Linux geeks unite

[Sapphyre]

My home systems these days run Pop!_OS and OpenBSD.

I haven't used Windows or Mac for any personal computing needs in more than a decade.

I ran Gentoo for several years… my experience echoes what others here have mentioned: it ran fantastically for awhile, but portage issues tended to become increasingly numerous and gnarly over time, and eventually it was just less work to reinstall fresh than to untangle the mess.

All in all, OpenBSD has made for the most stable systems over time, out of what I've tried. If it had the software and hardware support of Linux it would likely be my overall favorite.

 

[Koltzi]

If it had the software and hardware support of Linux it would likely be my overall favorite

I'm afraid that if it had the software and hardware support of Linux it would be unstable and prone to breaking... Just like Linux!! xD It's a tradeoff I guess

 

[winterheart01]

I'm afraid that if it had the software and hardware support of Linux it would be unstable and prone to breaking... Just like Linux!! xD It's a tradeoff I guess

We have very stable Red hat enterprise Linux Virtual Machines running in our datacenters for years, of course we do a complete reinstall when moving from version 7 to 8 or so because an in-place upgrade requires extended upgrade support licenses which we don't have (federal government here needs to be sparingly with its budget).
We rarely have problems with those. The windows VM's on the contrary are actually more prone to whatever, our monitoring software reports over 24 errors on windows VM's on a daily basis, ranging from network issues, update errors, rate limit of something exceeded etc (but we do have 280 VM 's in total so that's still a low number)

I can so a sudo dnf upgrade -y without even taking an additional snapshot and get a cup of coffee without issues. (besides , when we actually tried taking snapshots, it would mean 40 snapshots and several TB's of data, this causes an enormous I/O lag when the delta's in VMWare needed to be merged.)

 

[Bigbabybret]

So, lets see, you say Linux. I used UNIX back in the 80's.

Used and worked with SCO through the 2000's and also Linux, HP, ibm, Cray, and Sun over the many years in the field doing security some custom applications and auditing.

Today, I use Ubuntu for web servers and DB servers quite a bit, and use windows servers for just about everything else. Desktop usually windows. And yes I still use vi, even on windows for programming and alike.

Windows has never been fast/easy for Web DB applications and alike. So Linux has the advantage there, and most the places i've worked with dont really have a budget as most of use can fathom, and 99% of the consulting i've done would be on saving money elsewhere being 1000 times the shear dollars. In other words the price of the OS (With some exceptions) on where you run your applications is not really much the costs.

At home have 4 node windows cluster, a standalone win server, couple truenas systems for bare metal. As for the vm's use 4 windows servers, 8 Linux servers. I feel Linux is the best option for web servers/web apps currently, most are Ubuntu. As for desktops are all windows minus the one old osx system. I record music on protools and use the old osx for old projects, all new projects are on protools on windows.

I'll say that Linus got some great traction with his little endeavor, and whilst i'd love to switch to Linux and have the ability to do so minus one big glaring lack of the software base to allow me to easily just use the computer for what it's for.

My thoughts are mostly to use what i need for current music production, real time backups, and web/web enabled/db's and alike. I was going to go vmware for the bare metal, but had the windows server os's available, and the last time i looked at moving to vmware was just not what i wanted to spend my time on, and just kept the windows servers, good/bad was not worth my time.

That said, windows server 2019 (Havent upgraded yet) on the bare metal, and not putting any applications on the actual bare metal os is real stable, and rarely have any issues.

But, when i was a kid, in the 80's, i wish there was as much options as there is today, I remeber one of my first jobs, it was all Unix, dumb terminals and the occasional xwindows in the systems i was working on, now there is way more to play with, and I just want to use the machines as opposed to playing with them.

 

[winterheart01]

I was going to go vmware for the bare metal, but had the windows server os's available, and the last time i looked at moving to vmware was just not what i wanted to spend my time on, and just kept the windows servers, good/bad was not worth my time.

We still have VMWare vCenter on our legacy datacenter (non production), but we switched to Nutanix Prism for the production datacenter a while back, it has its ups and downs, the serial console for example is not very good compared to vmware's or azure's.

off topic: because linux is very performant it's been the primary OS for running Kubernetes clusters on it, Azure Kubernetes mainly uses Ubuntu (and soon their own Linux flavor) but you can run it on most Linux distro's (I'm talking about a full production kubernetes clusters of several vm's , not minikube)
Azure does provide an option to use Windows as OS for a kubernetes node but they discourage it.
And azure itself even runs on Linux because it 's just more stable

(well, amazon and google's datacenters also run on some form of Linux as well)

but that put aside, yes, the more recent versions of windows datacenter (2019 and 2022) are very stable. The problems I spoke about were still with legacy 2008 R2 and 2012 servers which we are phasing out but the business is very uncooperative with planning....

 

[ShippoFox]

I still don't understand why people think Linux is unstable. Maybe they heard about this or that with one distro and think it applies to them all? Or I guess they just don't realize how much Linux has changed over the last ten years. Or people just don't know much about Linux/computers, in general? I don't know, I developed an aversion to microsoft.... so I'm biased, and maybe I just won't "get" how they're thinking

I still don't understand WHY this is happening to people. I have a few computers and it does not happen to me. I even use arch-based distros. I maybe had it happen once, but it was my old laptop (and a more obscure distro), and I hadn't used it in months, so I didn't put much effort into fixing it. it had another distro already installed, so I just started that up. And my old PC is still running the same linux install from like 2+ years ago.

I decided to play with the old laptop. I fixed the problem. Extremely easily. three commands from a pinned topic (not here, a linux forum) copied and pasted into a terminal. But also, it was only because I use Arch based (or arch itself sometimes) distros. It was not a problem that happens on Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

Here is an interesting thing I have noticed. Windows likes to run hot. Literally. It heats the CPU more. (I hope I didn't already say this and am not repeating myself months later). This makes Linux great for laptops

 

[Koltzi]

I still don't understand why people think Linux is unstable.

For me, it's always been a driver problem, so it's not really distro dependent as it's mostly the kernel which takes care of it. I have an AMD GPU and sometimes the computer hangs while I'm rendering and I have to force the shutdown. Also I had a 860 series ssd by Samsung and somehow the driver did not implement trim correctly, so my disk died in a few years without warning.

This makes Linux great for laptops

While it's true that linux is less bloated and easier on the CPU, your statement is not true at all. Battery optimizations are heavily tweaked by producers, who often do not release the same optimizations for Linux. As a result battery life on my laptop is about 6 hours on windows and about 4 hours on Linux. This without even taking into account the trouble with the touchpad gestures and the multifunction keys.

 

[winterheart01]

For me, it's always been a driver problem

this is true, for all 4 computers (desktops) i had in the past, I had to ensure the hardware was not too new so there was a driver for it. For example back in 2007 I had a Linux box with a realtek NIC and of a specific model that was a bit older, because I knew there was a driver for it in the kernel.
Wi-Fi back then was hell, a lot of drivers for that were not existing yet.

Linux always had better drivers for Nvidia cards than ATI/AMD back in those days, but the rule is that brand new hardware (cutting edge) mostly isn't supported yet in Linux.
On an old toshiba laptop I could not get Ubuntu to run properly with the AMD chip, it kept crashing (in 2006 that is) because of a driver conflict with x11.

Today hardware support has improved but still, make sure there's a driver before buying a machine or part.

For a virtual machine this is no problem since it uses generic virtual hardware and requires general drivers, of some that can be installed afterwards (like vmware tools or nutanix guest tools)

 

[ShippoFox]

For me, it's always been a driver problem, so it's not really distro dependent as it's mostly the kernel which takes care of it. I have an AMD GPU and sometimes the computer hangs while I'm rendering and I have to force the shutdown. Also I had a 860 series ssd by Samsung and somehow the driver did not implement trim correctly, so my disk died in a few years without warning.

Weird, AMD drivers are supposed to be good on linux. I guess it wasn't always the case. (my new devices are both amd)

Maybe it's just my luck that changed. I used to have horrible luck with Linux. I wanted to switch long ago, but just couldn't yet. I had problems on several computers and there was no proton yet. But now, I can play just about any game I care about & I have Linux running just fine on four machines. New laptop and new desktop. Old laptop and old desktop.

While it's true that linux is less bloated and easier on the CPU, your statement is not true at all. Battery optimizations are heavily tweaked by producers, who often do not release the same optimizations for Linux. As a result battery life on my laptop is about 6 hours on windows and about 4 hours on Linux. This without even taking into account the trouble with the touchpad gestures and the multifunction keys.

Linux can be great for laptops. It's just up to interpretation, personal preferences, hardware, etc... Your point about batteries isn't wrong. That is a thing to consider if battery life is very important to you. (like it probably is to many people) But I don't care quite that much about battery life, and there's only a tiny difference in battery life vs windows on mine. (installing TLP made it almost the same)

I just don't like how my laptops consistently heat up under windows (70-80c, something like that. I think I saw 90 once for a split second), mostly at boot, while they rarely do that ever running Linux. It's almost the same with desktops, but less of an issue.

I don't know what you mean about touchpad problems and issues with multifunction keys. I have to be lucky about something for once, so I guess I have luck with Linux (even if the luck is kinda recent).

Sorry if I'm being annoying to anyone. I'm just trying to make conversation. And I'm weary of Microsoft. But I know there are good reasons people still need Windows. I just wish it didn't have to be like that. But I still have Windows on my new devices too, even if I rarely ever boot it.

 

[Bigbabybret]

Well,
I see it as a market share type of thing.

Most all business general desktops are shipped with windows already on them, and licensed as well.

So, as a small company you have 100 computers(desktops/laptops)

If you switch to Linux, might not be expensive in the licenses for Linux that the cost is in lost productivity and training.

I remember back training people on windows in like 1990, was a lot of training then.

Now we have most the staff (Especially with older employees) already know windows and the software on windows.

There is a lot of knowledge lost/new training to get all the employees back to 100%

So, even if there is NO problems with runing linux on every system, and having the exact same software for internal systems on linux as well. Still going to have lost time in the little things, like where is the calculator, or how do i take a screen shot, or a myrid of things that are just off enough to make it a question. even if the help desk has the answer at that second, still lost time on user and help desk, not to mention make/get all the help desk up to scratch on linux.

I'm actually an old UNIX, Linux, lot of sco, and hp.

That said, there is just a lot of money need to be spent to switch.

I'd love it if all the people i used to work with were on linux, back in the day (1990) i did work for a place that did govt accounting installs, and they all were Unix based. Wrote plenty of install scripts.

I have linux on one "Desktop" is a rpi i use for web surfing.

Back on topic, I love linux, use *nx tools on windows have about 1/2 my servers on freenas/bsd.

I'm not activly working anymore, sorta stopped when i stopped on another car's hood. But still use for everything at my home/studios for music to lighting.

I'd say that most IT people that can run linux know the benifits ar just not willing to rebuild everything on linux.

Even apple being the largest company give or take, there is tons of software that does not work on them and OSX is very very close to just another flavor of linux. Yet with large userbase, and very very deep pockets cant get a lot of windows software to run on osx native.

Bottom line, most of the internet is *ux systems, most the hardware level os' on modems or switches are all based on linux.

If you took away linux the internet would be dead in the water, it started at arpanet/milnet way back by Al Gore himself, oops maybe not that part.

LLL (Long Live Linux)

 

[Deleted member 73722]

Personly ya all talkin Chinese to me.
I'm still stuck with win 7. Microsoft said that after win 10 they would never make any other OS. Hummm quess that didn't work too well.
I looked into Linux because it was said that it was comparable to win 7. An stableas 7. Boy did I get lost with the options and when talkin with others they started speaking Chinese. I'll put up with the mods I've had to do with win 7's service packs and such. For what I do 7 is still out weighing other options. At least I don't have to deal with apps, an I'm still dealing with softwear.

 

[Koltzi]

Sorry if I'm being annoying to anyone. I'm just trying to make conversation.

Not at all! It's nice chatting about our different experiences with the Penguin [Peter Gunn theme playing in the background].

Personly ya all talkin Chinese to me.

If you hate Windows enough, one day you'll start speaking Chinese too haha

 

[ShippoFox]

Personly ya all talkin Chinese to me.
I'm still stuck with win 7. Microsoft said that after win 10 they would never make any other OS. Hummm quess that didn't work too well.
I looked into Linux because it was said that it was comparable to win 7. An stableas 7. Boy did I get lost with the options and when talkin with others they started speaking Chinese. I'll put up with the mods I've had to do with win 7's service packs and such. For what I do 7 is still out weighing other options. At least I don't have to deal with apps, an I'm still dealing with softwear.

It's going to be kinda bad to keep using Win7 for much longer. High risk of viruses and getting hacked due to end of support. (though I don't know if it's just a tiny risk or guaranteed disaster) There won't be anymore security patches. And if your computer is that old, you'll see some level of performance boost switching to Linux.

Linux Mint XFCE edition would be a good choice for an older computer. It's a very simple and pretty light on system resources.

Don't worry too much about all the different distros. I did a lot of overthinking before I switched too. But most of the differences between distros don't matter that much. You'd probably be just fine with Linux Mint. You can burn the installation image to a disc or USB drive and try it out without installing. Installation should be pretty easy (probably less steps than installing Windows), unless you want to dual boot, but that's still pretty easy too (with a few settings to change)

 

[winterheart01]

I'm actually an old UNIX, Linux, lot of sco, and hp.

I had courses in Unix with SCO and even used bash scripts on HP-UX servers so I understand your point of view.

I never really liked having Linux for a desktop, a Unix/BSD or headless Linux for server is imo the best there is with minimal driver issues

 

[ShippoFox]

I might be having one driver issue, I don't know. My Bluetooth range is horrible on my new PC, while it's much better on my laptop. I could probably solve it with a separate USB Bluetooth adapter, rather than trying to use the motherboard for Bluetooth when it's already used for WiFi

 

[Bigbabybret]

I had courses in Unix with SCO and even used bash scripts on HP-UXpc servers so I understand your point of view.

I never really liked having Linux for a desktop, a Unix/BSD or headless Linux for server is imo the best there is with minimal driver issues

Yes, I've built literally 100's of servers for customers, back in 90 client systems were actual dumb terminals, with a few using x-windows but that was expensive compared to a wyse terminal. Did also like in 91--92 started seeing some pc's and would use a terminal emulator for thoes few...This was govt stuff..

Private things was in late 80's was installing 10Base2 quite a bit, and some toke ring...which broke ring came up for two large clients mid-late 90's was all legacy 4 and 16 token ring.

But onto Linux, yes, great for servers, headless or not, that is the best place for them, they like any server needs a person that has the mindset and understanding to work/use them.

Windows, use a standard install (Clone) or even bot from server. Then set/update the group policies for the whole organization.

New PC (Standard configs) Load an image on it, mostly done. Issues rebuild it, and usually rebuild it every 12-24 months no matter what. I remeber having the 2 wheeler card with a pc or 2 on it, goto a desk, and just unplug one and plug in another...10 mins downtime for the user. Take old one back for a rebuild in the pile. One client this was done by 12-15 people every day just swaping machines, either based on help desk call/issues or it's time for a rebuild.

Not sure if you really could use/get a company to change/adapt for Linux on the desktop, the tools are there to do the same thing, but it's all just a bit different.

Also it's a bit more work to really secure a linux machine vs a windows one IMHO. Used to do security for many years, security auditing and even wrote softwarre for checking/auditing security for really large org.

Unless for some reason M$ really screws up BIG I dont see any company/org spending the money to switch all the processes and procedures already ingrained over the last several decades.