I Believe I'm Celebrating My 9 Year Anniversary With Linux

[Snort McDork]

I'm pretty sure it was 2016 when I switched to this OS.The bad news there are a lot of things I still don't understand or are confused on. This covers a lot of things from Browsers to Security issues. And of course things with Gimp. The good news is I have not had any real "major" issues like I did with Win-Doze. But all I really prefer is a smooth operating system with speed and efficiency, with a dash of user friendliness. Overall, I've been fairly happy with running this OS as I don't do much other than watch YouTube or edit images on Gimp. The reason I'm bringing this up has to do with seeing a recent video on people who have had problems with scammers accessing their system-likely through Win-Doze. I have not had that problem of getting pop-ups telling me I have a security issue and should call an 800 number. So am I to assume that Linux is safer for those kinds of problems? The other thing is I just read the Security thread for Firefox-which I use. I just updated this thing Tuesday, and I now see I have another update for Firefox. Does this cover the alert mentioned in the Security thread?

 

[CaffeineAddict]

congrats!
but you didn't say which distro are you using or were using so far?

 

[KGIII]

So am I to assume that Linux is safer for those kinds of problems?

You should be fine.

The other thing is I just read the Security thread for Firefox-which I use. I just updated this thing Tuesday, and I now see I have another update for Firefox.

Be sure to read the two related threads and the links in those threads. After that, you can decide if you want to move forward with Firefox - but you certainly should use an up to date browser regardless of your choice.

 

[Brickwizard]

 

[Snort McDork]

congrats!
but you didn't say which distro are you using or were using so far?

Sorry.
I started on Mint, and am now on Cinnamon.

 

[Snort McDork]

Just for future reference I like chocolate cake. Especially if it's from Costco.

 

[Deleted member 201381]

Same here! Nine years now. Started with Mint Cinnamon, played with at least twenty since and now right back to Mint Cinnamon as my standard base.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

@Snort McDork
@MinkoIkana
I think what ever distro people started with has profound impact on them long term.

I started with Debian based distro and still using Debian.
It may be due to lazyness to switch and learn or just using what ever you started with for convenience.

 

[Deleted member 201381]

@Snort McDork
@MinkoIkana
I think what ever distro people started with has profound impact on them long term.

I started with Debian based distro and still using Debian.
It may be due to lazyness to switch and learn or just using what ever you started with for convenience.

What I ran into is that because I help so many folks switch over to Mint as a first Distro that for me to also use Mint saves a lot of time with helping them navigate their on own. I can double check my own paths to make sure I am steering them to the right place. I don't have to guess where things "might be" between two different Distros.

 

[Snort McDork]

@Snort McDork
@MinkoIkana
I think what ever distro people started with has profound impact on them long term.

I started with Debian based distro and still using Debian.
It may be due to lazyness to switch and learn or just using what ever you started with for convenience.

When I started on Mint 19.1 I was happy with it. With the slideshow screensaver, I could put several images in a folder and they would play back at a fairly rapid pace-allowing many to be displayed. I could also make note on them as there was a way to click on image and write note. With Cinnamon, won't allow it. And slideshow is way too slow. Have it set to fastest setting. Had this thought Cinnamon would be an improvement, but I'm slightly disappointed.

 

[kc1di]

Congratulations on 9 years

 

[MikeRocor]

@Snort McDork
@MinkoIkana
I think what ever distro people started with has profound impact on them long term.

I started with Debian based distro and still using Debian.
It may be due to lazyness to switch and learn or just using what ever you started with for convenience.

Hmmm...I've never really thought of it that way but I think you're right. I come from the MS DOS and CP/M days when there was a clear progression from the boot ROM to whatever OS was running post-boot. I liked that and I liked learning about the various steps involved - even to the point of hand-disassembling the boot ROM on my old Z80 machine - because hey, you never know when you might want to write an OS from scratch, right?

Then I tried RedHat Linux (Hedwig, I think) and my understanding of the boot process fell apart because

• I had no idea how to see inside of a cpio archive (initrd) and
• because the boot up steps inside the initrd eventually did a chroot, the volume containing the initrd was no longer even mounted and I had no real clue where to find it.

As a Linux noob who wanted to know everything about the boot process, that was extremely off-putting. I now have a much better knowledge of Linux and how the boot process works, but even to this day I have a strong antipathy for distros that work that way.

So, yes, the distro I started with did have a profound impact on me, more than I realized until right now - thanks for prompting me to think about it. It's undoubtedly one of the many reasons I like Tiny Core so much - I can (mostly) wrap my head around it because the initrd doesn't get unloaded - and I've learned not only how to look inside it (and everything from it is still in the root filesystem anyway) but also how to muck with it.

 

[bob466]

It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun with Linux and you'll never have to worry about those many windoze problems ever again.

 

[Snort McDork]

Well I'm happy to see my definition of "Win-Doze" has caught on.
Got it from some dude in Texas a few years ago who I bought my previous machine from.
Found out later he did a horrible job on refurbing it.
Lose wire got caught in processor fan and burned it out.
......and so it goes.

 

[maddymathan]

Congrats....

 

[MikeWalsh]

Just coming up to 11 yrs here.....all bar a few days.

I started with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.....the "Trusty Tahr". This was within days of EOL for Win XP. I kept that going for around 7 months or so while I distro-hopped, then it all fell apart 'cos Canonical, in their wisdom, decided to scrub support for my ancient ATI graphics. Daily crashes and freeze-ups became the order of the day.....and Unity's hardware-acceleration requirements didn't help at all.

I quickly got fed-up with this, and had a wee moan to a few acquaintances on the old Ubuntu Forum. One suggested I take a look at Puppy, given the age of my hardware.....so I did. Tried a few, but all had "issues" of one kind or another, and then I tried out the recently-released Tahrpup 6.0 CE (this was 32-bit; despite having 64-bit hardware, Puppy was at that time yet barely experimenting with 64-bit builds, and everything was still very much "up-in-the-air". Most Pups were still 32-bit, so that was the way I went).

Tahrpup was a revelation! OOTB, absolutely all of my hardware worked correctly, 100%. Puppy has always used standard "huge" kernels - no silly customization, so everything as far back as possible was still supported. I fell for Puppy, there & then. Haven't looked back since.

I think what ever distro people started with has profound impact on them long term.

Yeah, I'd go along with that. I still prefer the 'buntu-based Pups for their sheer convenience. I've experimented with the Slackware-based 'Slacko' Puppies, but at the end of the day, I'm lazy.....the Slacko Pups were lovely to use, but like the parent, OOTB they were very minimal; just enough to get you to a working desktop, a handful of basic Puppy-native 'apps', and that was it. The 'buntu-based UPups came with everything including the kitchen sink, which made life so much simpler.

More recently, I've played around with various Debian-based DPups; again, a very well-stocked cupboard right from the off.

It works for me.....and gives me more in the way of 'play-time', building and messing around with stuff that interests me, rather then spending all my time simply performing 'maintenance' to keep things running smoothly.

Aye, I'm a happy bunny!

Mike.