What OS are you running?

@Brian_Innes FYI, Linux Mint has a MATE edition as well. Try it to see how it compares.

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@afre, thanks, I might take a look at Mint Mate, the frequent updates of *buntus (18.04, 18.10, 19.04 etc etc etc) I find are a bit trouble some, I’d a rather just go from LTS to LTS…

Although on the other hand, I don’t need to upgrade every Ubuntu update as they come out, and why use a ubuntu fork (Mint) , when I can just use Ubuntu Mate? Hmmm…

Tossed a coin, going to for Mint Mate!

– edit – Mint Mate 19 installed! Just doing final updates, then getting darktable, gimp, hugin et al installed! :slight_smile:

Instead of avoiding many small updates, it would be much better to learn to handle them efficiently. Large updates will give you a much harder time debugging why something broke.

Learn to love change.

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Still using Linuxfromscratch - for some reason I seem to spend most of my computer time building packages, and fixing breakages from newer versions :wink:

@darix, I’ve now got Mint 19 Mate installed. I think this will be my long term o/s choice (haven’t I said that before?). I do like how Mint goes from LTS release to LTS release - I’m looking for a more stable o/s rather than one which needs updating every six months when a new version comes out.

That’s why I love Archlinux. No more major updates, instead thousends of small steps …

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Those of you who have upgraded to *buntu 18.04, are you noticing any specific problems with your software packages (DT, Rawtherapee, GIMP, Hugin, etc)? In particular, using PPA’s or snaps to run the latest versions? I’m considering upgrading all my lab computers (7 of them) before the semester starts, but am not sure if all the typical “upgrade kinks” have been worked out by this point…

upgrade 1 and test?

Yeah, that’s the typical way of things, but I thought I’d poll the crowd here and see if there are any particular “gotchas” to look out for. My issue is that the upgrade will take some serious time and effort, and the computers have to be functional by the start of classes in ~three weeks…

That’s the reason why I usually have TW (our rolling release distro on my desktops. so I learn early when my stable workloads would break)

I am on OpenSUSE TW for the last two years. I had a couple of incidents when I was not able to do what I planned due to system malfunction. After that I installed Debian as a backup. No more problems since then. If SUSE does not boot I just re-boot to Debian and then fix the SUSE later. Sometimes SUSE fixes itself though :face_with_raised_eyebrow: I have no idea how

If you did the default TW setup, then you have system rollbacks via snapper. I had a system with nVidia proprietary driver, so it broke often, and snapper kept my system working a number of times.

I know. All my issues seem to be caused by some SQL database breaks on /home partition. Maybe that is because I use ext4 not the suggested xfs (or zfs I don’t remember). / is btrfs

I am aware of the benefits of rolling release distros, but for many reasons it’s not practical or even really possible to switch on these machines. They are from DELL with Ubuntu preconfigured with garaunteed hardware support, and I’m not willing to risk that by switching distros. Plus, a lot of the software packages I use to on these computers are complicated to compile from source, but recent versions are made easily available for Ubuntu via some well maintained PPA’s (e.g., ubuntugis). However, I know that with PPA’s, one often has to do full purge with the ppapurge package upon upgrade in order to not have dependency issues. I’m wondering if anyone who has done this specific upgrade (16.04 to 18.04) ran into any particularly nasty issues I should be on the lookout for?

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I’m using Windows 7. If I live long enough to migrate, I’ll go to Linux, probably Mint. (Not Windows 10, since when I tried to “upgrade” three years ago, it bricked my computer.)

Urgh. And that’s Linux Mint Mate 19 going slower than a slow thing. Open up firefox, and the whole thing crawls to a snail’s pace… Not only that, but sometimes the Mate desktop environment seems to sit and hang for ages when I open a large ~2gb file in Gimp. I have 8gb ram, so that shouldn’t be an issue…

:thinking: Is there an OS where things are zippy? Maybe stick with that one. Another guess is that there is something wrong with your hardware and / or the firmware.

I suggest you make a new thread.

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Disable all desktop effects, that should make it respond much faster. I’m also running Mint 19 Cinnamon on a 10-year old laptop with an i3 and 4 GB of RAM. It runs just fine after disabling all desktop effects.

The effects are cool in the beginning, but get old after a while anyway…

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Yesterday I updated the install script for Rapid Photo Downloader so it works on CentOS 7.5. It was my first time to try CentOS. I was very impressed with its stability. Everything “just worked”, in a VirtualBox instance at least (I wouldn’t want to run it on bleeding edge hardware though). The interface is very bare bones.

My impression is that running the most recent Fedora core is pretty much exactly like running a development version of Ubuntu. Things break from time to time.

Cheers for that tip. Out of interest (and derailing this thread further!) I’ve installed XFCE onto my mint 19 mate install. And disabled all desktop effects. Pretty zippy now. So do I stick with my Mint 19 Mate with XFCE installed, or go for a clean install if Mint 19 XFCE? Possibly something to experiment with!