Linux What is this Linux thing?

Think of sudo as right click run as admin in Windows

You have made yourself an admin but that doesn't make everything magically start as an admin

 

Seeing as the must-have Linux software thread has been dead for over 10 years, I'll just post this here...

For any Linux users who want to experiment a bit I highly recommend giving the i3 window manager a try. It's a tiling window manager, which means you don't have floating windows (by default) but they are automatically arranged to fit the full screen.
At first it looks more complicated than it is, but after using it for a bit over a month and configuring it for my needs it feels very comfortable, and switching back to Cinnamon or using Windows 7 feels sluggish now.
- It's very quick in operation once you get the hang of it
- Minimalistic look by default
- Very (easily!) customizable
- Very space-efficient (important for the relatively small screen of my Thinkpad X220T)
- Ultra light-weight, barely puts a dent in the battery life (unlike Cinnamon...).

It's very basic though, just the bare necessities.
You don't even get a task bar with a 'programs' menu or anything (though I guess you could just start up the task bar of another WM if you want to create an unholy mix of the two... ), so you have to start programs with the command line through the built in launcher. Just [win]+D fire [enter], and firefox is running.
Any special keys you'll have to bind yourself, including volume buttons but also the power button! I have mine set up to display a small dialog with the standard sleep/shutdown/logout/etc. some guy made (can link to it should anyone be interested).

So if you don't mind using keyboard shortcuts (the few essential combinations are intuitive and easy to memorize) and taking a few hours to fully configure it to your liking I highly recommend it.

Here's a youtube video with a short, basic demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4

 

I've been meaning to give I3 a go since I first heard about it. I'll get around to it eventually.

 

some things I like so far are control alt F2, F3 this switches to terminals (full black screen terminal view) which are separate.

Linux community saying the Windows key is called "the super key, some times known as windows key".

 

I revisit ubuntu every few years and then go back to windows. As a gamer it's not quite there just yet. That and I hate unity!

However I spent a few hours over the weekend setting a headless debian download box. Got my nas drives mapped and am now able to use the latest version of nzbget etc. It was fun messing about in a cli once again, .

It takes a little paitence and my advice to anyone is get a free hypervisor like vmware player / virtual box and have a play, it's tremendously satisfying when you get something working.

 

My netbook's windows partition failed on me last September (just as I needed it to set up stuff for a demonstration, doh) so I ended up just throwing Debian on it as finding and burning a Vista 32bit repair disk was just going to be a PITA. It wasn't too bad getting into things as I'd been mucking around a bit with the Pi a bit.

Now I use CentOS at work and have Ubuntu as a HTPC/NAS box (would have gone for OSMC/OpenELEC but I've had pain with those in the past, and everything just works on Ubuntu).

Biggest gripe is that GNOME is crap, and that default settings managers for all distros feel a little sparse.

 

Really informative thread

 

Feel free to shoot me if what I'm about to ask has already been answered but it's too early in the morning, too late in the week, and after having spent the last few days reading the ol' grey matter is taking a break.

So having spent a week building a new system, installing Linux on it, and having a play around i thought I'd garner the opinions of you learned folks on a few things, namely Desktop Environments, release types, and anything else you think maybe pertinent to someone switching to Linux in 2019-20 (for those of us who refuse to use Windows 10).

I'll start out by saying I've given Mint cinnamon a try and i only needed to reinstall it once (i accidentally changed the owner of / instead of an old NTFS partition) and although I'm liking how far Linux has come since last time i tried it (Slackware in the noughties) i don't think Mint is really for me.

My biggest gripes about it is it's lack of easy customization, yes it has some and yes i could dig into files to get things just right but come new release time those config files would be upgraded so i could lose any changes I've made. Also with it being based on Ubuntu LTS some of the out of the box support for new hardware can be a bit sketchy (B450/X570 & Ryzen 2/3 wasn't a thing when Ubuntu 18.04 was released).

So having got that preamble out of the way I'd really appreciate your thoughts on point releases vs rolling and also DE's, I'm currently favoring a rolling release probably Manjaro with either KDE or Xfce, thoughts?

 

And @Gareth Halfacree in 3...2...1...

 

Never used KDE either, but have used a couple of different distros with different UI setups.
Fedora was probably my favourite, found Mint to be very Windows-esque, Ubuntu (with and without Unity) and then CentOS.

What kind of customisations are you wanting to do?
I've got an issue at the moment where the newest ubuntu kernel upgrades breaks my 2080ti install so I have to manually select an older one on startup.

 

@Gareth Halfacree: Yea i suspected your requirements would be quiet different than mine so you may not be best placed to advise, no disrespect intended.

For you i guess stability is right up there as you depend on your machine to put food on the table whereas i don't so i can live with things breaking, although having had a read around it seems Manjaro's stable channel isn't to bad as it's a month or two behind the bleeding edge.

Xfce being lightweight was one of the things i picked up on also, although I'm in two minds if that's all that important what with modern hardware and I'm assuming memory management, put the extra CPU cores and GPU power to good use.

I don't really know TBH, i can tell you what my 'oh bum' moments have been with Mint and things i wish were simpler to do, things like removing the logout/lock screen buttons from the menu, changing a single mouse pointer icon, title bar colour, size or whatever instead of the take everything approach of themes, switching display output&sound at the same time, and other little niggles.

Don't get me wrong, I'd recommend Mint to anyone who wanted a turnkey solution, a Windows-esque install and forget it type experience, however for me everything beyond Windows 95/8 was to restrictive and hand-holdy for my liking and Mint, beyond digging around in config files, is sort of the same. It's why I'm leaning towards KDE as I've read it's the most configurable DE with Xfce coming in a close second.

EDIT: Just tried out Manjaro KDE and boy-o-boy is it configrable, you can add new menus and a plethora of widgets to them and unless I've been doing something wrong with Mint its reporting on hardware is much better, lmsensor seemed to work as for the first time i discovered what my idle temps were.

 

Fully customizable, I'd say KDE; customizable with a few jumps (extensions and tweaks), GNOME; cinnamon, LXDE, Xfce, that other one, I haven't used or haven't used in a long time so I can't speak for those.

 

This has been just a fact of linux life that none of the cheerleaders happen to mention when telling you how customizable your experience can be. these billion n one sub distros are more or less a big pile of custom edited files, and if they don't offer something CLOSE to what you are looking to get out of it, direct out of the box then it may be wise to look elsewhere rather than spend your life editing things that will be changed

me personally I use MX linux which comes default with xfce, I have prefered xfce ever singe gnome2 died, its simple and doesnt try too hard like most modern DM's

 

I use Ubuntu (GNOME) with the Unite extension to make it more like Unity was, and a few other extensions to make it work the way I like.

 

If it's anything like Manjaro's Xfce then it won't be for me, i just tried that on a live USB and really struggled with it, same sort of 'Oh i can't do that' feeling, so far KDE is the winner.

 

One of the primary reasons I use Mint so much is because I find the default setup quite usable, so it is very much a "fire and forget" install. I spend longer getting CUDA set up than the rest of the OS...

I keep wanting to like KDE, but every time I try it, something crops up that drives me utterly to distraction and I end up either a) giving up and using something else or b) wasting hours tweaking things. I think the last time I used KDE without messing around with it was RedHat 7. Not RedHat Enterprise Linux 7... RedHat 7. So... 2006 or so...? Gnome Shell is horrible, though; it's the default on modern RedHat/CentOS, which is widely used on work systems, and I end up doing everything in a commandline in a non-GUI shell because it drives me up the wall so much...!

Manjaro being better than Mint at hardware reporting doesn't surprise me; it'll be using a much newer kernel, upon which most of this stuff depends. The default Mint kernel is 4.15, while the last time I was playing with Manjaro the default kernel was 5.0.

Manjaro does love its black themes. It used to be shades of grey, which I found much more doable.

I've been playing with OpenSuSE Tumbleweed recently because RedHat distros seem to deal with software RAID better than Debian ones, for reasons I have yet to figure out.

...

The only time I've had Manjaro break in a terminal fashion was when I hadn't booted a laptop up for about 9 months... the sheer volume of updates broke just about everything...

 

I get what you mean about wasting hours tweaking things but i love doing that, I'm currently messing around with lm-sensors and trying to get it to play nice with X570 and Zen2, although I've got the temperature to PWM association working for the CPU & GPU i don't think kernel 5.2 or hwmon supports any of the Ryzen chips.

 

Proper support should be in 5.3, which is Ubuntu 19.10's default kernel. It should also replace 5.0 as the HWE kernel on 18.04. 5.4 is just around the corner as well.