121–130 of 329 posts
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Doesn't Mint stay in-sync with the latest Ubuntu versions? It's literally Ubuntu with Cinnamon/MATE and different branding. Everything version-wise should be identical with Ubuntu, since it uses the same packages.
Think it's pegged at least to the LTS ones so when I was on Rosa it was still 14.04 when 15.11(?)/16.xx were already out
Regarding your important points: - All modern distros can run virtualized systems. You just need to install your favorite virtualization software (VirtualBox, qemu, VMWare, etc.). - No distros have good battery management, at least not really on par with Windows, and certainly not on par with macOS. This is just the unfortunate state of affairs with the Linux kernel. Some of it is due to lack of focus on improving th…
I've owned laptops in the past that actually get better battery life under linux than windows. My current laptop is a $189 Acer Cloudbook. It gets ~ 10hours with the backlight set low. I accidentally left it on overnight (backlight off, no web browser) and it was at 20% > 10 hours later. The only power tuning is "sudo powertop --auto-tune". I run evilwm (so, not some heavy desktop environment like unity).
(Web browsing is painfully slow without noscript; I use it for light C++ and VNC)
Xubuntu is my daily driver. Fast and light, rock solid, many packages available, a lot of tutorials and documents on the 'net, and ltd is guaranteed to receive updates for three years on desktop and five years on servers (well, on server is Ubuntu). Just works and doesn't get in the way. If I need something else, qemu-kvm is awesome or docker.
* Chromium tends to be unresponsive after waking up from hibernation.
* VLC tends to hang and freeze.
That's not the stability and simplicity that I originally moved to Xubuntu for.
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I agree Arch and rolling release is great to avoid breaks. Paradoxically, people are afraid of it for the opposite reason. In 9 years running Arch, I have never ever experienced the need to downgrade my kernel after an upgrade, and only once had to downgrade a package (ghc). I key point was always to run hardware that needs no drivers aside from those coming with vanilla kernels. Quite on the contrary, I love getting…
> I agree Arch and rolling release is great to avoid breaks. Paradoxically, people are afraid of it for the opposite reason. > I am considering to migrate to NixOS or GuixSD (currently toying with 2 virtual machines). I find Arch to be a great imperative distro, but functional ones are simply superior. Declarative system configuration, declarative package recipes, and the ability to install multiple versions of the s…
GuixSD is a GNU version of NixOS, running on Guix package manager. Extremely neat, as it's written in Guile Scheme. They have most basic things packaged. Also, derivations are compatible with Nix ones, so you can use any Nix channel.
Arch Linux If you want a developer laptop you want modern hardware. If you want to run modern hardware you want a modern kernel. In your case (since your hardware is a little old), you might not care about support from recent kernels but still want modern compilers, toolchains, etc available to you. You also probably don't want it to break every 6 months when you have to system upgrade. Rolling release is the best.
Arch is worth it for the AUR for sure. If you don't want to deal with setting up Linux from scratch you can go with Antergos. It's basically just an installer for Arch.
Installers are brittle. They don't always fit every case you give to them. That's why vanilla Arch lacks an installer, because chances are you're smarter than a shell script. No matter what crazy, inane setup you might be facing, Arch can tolerate it. Specifically because it doesn't have an installer.
(I once dual-booted Mac OS and Arch, with a shared /home partition. It totally worked and was a lot of fun.)
With vanilla Arch, since you're the one who brought up the system, you know exactly what you put in and why. If something breaks, you are better able to fix it. Because it's no longer magic. You did it yourself, after all. You can at least identify the parts of the system that are wrong, if not being able to outright fix them.
And since setting up the system means learning how to use the wiki and IRC channel, for most people, you already know the support network to fall back on.
Arch's installation procedure doesn't just prepare the computer for booting Arch. It also prepares you for using Arch.
If you're using Antergos et al. there's no shame in it, but you're seriously missing out on a very interesting experience.
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I love cinnamon so that's a big plus on Mint but I didn't love being stuck on an old version of Ubuntu and all the associated core packages/drivers. I had some hardware issues that were fixed by using a more recent version (now on Fedora). I'm by no means a seasoned Linux veteran though so just explaining that YMMV.
Doesn't Mint stay in-sync with the latest Ubuntu versions? It's literally Ubuntu with Cinnamon/MATE and different branding. Everything version-wise should be identical with Ubuntu, since it uses the same packages.
They do have another version that is based on Debian directly, but I have never used it so can't say much about its upgrade paths.
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Arch is worth it for the AUR for sure. If you don't want to deal with setting up Linux from scratch you can go with Antergos. It's basically just an installer for Arch.
I've found https://arch-anywhere.org to be perfect for that.
* The huge community would fix all the issues quickly.
* Up to date set of "trusted" libraries and language runtimes.
I usually test distros in a VM instead of installing them on bare metal. So far I have not found a distro specifically tailored to development though, and the question really should be what tools are best for development?
In that case, Emacs/Vim[2] would be a good start, and being able to develop without an Internet connection helps harden your coding ability too as you're not so reliant on the solutions of others. Go for one day of coding without Stack Overflow/Google and see how you fare.
[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1430164/differences-betw...