I installed MX-17 Linux today

I did it mainly because I was having a hard time using Jekyll, which is a static web page pre-processor which relies on Ruby and Windows really has a hard time with Ruby.

I choose this version because it was lighter than ubuntu. I actually was considering Arch, but I heard that it was terrible to install.

This one wasn't so bad, except for a few things. In order to get 60hz I had to dial back to 2k on a 27in, which isn't bad. I still haven't figured out how to get all of my mouse buttons to work. But I got the sound to work, which was great.

Anybody else using this?

 

It's a mid-weight os running Xfce. I thought about running wine or even buying crossover, but after playing around with libreoffice I think I'll be fine with it. The only thing I saw as a problem with libreoffice is that the autosave fail safe flickers so I just turned it off. I can use other things to make sure I don't lose stuff.

Also I discovered smoothscroll 1.6.1 for chrome, which should be a mandatory install on chrome and I turned chrome smoothscroll off. It works better than edge. So needless to say, I am loving this so far.

Things I dont understand are: compiling drivers and I am probably going to buy a book: the linux command line, which is the major reason I which to linux in the first place.

Linux Mint Cinnamon and mate, I heard really good things about. The reason I choose MX-17 Linux was because it only used less than 10gigs of harddrive and less than 1 gig of ram. It is FAST! I thought about trying arch, but I don't know enough about the command line. There is also voidlinux which is even less. But I might try those later.

 

Man, the speed of linux is crazy. Using google chrome back and forward is instant. bring up programs are instant. I am really becoming interested in this os and to see what I can do with it.

 

So I've had Linux installed for a week and here are my impressions.
There is only 1 program on windows that I truly miss and that is outlook. I know you are supposed to be able to run it in wine, but wine is shitty. Firefox sucks, Geary is a joke, gmail is too ugly and complicated. There is no equivalent to outlook on linux, period.

The other thing is libreoffice is not great either. It just annoys me. But fortunately google docs and google keeper (for onenote) are very good options. Google has made strides in making a browser app look like a desktop app. Especially docs, which has a lot of well-thought-out features that I need.

Lastly, I'm using mx-17 and the tinker in me thought about arch linux, which is a barebones linux distro. Here's what I have learned. Arch linux solves a problem for people who need to have a very specific setup. Don't shun more full-featured linux distros just because (like me) you don't like libreoffice. Most distros are going to run at breakneck speed compared to what you are used to.

The real question is that if you want stable (and you should) go with debian. If you just want to tinker with the latest and have specific needs maybe try a more rolling release.

 

I'm not exactly sure it has anything to do with bloat. I think desktop environments and how memory Hogs they are are a big factor.

And more importantly how efficiently they handle things.
Windows 3.1 was faster because it was less complicated.
Unbuntu is going to be slower than MX 17 in the same way as aa WordPres site is going to be a slower side then just a straight HTML web page. And that's partly because WordPress uses a more complicated scheme in order to get the things done than just a straight web page would, with an SQL database back end and so forth

 

Puppy Linux or what? Adobe doesn't have a linux version, so you'd have to find an alternative, or you could do a windows vm.
If you are thinking about going with linux, I would make sure you have a good reason.
In my case, I needed to use ruby and windows didn't allow me to do it.
One reason could be privacy, ease of use.
You might try mx-17 (I highly recommend it) and then check out some of the adobe alternatives to see if any meet your standards.
I will tell you that linux probably has an alternative. A quick look shows lightworks is pretty good.

For me, I have only really missed outlook. I think google docs is good enough for my text editor and it is free. I like microsoft edge a lot but google chrome is still good. (I would have missed edge a lot more had I not found the smooth scroll extension. I HATE/ LOATH a browser without responsive scroll.

The linux video drivers are certainly not as good as the windows version as you have screen tearing even on the desktop when you move a window too fast you can see it. I will say that mx-17 is pretty good with this on everything else. I installed debian and void linux and screen tearing was noticeable even in the browser, but that could be because I had not installed compositer, which I think is an app package build by the mx-17 team. I'm not sure.

 

Some more observations:
I am a stickler for backing up my data. I have lost so much crap over the years. My solution requires: both online and offline backups.

The problem: in linux, google drive doesn't really have a good native solution, which creates a couple of problems. Namely, that I cannot use google docs for my word processing needs, since I cannot easily get an offline copy.

Using libreoffice gets an offline copy, but it is difficult to get an online copy, plus I don't like that every time I save, the entire document blinks at me.

Long story short, if you are using linux, you should also be using dropbox because it will completely integrate with linux. So then I had to find a solution for word processing. Luckily I found that Dropbox released dropbox paper last year. So, problem solved.

Use dropbox + dropbox paper. Now I haven't explored how good dropbox paper is, but I like the clean layout so far.

 

Well I updated my os today. I liked mx-17 for the most part, it was fast and easy to use. I decided though that I just didn't want libreoffice anywhere near my build, so I decided to do a netinstall of debian stretch. I even only installed the system tools with no gui shell, and I lucked into figuring out that I could use apt install gnome-core.

I went with gnome because every other gui (outside of unity) looked like windows 95. The pure debian build however is a lot harder to install. It took a lot of trial and error to get things to work.

For example: i had to scour through stackexchange and linux forums to figure out that the version of ruby that debian installed came with a deprecated version of liquid language, and if I just removed liquid everything worked.
Debian is very slow, it's almost as bad as arch's rolling release, but I guess it depends on how much you want to upgrade.

I really do like gnome, since it is different and isn't trying to look like a windows or mac clone, but things in linux do break often.

 

No, I mainly did it because I needed to install the ruby suite for my web development stack and windows 10 just wasn't cutting it. But I am also a tinker so when I try something new I just can't stop fiddling with it. However it is true that I hate libreoffice.
The other problem I had was that linux and google drive don't integrate well and word processors are indeed important to me, so I had to make some compromises, and I switched from google drive to dropbox, and I have started using dropbox paper.

mx-17 was a good system though and it had a lot of good features, but the tinkerer in me got the best of me. I could have installed arch, but I just didn't like the rolling release aspect of it.

 

The thing that kinda sucks is that linux doesn't really have a good notebook/thought organizer and the current project I'm working needs a lot of research, so my development stack is still stitched and glued together. If you are like me and you value BACKUPS. So I am using google keep to store my notes for the time being, the problem is google notes and dropbox paper (which is my preferred word processor next to microsoft word, neither have a good storage/download option in linux, and microsoft word online (despite the fact that onedrive doesn't integrate with linux) is terrible as an online application.

Google docs is really nice as far as it goes, but dropbox paper actually has a killer feature, which is the fact that you can save your doc in pure markdown, so if I create an opinionated website, I don't have to write ANY html if I don't want to. And jekyll has so much support that makes the tedious parts of web design easy.

I am hoping that dropbox paper gets integrated with the dropbox file system, which pretty much everybody using it wants, so I am assuming that it will happen. Then I'll only have one problem with my stack which is google keep.

 

Linux has a lot of good aspects about it. The more that I have been educating myself about the os the more it makes me think. For example, I learned that the intel core 2 duo was the last processor (most modern) that you can use to run a program called libreboot. What's the big deal about libreboot? Well if you want a completely free and opensourced setup, you have to get rid of the proprietary boot software, libreboot does that.

All other processors after the core duo 2 came with intel spying architecture in the framework of the processor.

Also I learned that many people setting up linux machines look for ibm thinkpads x60 and x200, which have the intel core duo installed and that you can buy them for less than $150 on ebay.

Without something like that, it is pretty difficult to go completely free software, because of the video drivers, wifi cards and the codexes. Even with the proper hardware, do you really want to give up spotify, or dropbox, or steam, or chrome? To be completely free, requires a lot of compromise.

My setup isn't close to free even though I am running vanilla debian. I use dropbox, spotify and proprietary video drivers in my setup. Plus, I am running with a intel i7. The other thing is that it is hard to give up google assistant on your android phone, even though on my desktop I switched to duckduckgo.

I do think that some linux users go overboard with the whole privacy thing, but I do like the free software movement, and I'm trying my best.