I'd like to see MS Office officially on Linux and all the games my kids want to play.

Kiwifruta:

 

I'd like to see MS Office officially on Linux and all the games my kids want to play.

 

MSFT I am sure would do that if and when the numbers stackup, would the Linux and Open Source community accept it ?........ I don't think so which would be a real shame.

How many others are using Manjaro? I tried it recently and was impressed by the installer and the look and feel of it. Unfortunately I stumbled at the first hurdle when I tried to install VS Code... Suddenly had to learn a bunch of new Arch concepts relating to downloading and compiling things and gave up, too hard. That's what keeps me on Ubuntu - simple and easy to use, with tons of support.

amanzi:

 

How many others are using Manjaro? I tried it recently and was impressed by the installer and the look and feel of it. Unfortunately I stumbled at the first hurdle when I tried to install VS Code... Suddenly had to learn a bunch of new Arch concepts relating to downloading and compiling things and gave up, too hard. That's what keeps me on Ubuntu - simple and easy to use, with tons of support.

 

The learning curve is worth it - and while initially a little steep, it doesn't last long.

I've always found the online community for Manjaro/Arch to have most of the answers - e.g. to install VS Code

Did 2018 really turn out to be an annus horribilis?

I kept running Debian stable and had no problems. One of the good things about Debain stable, is that the new versions come when they're ready, not when it's time to increment the major release number. You can get the newer packages through backports, but most of the time they’re not needed.

The same is true in the server world, where people running Fedora are the beta testers for the actual stable release (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), so people that need stability can run RHEL or CentOS.

At work we have RHEL and no problems unless you count planning downtime for security updates (e.g. spectre and meltdown), but every OS has those issues.

Most of the problems I see people complaining about are pebkac errors or people attempting to run Linux on dodgy hardware instead of searching for compatible hardware before they buy.

I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with XFCE desktop on an old HP laptop and am loving it. Everything works perfectly - no complaints at all.

I convinced a work colleague to try LinuxMint on an ageing laptop (previously Windows 7)

He was blown away about how easy it was to install and use and how fast it is.

StructureDr:

 

amanzi:

 

How many others are using Manjaro? I tried it recently and was impressed by the installer and the look and feel of it. Unfortunately I stumbled at the first hurdle when I tried to install VS Code... Suddenly had to learn a bunch of new Arch concepts relating to downloading and compiling things and gave up, too hard. That's what keeps me on Ubuntu - simple and easy to use, with tons of support.

 

 

The learning curve is worth it - and while initially a little steep, it doesn't last long.

 

I've always found the online community for Manjaro/Arch to have most of the answers - e.g. to install VS Code

 

Don't think I'd ever want a GUI package manager. Do yourself a favour and get yay:

# get enough packages to grab source code and build

pacman -S git base-devel

cd /tmp

# grab yay PKGBUILD, the best AUR package manager

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git && cd yay

# sync deps (installs any that are missing), build yay, and install it

makepkg -si

Now, to install an AUR package (in this case vscode):

yay -S visual-studio-code-bin

Hint: yay works more or less the same as pacman. So to update all your packages, including AUR:

yay -Syu

-e- Also see the comparison of AUR helpers at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers#Comparison_table

Just this last weekend I finally bought my NUC and set up Linux Mint on it. The installation didn't go very smoothly (problems setting up that partitions how I wanted them), but after some fidling I finally got it all working.

I've got Apache, MariaDB and PHP all up and running (including having both PHP 5.6 and 7.2, for supporting my clients that are stuck on 5.6). I was able to change where Apache looks for the website files (moved them off the partition where the OS lives) but no amount of fidling would get MariaDB to look for its databases in anywhere but the default /var/lib/mysql. I followed numerous instructions that were written for both MySQL and MariaDB but the file layout in my installation was different (different named files).

But all in all I'm enjoying the change from Windows!

In the last year I have seen quite a few things that are really disappointing.  Most are to do with software rather than hardware regressions.  Here's a few I remember.

Xubuntu 16.04.5 Big problem running synaptic package manager.   Message about broken packages.   Not easily fixed.

Wine worked perfectly for me on 16.04.3    Wine has sucked on Ubuntu 18.x and Mint 19.x for the last year.   After a lot of work I got it to work with Mint 19.1 Xfce.    A big turn off for a new user. (Just annoying for me as I don't depend on Wine for anything.)

Java.  Forums are full of messages about how to get this to work properly on Ubuntu 18.x etc.   Didn't seem to be a problem on 16.04  Apparently, this is needed to play Minecraft on Linux - so potentially a big problem for some families.

And finally Libre Office writer.   By default there is no freaking spell checker enabled!  To get this to work at all you have to go in and select language in about three places.   Why can't it have US English or Brexit English enabled by default?   The Windows version does.

The reason for all this is a ridiculous amount of duplicated effort with a crazy number of distros, very smart people who don't like doing QA, and overall dysfunction in the Linux community. End of micro rant.

amiga500:

 

In the last year I have seen quite a few things that are really disappointing.  Most are to do with software rather than hardware regressions.  Here's a few I remember.

 

Xubuntu 16.04.5 Big problem running synaptic package manager.   Message about broken packages.   Not easily fixed.

 

Synaptic is just a GUI around apt. Messages about broken packages came from apt, probably apt cache/db was corrupted.

 

Wine worked perfectly for me on 16.04.3    Wine has sucked on Ubuntu 18.x and Mint 19.x for the last year.   After a lot of work I got it to work with Mint 19.1 Xfce.    A big turn off for a new user. (Just annoying for me as I don't depend on Wine for anything.)

 

Wine (at least staging version) works perfectly on 18.04, though I play Blizzard/Battle.net games only. Some efforts were required to get Windows libraries installed but it's kind of semi-automated with winetricks utility. 

 

Java.  Forums are full of messages about how to get this to work properly on Ubuntu 18.x etc.   Didn't seem to be a problem on 16.04  Apparently, this is needed to play Minecraft on Linux - so potentially a big problem for some families.

 

Why blame Java rather than Minecraft? Also what kind of Java - Oracle or OpenJDK? I use both, not for Minecraft, and have no any issues.

Really disappointing thing in my list for Ubuntu is the choice of Linux kernels for LTS versions of Ubuntu. Why use non-LTS kernels in LTS versions of Ubuntu? 18.04 was released with 4.15 and recently updated to 4.18. Both are non-LTS kernels reaching EOL soon.

qwerty123:

 

Really disappointing thing in my list for Ubuntu is the choice of Linux kernels for LTS versions of Ubuntu. Why use non-LTS kernels in LTS versions of Ubuntu? 18.04 was released with 4.15 and recently updated to 4.18. Both are non-LTS kernels reaching EOL soon.

 

This!  I dont get it either.  Was hoping they'd go to 4.19 with recent point release.  To me it seems the HWE versions of Ubuntu would be better served to use non LTS kernels.

On a Ubuntu forum I read that the removal of an easy gui operation for java came from a decision at the Debian level re. a security concern.   Sorry, I don't have details.

As for Synaptic I like its ease of use and speed.   After installing a distro I can quickly install most of the extra things I need by using Synaptic.

Tracer: Debian/Ubuntu maintain their own kernels post x.x.0, cherry-picking patches as required, so it’s not as important for them what Greg does with linux-stable.

Debian uses LTS kernels: 

3.16 for Debian 8

4.9 for Debian 9

4.19 for upcoming Debian 10