting back" - fugggedaboutit! The young'ns don't give a crap because it's not a cellphone (irony alert for Android/iPhone users!), and greybeards are dying off, literally. I'll just maintain peace of mind knowing that I don't need to be tied to the yoke of Windows in my golden years.
[/quote]
Golden years? I don't why it's called the golden years when it's "The Painful Years" for me.

[herbie643]

I'll be 82 in a few weeks and I can see where you are coming from the 'phone' references as they cannot even eat lunch without looking at their phones.
Linux will be around long ater I am gone and get even better as windows gets worse.

[Artim]

Linux "fighting back" - fugggedaboutit! The young'ns don't give a crap because it's not a cellphone (irony alert for Android/iPhone users!), and greybeards are dying off, literally. I'll just maintain peace of mind knowing that I don't need to be tied to the yoke of Windows in my golden years.

Some of us - very few, I'm sorry to say - resist the urge to let technology run our lives. It's my parents who scroll through Fakebook and Tiktok at the dinner table. Mom at least has a computer (Windows) which she uses for some work stuff - and Fakebook and Tiktok. One of her hand-me-down machines is what I use, restored with Linux and more recently with a BSD I'm experimenting with. But my situation is the exception to the rule I think. Most 'nixers don't want anything to do with kids, judging us all by the kids who act like my mom - scrolling constantly on her phone and oblivious to everything else.

[Mauser]

Linux "fighting back" - fugggedaboutit! The young'ns don't give a crap because it's not a cellphone (irony alert for Android/iPhone users!), and greybeards are dying off, literally. I'll just maintain peace of mind knowing that I don't need to be tied to the yoke of Windows in my golden years.

Some of us - very few, I'm sorry to say - resist the urge to let technology run our lives. It's my parents who scroll through Fakebook and Tiktok at the dinner table. Mom at least has a computer (Windows) which she uses for some work stuff - and Fakebook and Tiktok. One of her hand-me-down machines is what I use, restored with Linux and more recently with a BSD I'm experimenting with. But my situation is the exception to the rule I think. Most 'nixers don't want anything to do with kids, judging us all by the kids who act like my mom - scrolling constantly on her phone and oblivious to everything else.

You misquoted me. You moved the quote I was answering to that didn't get posted correctly due to a forum error. I only wrote after "[/quote]" I only wrote "Golden years? I don't why it's called the golden years when it's "The Painful Years" for me. "

[Artim]

Sorry, formatting error or something

[Tovian]

Want some of these ? I still use 'em almost every day - but only for writing notes on.
The times they are a changin'

[rambo919]

Part of why Linux just can't win.... in the crucial year when WIn10 bites the bullet a religious nerd war with kink elements erupts over display servers.

No wonder the tech normies think we are insane or "dangerous".

So yes Linux is fighting.... itself.

[Aceediq]

.... Maybe if all Linux distributions went to a " rolling release " model, you wouldn't have to keep re-installing ( which most users won't want to do ). Just wondering.

As a multibooter, I can tell you that rolling releases have their own problems.

If they are very aggressively rolling, the users need to learn a lot more about how to handle and maintain their systems. Updates generally need more attention than in Debian Stable. Supporting the uninitiated (or those more used to Debian /Ubuntu fixed releases) can be very tiring and tiresome. Go check out the Manjaro forum.. Sometimes users mess up their system so badly (or think they did) that they give up and do what they thought they wouldn't have to do, ie reinstall.

And it means you'll get the latest versions of software before they are fully ready or stable, or before you are ready for the change because stuff from upstream just gets thrown into the mix (simplistic explanation/description , I know) . Eg. The move to plasma 6 in Arch and thus Manjaro when maybe your favourite plasma 5 widgets have not been upgraded for plasma 6. Or maybe you still prefer Gimp2 but you're forced to move to gimp3.. Packages roll inexorably forward in these distros whether you like it or not. You can try pinning a particular version only for so long before it conflicts with everything else on your system.

If the distro is a more gradual, managed rolling release that enables users to be less hands on, it means the devs have to spend lots of time managing and testing packages behind the scenes, holding back some upgrades until they seem fully ready, etc. You'll either need lots of devs, or you limit the number of applications in your repo so you have less to deal with (eg Solus and PClinuxOS).

So then these distros may not have the apps you want.

No distro suits every single user.

is that what pclinuxos does? that's a lot of worth managing each of the packages...I was hoping to have a pclinuxos variant of mxlinux in future, so I get rid of reinstallations

[asqwerth]

@Aceediq

Regarding PCLinuxOS being a more managed rolling distro, I think they probably mainly worry about foundational changes, like gtk or Qt version changes, or major releases of Plasma, or other core packages. I have noticed over the years of updating (via Synaptic) that there will points in the year where suddenly a whole lot of, say, qt and qt-related packages, are upgraded. And the timing is quite some time after the qt stuff was upgraded in Arch. I can only surmise they held it back for some time, did some checks, made sure at least most common apps that rely on qt can work properly with the latest qt, before releasing everything into the repo.


I did face an issue a few years ago, when I think I went almost a year without changing or upgrading the kernel as I was too lazy and everything seemed to be working fine. One day the network manager just no longer worked no matter what I did. After some checks on their forum (which I don't frequent) and some research, I think I found out that they had changed something in the network manager which required newer kernels than I had to work. Since I had no internet in PCLOS, I did all my searching and downloading of the latest PCLOS kernels while booted into MX. I think I used MX's chroot rescue scan tool to mount and chroot into PCLOS, do a system upgrade, and also manually install the new kernels. Thankfully this restored my network connection. Now I make sure to check on my kernels regularly.

But currently I'm facing an issue where Synaptic no longer works from their updater icon. The authentication password window accepts the password and then nothing. Synaptic still opens from root terminal so maybe it's just an authentication issue. Found only 1 mention on their forum of something similar but the solution didn't work. If I can't sort this out soon, I may finally open an account on their forum to ask for help. Or I may just get rid of the update notifier and upgrade from the command line.

To be fair, this is only my second issue in my PCLOS (MATE) install in 10 years of use, and I don't actively maintain my PCLOS installation, nor check forum announcements the way I do Arch/Manjaro. So this may be a rolling distro for you to consider.

My caveat would be that if you do a lot of audiovisual or other specialised work, I have no idea how it would perform, whether PCLOS would have the requisite packages you need, whether the packages you need or use prefer systemd (and if PCLOS has the necessary sysV scripts instead), etc. That's because my own use of the computer is pretty basic.

[Aceediq]

@Aceediq

Regarding PCLinuxOS being a more managed rolling distro, I think they probably mainly worry about foundational changes, like gtk or Qt version changes, or major releases of Plasma, or other core packages. I have noticed over the years of updating (via Synaptic) that there will points in the year where suddenly a whole lot of, say, qt and qt-related packages, are upgraded. And the timing is quite some time after the qt stuff was upgraded in Arch. I can only surmise they held it back for some time, did some checks, made sure at least most common apps that rely on qt can work properly with the latest qt, before releasing everything into the repo.


I did face an issue a few years ago, when I think I went almost a year without changing or upgrading the kernel as I was too lazy and everything seemed to be working fine. One day the network manager just no longer worked no matter what I did. After some checks on their forum (which I don't frequent) and some research, I think I found out that they had changed something in the network manager which required newer kernels than I had to work. Since I had no internet in PCLOS, I did all my searching and downloading of the latest PCLOS kernels while booted into MX. I think I used MX's chroot rescue scan tool to mount and chroot into PCLOS, do a system upgrade, and also manually install the new kernels. Thankfully this restored my network connection. Now I make sure to check on my kernels regularly.

But currently I'm facing an issue where Synaptic no longer works from their updater icon. The authentication password window accepts the password and then nothing. Synaptic still opens from root terminal so maybe it's just an authentication issue. Found only 1 mention on their forum of something similar but the solution didn't work. If I can't sort this out soon, I may finally open an account on their forum to ask for help. Or I may just get rid of the update notifier and upgrade from the command line.

To be fair, this is only my second issue in my PCLOS (MATE) install in 10 years of use, and I don't actively maintain my PCLOS installation, nor check forum announcements the way I do Arch/Manjaro. So this may be a rolling distro for you to consider.

My caveat would be that if you do a lot of audiovisual or other specialised work, I have no idea how it would perform, whether PCLOS would have the requisite packages you need, whether the packages you need or use prefer systemd (and if PCLOS has the necessary sysV scripts instead), etc. That's because my own use of the computer is pretty basic.

for specialized audio video work, linux has never been even a good testing ground compared to what you get in other OSes, sometimes there are regressions in updates that previous releases didn't have...so for specialized cases, most of us are generally pseudo lab rats...

pclinuxos stability despite all its quirks, such as having unique packaging system is even as stable as debian, personally, it is more stable than debian...and as for packages, I am more of an appimage person than using apt, so....

mx linux is goood, very very good, its stability is thorough and intentional, though I prefer sparkylinux when it comes to app variety, I can't bring myself to justify the reinstallation that is necessary for every major mxlinux release, when pclinuxos operates a update if you like and when you like option. except for one or two times in 10years, like you said, it is just flawless...like windows and macos, they try as much as possible to not allow you to bother with the OS itself, just come with your choice of softwares/apps and use, which is what an OS is supposed to be...for me windows isn't as buggy as other say because I tweak it, mod it or use mod versions, as I am responsible for my gadgets and what happens to them, so all those update shenanigans and it affecting important work has never been my issue in years of using windows, screen of deaths? my hardware was failing or a bad modification, nothing more...

I have used pclinuxos extensively, I still have my account there, which I had before opening one for mxlinux because of avlinux, because avlinux was kinda a done for you av distro, a rt kernel, which seems not as important as before and currently @AVLinux moksha desktop variant is a potential keeper but it looks and feels it has not been stress tested currently, I just encountered kinda of a bug where if you log out, and log back in, all your desktop settings would reset... ...it is expected I report the bug which I fnd hard to do, since I have a lot on my plate, qsi requirement + other moksha quirks that needs to be reported so it can be smoothed out...

mxdevs are specs though, even the moksha devs since we can see the juicy fruits of their works but each time I remember that I didn't need to get myself to report a bug after tinkering myself on pclinuxos, I lament

and I tinker a lot, to get things to work for me, with my workflows...

@asqwerth