Murph Posted July 11, 2017 Share Posted July 11, 2017 I am familiar with Mint Linux, and I am running it on my little linux laptop. I know that Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. Debian is alleged by many to be the "hackers" linux, the one the real L33T H@x0Rs use to "roll their own". Ok, great, whoopee. I like that Mint just works for the most part. Now I know that Fedora is based on Red Hat, and is pretty stable. I despise Ubuntu due to their weird desktop; Unity which just sucks IMHO (I like Cinnamon and XFCE) and because you can't get the Unity desktop to work right.... Now OpenSuSE which is a decendent of the old SuSE linux, which was pretty good in the day, I don't know a whole lot about it. So my big question, does Red Hat/Fedora have an installer as elegant, and functional as the Debian "apt-get"? Does Fedora make installing software easy, or is it dependency hell (a problem with the earlier Linux distributions). Discuss, I look forward to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivanhoe Posted July 11, 2017 Share Posted July 11, 2017 "The beauty of Ubuntu is that there are so many to choose from." (Old Unix joke, I am showing my age...) https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives If I had to use a *buntu, it would be Lubuntu. Traditional desktop, no flaming/shaking/transparent windows etc. I wouldn't necessarily call Debian a "hacker's Linux," I would say its for people who are trying to get work done rather than play around. The concept of Arch Linux is closer to a developer's flavor, due to the whole "compile your own kernel" routine. As for package managers, RH used to be yum front-ending for rpm, now apparently dnf (which I haven't messed with). At least as of a few years ago, the trend has been towards being a bit agnostic for the GUI side of package managers. Back when I was messing with Linux a lot more, yum seemed sufficient to me. As for dependency hell, IMHO its never going away in the desktop arena. For illogical reasons, Apple, Microsoft, and Google are OK with the concept of a unitary app in the pocket mobile device, but not on a real computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 11, 2017 Share Posted July 11, 2017 I lived in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS world for a LONG time. I still work extensively in it. In general, you can do the same thing with both. Where the Debian family has apt-get, the Red Hat family has yum, etc. My problem with the Red Hat line is this: You have to pay for Red Hat Enterprise, or get the CentOS free version of Enterprise - often several months or more out of date. Or you go for Fedora and are on the "bleeding edge" - and pay the upgrade/reinstall game every six months. To give you an idea, a few years ago we built some core services on a Fedora 14 box (I knew it was dumb at the time, but you win some battles, and lose other battles). Current state of the world is Fedora 26. Things we have developed since that deployment no longer work on such an old distro, and there is no good upgrade/update path to get that FC14 box to FC16. We can't have it out of production that long; and it is too integrated into the environment that it can't be readily migrated to a newer system (the hardware at this point is old as well). While a similar vintage deployment on Long Term Service distros have been more easily updated, and don't run out of support quickly. They may not be *as* up to date, but they are more stable. For production these days I insist upon a long term service distro, be it Ubuntu LTSB, or CentOS. I don't really care which. For home users... I have tried using all manner of distros for people of varying levels of computer skill. The only one I would give to my mother would be Mint, with the Cinnamon desktop. By and large, it just works. Yes, all the same dials are there, all the same under-the-hood configurations are there and can be set however a power user wants them - but to the basic user, it just works. It's arguably more intuitive than moving to Windows 10, and is a lighter weight OS (much less disk space, lighter RAM footprint, and the CPU isn't touched unless I'm actually DOING something). If I had to put my mother on a computer that I support remotely today, I would very likely put her on Mint. When push comes to shove (seeing as my father is currently managing all their IT support, and has been doing so since the 70s when we got our first computer) some day, I'll make the call based on the current state of the world. There's lots of opportunity for things to change. Dependency hell will be with us - in fact, as one who delves deep into things, it exists in Windows land and Mac world too. The user is just sheltered from it for the most part - or you wind up taking it to the experts who figure out how to resolve it. I believe, Murph, you are dealing with that on the other thread right now :-D It is the nature of computers - it's just most people have gotten used to the Windows or Mac quirks; and the Linux quirks are "new" (to them). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivanhoe Posted July 11, 2017 Share Posted July 11, 2017 My problem with the Red Hat line is this: You have to pay for Red Hat Enterprise, or get the CentOS free version of Enterprise - often several months or more out of date. Or you go for Fedora and are on the "bleeding edge" - and pay the upgrade/reinstall game every six months.You mean the free software economic model isn't the best thing evar for all peoples? For home users... I have tried using all manner of distros for people of varying levels of computer skill. The only one I would give to my mother would be Mint, with the Cinnamon desktop. By and large, it just works. Yes, all the same dials are there, all the same under-the-hood configurations are there and can be set however a power user wants them - but to the basic user, it just works. It's arguably more intuitive than moving to Windows 10, and is a lighter weight OS (much less disk space, lighter RAM footprint, and the CPU isn't touched unless I'm actually DOING something).Now that we are fully immersed in the Win10 desktop at work, with all its foibles, I don't see MS maintaining their chokehold on the desktop much longer. Too quirky in the admin's UI, too much oddware, etc. Despite Millennials' addiction to the phone, the desktop/laptop is still where the majority of the world's economy enters the copper. Win10 seems to be costing my employer more labor hours per seat than Win7, even two years after rollout. I've been trying to get up to speed on the whole SSL/TLS trust-on-first-MITM-attack debacle, and have read a few things about cert pinning, and surprise surprise Win10 does some cert pinning to enable secure telemetry of Win10's built-in spyware. MS could have spent those developer hours doing something more intelligent than telemetry, and then SSL tunneling telemetry data back to Coruscant. Dependency hell will be with us - in fact, as one who delves deep into things, it exists in Windows land and Mac world too. The user is just sheltered from it for the most part - or you wind up taking it to the experts who figure out how to resolve it. I believe, Murph, you are dealing with that on the other thread right now :-D It is the nature of computers - it's just most people have gotten used to the Windows or Mac quirks; and the Linux quirks are "new" (to them).I ran into a classic dependency hell scenario with Samsung's Smart Switch Windows application for my new Galaxy phone. Apparently written during the Eisenhower administration, it needs dynamic linking to .NET 2.0 or something. I finally got it to launch, but of course its not talking to the USB controller... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 11, 2017 Share Posted July 11, 2017 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 12, 2017 Author Share Posted July 12, 2017 I had heard that Fedora has no long term release version, and that you are on a constant uninstall and re-install cycle every six months. Mint 18 seems just sooooo stable compared to Winders right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 12, 2017 Share Posted July 12, 2017 You are correct. If you want a long term release in the Red Hat family you have to go CentOS or RHEL. As someone who works professionally, and extensively, with Windows and Linux: Mint *is* so stable compared to Windows. It isn't even funny. Windows requires so very much attention from me *because* it is so unstable and unreliable. Linux.... I hardly even touch because "it just works." Which is why at home, where I don't want the drama with the computers, where I don't want to be troubleshooting and debugging... I use Mint. It just works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivanhoe Posted July 12, 2017 Share Posted July 12, 2017 The other thing about Mint that makes it so appealing is that both the user community and developer community are very douche-free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 12, 2017 Share Posted July 12, 2017 The other thing about Mint that makes it so appealing is that both the user community and developer community are very douche-free.For now. The douches *always* come fill in any douche vacuum. And if none come from elsewhere, douches sprout to fill the void. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TTK Ciar Posted July 12, 2017 Share Posted July 12, 2017 (edited) I am almost entirely in agreement with CT96. Mint is what I recommend to friends who are using Windows but want to try a Linux distribution. His characterization of the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora constellation is spot-on, as well. "Dependency hell" is a straightforward and entirely unavoidable consequence of the new philosophy of release management, which is that there is no real target platform or well-specified environment anymore. Operating systems are relatively amorphous entities, with all of their components in flux, and dependencies following the whim of upstream developers. To avoid dependency hell, you will need to use one of the distributions which follow a more classic approach to release engineering. These define a platform with specific versions of libraries and other components, and in order for an application to work on that platform it needs to become reconciled with the resources provided by the platform. Slackware is one such distribution. A Slackware installation is fairly "heavy" -- it installs a lot of packages. Instead of a "rolling release", Slackware issues periodic stable releases, with very few changes between releases (and those only to patch newly-discovered bugs and security vulnerabilities). To get an idea of how frequently and what kinds of updates it gets, the ChangeLog enumerates them by date: ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware64-14.2/ChangeLog.txt The main advantages of this are:the packages have all been extensively tested together, so there is a very high level of confidence that they will interoperate correctly, andwhen installing a third-party application, most or all of its dependencies are usually already installed as part of the standard environment, and thus there is less room for dependencies to contradict (effectively avoiding dependency hell).The disadvantages are:it's a very heavy base install, which can be the kiss of death for things like VM instances,packages for the most recent stable release will often be older than packages for "rolling release" distributions -- if there is a year between releases, then by the time a new release comes out you will have been working with year-old (or older) packages, andthere are a lot fewer third-party packages available for Slackware than there are for Debian/RHEL derivatives (by about a factor of five).Obviously Slackware isn't for everyone, but if these advantages appeal to you and the disadvantages don't seem so bad, it makes a good desktop (it ships with XFCE and KDE plus a half-dozen WMs) and an extremely stable server. If you want the greatest selection of completely up-to-date applications and codecs, go with Mint. Edited July 12, 2017 by TTK Ciar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 12, 2017 Author Share Posted July 12, 2017 That is so true, the Mint community is so refreshingly free of the "L33t H@x0rZ" that infest so much of the Linux world. They are incredibly helpful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nabqrules Posted July 13, 2017 Share Posted July 13, 2017 What surprised me recently with Mint was installing it on my Win7 Based Tablet. I was expecting to have to track down touchscreen/pen digitizer drivers and sacrifice a small lamb in order to get all the hardware working. Nope, every device was found and working properly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivanhoe Posted July 13, 2017 Share Posted July 13, 2017 The other thing about Mint that makes it so appealing is that both the user community and developer community are very douche-free.For now. The douches *always* come fill in any douche vacuum. And if none come from elsewhere, douches sprout to fill the void. Hmm, you seem to be implying there's a fourth conservation law; mass, momentum, energy, and d-baggery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 13, 2017 Author Share Posted July 13, 2017 Well there is. I call it Bozium after Bozo the clown. When the Bozium level is really high, people do really stupid things. The other thing about Mint that makes it so appealing is that both the user community and developer community are very douche-free.For now. The douches *always* come fill in any douche vacuum. And if none come from elsewhere, douches sprout to fill the void. Hmm, you seem to be implying there's a fourth conservation law; mass, momentum, energy, and d-baggery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 13, 2017 Share Posted July 13, 2017 The other thing about Mint that makes it so appealing is that both the user community and developer community are very douche-free.For now. The douches *always* come fill in any douche vacuum. And if none come from elsewhere, douches sprout to fill the void. Hmm, you seem to be implying there's a fourth conservation law; mass, momentum, energy, and d-baggery. I can't speak authoritatively on other areas of life (though it appears to be the case there too); in any given technical field nature abhors a douchebag vacuum. If you are working on a technical project and don't know who the douchebag is, I have news for you......... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 13, 2017 Author Share Posted July 13, 2017 Man, Slackware, I have not heard that name in years. It was one of the original "hard core" linux distros. I remember back in the day it seemed the Linux world was either the elite users of Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, or SuSE. And the Slack/Debian crew looked down on the other two as too Windows like and something only Windows users would consider a distro. If you were L33t, you "rolled your own" Slackware or Debian set up. I will be the first to admit it, I am a Linux wimp, and like Mint and how easy it is to work with. I am almost entirely in agreement with CT96. Mint is what I recommend to friends who are using Windows but want to try a Linux distribution. His characterization of the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora constellation is spot-on, as well."Dependency hell" is a straightforward and entirely unavoidable consequence of the new philosophy of release management, which is that there is no real target platform or well-specified environment anymore. Operating systems are relatively amorphous entities, with all of their components in flux, and dependencies following the whim of upstream developers.To avoid dependency hell, you will need to use one of the distributions which follow a more classic approach to release engineering. These define a platform with specific versions of libraries and other components, and in order for an application to work on that platform it needs to become reconciled with the resources provided by the platform.Slackware is one such distribution. A Slackware installation is fairly "heavy" -- it installs a lot of packages. Instead of a "rolling release", Slackware issues periodic stable releases, with very few changes between releases (and those only to patch newly-discovered bugs and security vulnerabilities). To get an idea of how frequently and what kinds of updates it gets, the ChangeLog enumerates them by date: ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware64-14.2/ChangeLog.txtThe main advantages of this are:the packages have all been extensively tested together, so there is a very high level of confidence that they will interoperate correctly, andwhen installing a third-party application, most or all of its dependencies are usually already installed as part of the standard environment, and thus there is less room for dependencies to contradict (effectively avoiding dependency hell).The disadvantages are:it's a very heavy base install, which can be the kiss of death for things like VM instances,packages for the most recent stable release will often be older than packages for "rolling release" distributions -- if there is a year between releases, then by the time a new release comes out you will have been working with year-old (or older) packages, andthere are a lot fewer third-party packages available for Slackware than there are for Debian/RHEL derivatives (by about a factor of five).Obviously Slackware isn't for everyone, but if these advantages appeal to you and the disadvantages don't seem so bad, it makes a good desktop (it ships with XFCE and KDE plus a half-dozen WMs) and an extremely stable server.If you want the greatest selection of completely up-to-date applications and codecs, go with Mint. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 13, 2017 Share Posted July 13, 2017 I played with Slackware WAY back in the day. I later played with Gentoo. I've lived in Red Hat and Debian. Mint just works. Game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ivanhoe Posted July 14, 2017 Share Posted July 14, 2017 Wow, Slackware. Here's my new mental image of TTK and CT96; Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 14, 2017 Author Share Posted July 14, 2017 LOL! That is funny. Wow, Slackware. Here's my new mental image of TTK and CT96; Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 14, 2017 Author Share Posted July 14, 2017 You are so right, Mint just works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CT96 Posted July 14, 2017 Share Posted July 14, 2017 Wow, Slackware. Here's my new mental image of TTK and CT96; Well, I do rock an epic beard... and I am a condescending "unix user" - referencing a Dilbert strip from when I was playing with Slackware: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TTK Ciar Posted July 14, 2017 Share Posted July 14, 2017 (edited) Haha :-D an old friend shot me that exact Dilbert strip last week :-) and to be fair I deserved it. On a more serious note, Slackware has evolved quite a bit since then. Its worst parts have gotten better, and its best parts have gotten better as well. There's a very lively, friendly support community http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/, and a lot less snootiness. It's still somewhat "hands-on" in some ways, but installation is a breeze and once installed you can get to work immediately without further configuration. (Mostly. If your wireless is encrypted you'll need to poke a few clicks at NetworkManager, and using a printer requires some CUPS configuration. But that's true of other distros as well.) All of my systems (desktops, laptops, servers) are Slackware, except for my phone which is Android. I'm quite happy with it. But again, it's not for everyone. Mint is the answer for normal desktop use. Edited July 14, 2017 by TTK Ciar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 14, 2017 Author Share Posted July 14, 2017 I took the mint laptop with me on vacation as my main machine (I have the mac only for movies), and I would really like to somehow get Mint running on the desktop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Murph Posted July 21, 2017 Author Share Posted July 21, 2017 Anyone using Fedora or one of its derivatives? I really don't like that there is no long term release version of Fedora for me to try out. As a buddy told me, Mint just works, and he is a hard core windows user who I converted to try MInt. He had a cryptominer system built and is going to run Mint. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Avalon12 Posted July 26, 2017 Share Posted July 26, 2017 Stopped using Fedora after 17, let my wife use it as her daily for a long time. She ditched it because no netflix. Oh well. She swaped to Mint aferwards. After that lappy died she's been using Win 8.1 U3. Need to get her back on a proper distro. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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