I think I finally have a flavor of Linux and much moar
This post is to wrap up several threads left hanging in other posts and my latest adventures in Linux-landia.
TLDR: I am now in the lounge1 with the other lizards and have almost everything I need to kick Windows to the curb.
In post 13, I was complaining about not being able to program my mouse buttons, solved mostly now.
In post 14 I had complained about the upgrade issues I had with Fedora 34, and in post 15 my new love of PCLinuxOS. Well, PCLinuxOS was just a May-June romance and I have moved on after a few issues and much testing.
In post 17 I had started my "adventure" to un-raid my desktop, I am now un-raided, some faster some slower but working better for my daily usage.
But having to start in the current time and work backwards may seem wrong it will make more sense because the oldest post (13, mouse issue) was the latest to be fixed mostly solved.
Still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild,
a million dead-end streets distros and
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
Changes - David Bowie, apologies for the lyric change but it needs to fit.
So, maybe the easiest way to find a distro is also the hardest to find the best one, at least for my needs. Rather, all of the needs of the household. We have five computers in the house that are running a mix of OS's due to needs and uses that all need to have an OS that will work for them, most are the same but a few are unique.
Desktop 1: (Mine) Dual boot Win10 and now OpenSuse Tumbleweed
Desktop 2: (Wife's) Win 10, will most likely be OpenSuse Tumbleweed in the somewhat distant future, she still needs Win for a few things until I can find a good replacement
Notebook 1: OpenSuse Tumbleweed, was Fedora (2016-2021) 24/25/../33/34/borked
Notebook 2: Fedora 33
TV: Fedora 33
What is needed to run on them collectively:
KDE
Libre Office
Firefox
Thunderbird
VSCode
Chromium
Chrome
Brave
Ghostwriter
Knetwalk
Swell-foop
AisleRiot Solitare
PySol solitare
OpenArena
Hexchat
Pidgin
VirtualBox
GNUCash
DropBox
Kodi
Also, not a big fan of Snaps or Flatpaks, they usually work well but I have had issues from not working to manual updating required.
A quick list of what I tried and why it was not chosen.
MX Linux - Old software in repo, by many versions EndeavourOS - as they put it, "A terminal-centric distro" Salient - No software GUI, install/remove all CLI Artix - No software GUI, install/remove all CLI FreeBSD - Not baking a cake Manjaro - A very close second, but there were issues with Kodi and OpenArena and the only way to get VSCode was a Snap.
There were probably a few others I missed in the beginning of my search. The main change I was looking for was a rolling release vs fixed release and reasonably current software that is updated in a week or less from release.
One thing that has repeated itself is most every time I switch distros is is usually because of a big upgrade/update issue. I don't remember every flavor I have used but I can tell you about some of the history.
Debian Ubuntu Kbuntu Arch/Gentoo Linux Mint (WiFi issue) Fedora (Two borked upgrades) PCLinuxOS (Software issues) OpenSuse
With my May-June romance of PCLinuxOS software availability wound up being the the demise.
Installing Software PCLinuxOSHelp Knowledge Base
Installing software using the PCLinuxOS repository Using Synaptic Package Manager
The recommended way of installing additional software is to install from the official PCLinuxOS repository. This has the advantage that the software has been built and tested to be compatible with PCLinuxOS and also will ensure that any additional packages (dependencies) required by the software will automatically be installed.
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Warning! Installing apps that aren't in the repository is not a good idea if you are new to Linux
~~
The other "approved" options are AppImage and Flatpak. While other distro's have included one or both of these options as part of their software installer, PCLinuxOS has not. This causes two things to happen. Updates for the provider (AppImage and Flatpak) are done manually as are the program updates as opposed to through the normal updating process.
What about just installing via RPM like other do?
If the RPM has no dependencies or the dependencies it has can be found in the PCLinuxOS repository then the RPM should install successfully. RPMs built for other distributions might not install due to missing dependencies or different naming conventions in which case you will need to find an alternative method to get the application installed
So, what is the issue?
VSCode and Ghostwriter are only available via Flatpak in PCLinuxOS and I have had issue which have started this searching. I had installed both programs as Flatpaks after installing Flatpak. as the RPM package I downloaded would not install. Then I got a notice saying a new version of VSCode was available from within VSCode. Went to do the update but had to first update Flatpak and then VSCode. The first update went fine but the second (VSCode) failed for some unknown reason. No error, no message other than "all should be well" that the update had finished. But yet it failed to launch. After trying to uninstall and reinstall a few times it was still dead.
Thus began a search for an IDE that would live in both worlds and would work for me. After looking and trying a few different ones, I wound up giving a good try with Kate. I have already tried many others in the past, like Geany, KDevelop, Sublime, Vim and even a serious six month trial of Emacs but all have left me wanting for something. It seems that Kate also left me wanting but I was able to figure it out rather quickly. IntelliSense. Having used it for so long both in VSCode and Visual Studio it has changed the way I program.
Anyway, the other program I use semi-regularly is Ghostwriter, in fact I am using it right now. I tried a different markdown editor I found in the PCLinuxOS repo but it seemed lacking.
As far as the un-raiding, it has been completed. Nowhere how I originally envisioned it but with clean installs, Windows on one hard drive and OpenSuse on a different hard drive. This might sound really old school but it is the cleanest way I know to not have an issue with one take out the other. Yes, telling the BIOS what to boot from is a pain but at this point very little pain compared to a dead computer that I need for work and having less than two hours to make it functional. The default boot is OpenSuse and I should only need to get into Windows rarely, maybe only for the updates.
About the mouse buttons, I finally found an app that would install and run, GitHub libratbag/piper. After a pretty straight forward install (it's in the repo!) and a little reading of the wiki I was able to get it to work. Mostly. I am doing a bit of logging to see if I can find out what is happening. Basically, I can setup my buttons, apply the changes and it works. A little later it seems to be crashed and the buttons don't work as re-programmed. Restarting will sometimes bring the settings back, sometimes not, but a reload fixes it for a while. I will be trying it on my notebook later today and see if it does the same thing, that might eliminate a hardware difference. As a note, post install you need to add your user to the "Games" group to get it to talk to the dbus.
The notebook had the same issues, still digging deeper for a permanant solution.
That pretty much wraps it up for now, more things later.
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A group of lizards is called a lounge. ↩