Recently I reported about another article on why people run Linux on their machines. And one of the reasons is always: because it doesn’t make your hardware obsolete, like Windows or MacOS both are doing. Proof of the pudding: here is Mitchie’s old Lenovo SL500, a dual core (Intel T5670) 2GB notebook from ca. 2008, running a current Arch Linux with the latest 5.18.2 kernel, the same which I have on my main machine:
Modern day Linux on an older machine, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022
If you enlarge the photo on Flickr you can probably see that its CPU is at 1%, which means it’s doing nothing except wait for any user input. And the system together with the very nice and modern XFCE desktop consumes just about 750MB of the total 2GB main memory – so it’s perfectly usable. Well maybe not for real number-crunching, video de- or encoding, or music production, but you get the point – as an everyday surf machine or even to watch videos on your lap, it’s perfectly fine.
I always encourage friends to try this, and we have converted many older machines in the greater family to Linux, no need at all to constantly spend any money just to stay “current”. As you can see, the version of Linux I’m running here is as current as it can get, much more modern, safe, and stable than your typical consumer OS.
We only boot into Windows if we absolutely must, and we’re all doing that since years (and Zuleikha since she was born). So this is an easy recommendation from friends to friends, ’cause that’s what we’re doing here. Oh, and by the way: thanks again to my son Jeremy who first suggested trying Arch to me some years ago. If you need “current”, that’s a nice one!
Last time we were in Frankfurt, I discovered that little store where they sell limited photography prints of all kinds of things. Mitchie and Zuleikha loved it, once inside and browsing, and in the end they bought a smallish (and not so limited) print of the library of Trinity College in Dublin. You can see a bigger version left of them in the shop:
Today I upgraded Mitchie’s computer to ‘Jammy Jellyfish‘, and I also installed a small WLAN repeater which we bought yesterday so that both Zuleikha and Mitchie have better WiFi coverage in their rooms.
Oh, and the new and LTS (long term supported) Ubuntu desktop is also covered here. Personally, I am running Debian and Arch, but I’m still a big proponent of Ubuntu. It is in fact the better business desktop, just as Steven writes.
We’re recovering from CoVid. And we all had mild progressions, thankfully – and surely because we all had three vaccinations. Don’t take this one easily, friends, it could seriously hurt you, and it’s definitely not a walk through the woods…
My old MIDI master keyboard with 49 keys was pretty finished, and I had that since 25 or 30 years – so time for a new one. I would have bought another simple and cheap one, but then saw a good deal with lots of additional full versions of libraries, like a Rhodes e-piano and a Mini Moog synth, so I could hardly say “no” to that. And I think Zuleikha likes it as well…
They call me wjl on wikiloops.com, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022 photographer: Hamidah Suadi-Lonien see also on Wikiloops
Thanks to Mitchie for taking the photo, and thanks to all friends on Wikiloops for making this possible. And without Wikiloops I would never have dreamt about learning to play the upright… 🙂
I often was asked this question, mostly by (now former) colleagues, and sometimes also by family and friends. And since my journey through the different versions and flavours of Linux and Unix (mostly Solaris and the BSDs) was quite a curvy one, and I arrived at my current state and choice through recommendations/suggestions/encouragements myself, I thought I should probably write about it.
First, you have to decide whether you’re a total beginner, and what your reasons and preferences to thinking about switching to Linux are, or to anything else than the big mainstream operating systems like Windows and/or MacOS. And since the question about which Linux to choose is mostly asked by beginners, let me give kind of a quick & dirty (which is a joke! It doesn’t tell anything about the quality of the following!) advice first:
There are many reasons why you should start with a simple solution and choice like Ubuntu, but the first and maybe most important one is the sheer size of it, the numbers of people who download, try, and give advice and tips about this free operating system. Don’t get me wrong, there’s also criticism about it, but that’s mostly by people who already have seen and used other distributions. As a beginner, you can’t go wrong with Ubuntu, and you will always find help in case you’ll encounter some problem which you can’t find handled in the help files already.
Ubuntu looks very different from other operating systems, both commercial and free ones – it is now based on Gnome 3 but still applies its own look & feel onto it. There’s another distribution which is based upon Ubuntu (which in turn is based upon Debian, but more to that later), and which has a certain degree of eye candy and might appeal to people who like the look of MacOS, and that is
I myself had only a brief encounter with it so far, but a friend from Paris uses and seems to like it a lot. My first impression (of only minutes, so maybe not very valuable) was that it indeed is pretty like MacOS, but to me it seemed to be similarly restricted in a way that I’d have had to find out how to use other tools and programs than the ones which are delivered with it out of the box. Too much effort for me for just a bit of eye candy, so I gave up quickly, but if you like it, give it a try, YMMD…
By the way, about this “give it a try“: you can download so-called “Live Images” of most of the distributions I’ll mention here, with the exception of just one. That means that if you download the offered live image and put it onto a bootable medium like a CD or DVD or a USB stick (search for “Rufus” if you are on Windows), you can boot from these media and try any of these distributions (except one) without even touching your already installed system – so there’s no harm done if you decide that you do not like what you see. Go and try the next one, or give up – it’s all about choice.
So what is my first choice, and the system I’m using since about 20 years and counting? I’ll cover that under a new chapter like:
Intermediate users:
I’m using Debian GNU/Linux since before my youngest was born. I’ve had it on servers and on my own desktop and notebook machines since a former colleague from Austria suggested to have a look (Thanks Peter!), I first got the feeling and urge to give something back with using this distribution – which is what I did – and now even some relatives like my brother are running it (although my wife and daughter are both still on Ubuntu, see my recommendation above).
Debian comes in three different versions, called “stable”, “testing”, and “unstable” (plus some additional ones like “experimental”, but that is beyond this article). I’m using “stable” because that is what I want – a stable operating system which never breaks, and which lets me concentrate on what I want or need to do, instead of dealing with my OS.
The disadvantage about being stable is that Debian never has the newest stuff. There are some exceptions, so core applications like web browsers or mail clients (Firefox-ESR and Thunderbird in my case) follow the “upstream” development and they do get updates, but in case you always want the latest and greatest, then Debian stable might not be the right choice for you. The release cycles of Debian are quite long – their release team members are proud of their choice to “release when we’re ready” – so if you want or need anything more current, you probably need to look elsewhere. Or try Debian “testing” or even “unstable”, don’t be afraid of these names because Ubuntu and others are based on them (but they still take out some headaches you might get when simply choosing one of these without being able to deal with problems yourselves).
So for something newer and more current, I’d suggest to look at some distributions which use a so-called rolling release model. That’s a bit like Debian “unstable” (also called “Sid” because that is the boy from the neighbourhood in the film “Toy Story” who always breaks toys), but some of these rolling release distros are still a bit polished, and you’ll get some kind of hand-holding. Like for instance with
Manjaro Linux. Manjaro is based upon Arch Linux, and like it it follows a rolling release path, using its own repositories, which is why you might compare the relations of Manjaro and Arch to the ones of Ubuntu and Debian – think of it just as a more beginner-friendly version of Arch. There are others like for instance EndeavourOS who don’t even use own repositories (I think, only tried it briefly as well), but the closer you’ll get to Arch itself, the more you might ask yourself if you really need some kind of friendly installer and polish, or if you’d rather learn – and that brings me to the
“Pro” users,
and to:
Arch Linux itself, which is my second choice, and my “testbed” for newer stuff like pipewire, new kernels, and so on. Arch is the only mentioned distribution which does not provide any live image, so what you boot into is the installer (text based), and although Arch now has an arch-installer script, this one is very rudimentary at this moment, so in case you’d like to keep other operating systems which you already have on your hard disk / SSD, you’ll have to go through the very well documented manual installation, and to put in stops and detours in case you’d like to have a dual or triple boot system like I do.
Arch was first mentioned to me by my son Jeremy, and I’m glad he did (thanks son!). It is really nice if you can just reboot into some fresh OS to try out things for which you might need another kernel or architecture or whatever. But it will also teach you about how little you know, so you’ll have to bring the urge to learn something new, or else this won’t be much fun. The package manager still is – for me – not as intuitive as “apt”, Debian/Ubuntu’s “Advanced Packaging Tool”, but it’s still far better IMO than Red Hat’s notoriously well-known “RPM hell” (and yes I know, both Fedora and Red Hat plus others like Suse now have programs and tools to resolve dependencies, good for them, but I prefer to avoid commercial stuff, thank you very much) – but hey, did I say something about learning new stuff? And for that you can’t have much more than Arch’s Wiki which is one of the best I’ve seen so far.
Conclusion
So there you have it. On my current boot drive (a 1TB SSD) I have a triple boot setup where I started with an Arch image to create an UEFI partition big enough to hold boot loaders for three systems (and I’ve learnt about that from Arch as well), then installed Windows 10 Pro, Arch, and Debian onto it, so when I now switch on my machine it will boot into Debian if I don’t interrupt that to select something else. In the future, Windows will be wiped off of my drive (won’t install something like Win11), but I’ll probably keep both Arch and Debian because these are my choices. Debian for its stability and for “daily work”, Arch to learn, and to try out new things.
No spyware. Like I wrote, Linux is about choice. But so would be any of the BSDs if you’d want something even more “exotic”.
Hope that helped answering some question(s), and as always, thanks for reading. Oh, and by the way, of course I have written this on one of the mentioned systems, which in this case was Arch Linux.
P.S., from Monday March 21st, 2022: in case you want Debian stable but still need some newer package(s), have a look at its backports pages, and follow the instructions.
P.P.S, from Monday March 28th, 2022: the new and upcoming Arch Installer script looks pretty neat, see https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/releases/tag/v2.4.0.rc1 – that should/could probably help those who would like to use plain Arch without going the manual way…
Today it’s exactly a year since “our” Tuna died. And of course we had to visit her grave. I took my camera, and even a 2nd battery just in case – but forgot the SD card which was still in my computer at home from this morning.
So here are two snapshots from the phone instead:
Tuna’s grave from behind, Frankfurt 2022
Tuna’s grave, Frankfurt 2022
We still miss her each day, so thanks for viewing.
Today is my wife’s birthday, so we got a few presents for her. I built her a new computer…
Happy birthday… 🙂
For those who are interested: here are some links and a parts list (hint: I used slightly more)… oh, and like the c’t magazine wrote, it runs just fine with Ubuntu 21.10 (although the recent kernel 5.16 would have been even better for this new hardware). But everything like the integrated AMD graphics or the wireless runs out of the proverbial box.
P.S.: Mitchie just measured the power consumption when doing nothing on her Ubuntu 21.10 desktop (but with WiFi on) – the meter cycles between 19.3 and 20.5 Watts, so I’d say that’s an average of about 19.9W. Cool; mine takes slightly more than 31W when doing nothing (which is what computers do most of the time, they’re always waiting on us instead of vice versa…) 🙂
Our car needs to be repaired. This time it’s the crank shaft sensor which has to be changed, and Mitchie decided that it’s not cost-effective to keep hanging on to that vehicle any longer; it’s now well over 19 years old and needs to be repaired more frequently lately, so she wants a new one.
No, not this one which Zuleikha saw and loved in our car dealers’ shop lately:
Toyota Yaris 4th generation in “mangan bronze”
That’s almost the same they had given us last time, and about which I’ve written here already. Super car, but we wouldn’t like to spend 20k€+ on a new car right now.
So we decided to look for its last predecessor, which is the second facelift of the third generation of the Toyota Yaris line, and we’ve found a really nice one in a trim that Toyota calls the “Style Selection”. Here’s a photo taken from the dealer who had it on offer:
Toyota Yaris Hybrid Style Selection, from 2017
This one also has a 1.5l fuel engine, but a four cylinder instead of the three cylinders in the newer version. Plus, like all full hybrids, an electrical engine and a CVT – a continuous variable transmission, meaning: no gears. No clutch, no starter, alternator, no drive shaft as well. It has a combined power output of 100hp, three more than we have now, but the top speed is limited to 165km/h (more than enough in this day and age IMO). This “Style Selection” comes with two colours as you can see, and with 16 inch wheels, a bit bigger than what we have now.
The used car market is pretty empty at the moment, and it’s understandable why: people are thinking about getting full electrical cars, but most of us who live in urban areas don’t yet have the possibility to charge these at home, or on the working place. So no electrical, no plugin hybrid, but a full hybrid like this makes the most sense at the moment, and because everyone thinks that this time will pass as well, people are buying more used than new at the moment. Understandable in my opinion.
Bob from Ireland thinks the same, namely “that it makes a lot of sense” to get a car like these:
Quick review of the Toyota Yaris Hybrid 2017
He’s driving the exact same car in red & black, and with the wheel at the other side of course, but beside of that, the same.
And here’s another (bit longer and) nice presentation from a German car dealer where Josephine also talks about the differences between her own and that slightly higher specced “Style Selection” model (in German of course):
Toyota Yaris (Modelljahr 2017) – Fahrzeugvorstellung + Probefahrt | Review/Sitzprobe
I’ve driven “ours” (which is paid, but we don’t have it registered yet), and we’re very happy with what it is and what it does. I assume that we’ll get it in a few days, then I’ll report more, and have our old one repaired, maybe somewhere locally (and a bit cheaper than at an official Toyota repair shop?). Then we’ll have to see to whom this one will go…
Oh, and this “new” car doesn’t only take less fuel than our old one (I managed to get it to 4.8l/100km on our short test drive, the old one takes a bit more than 6 litres), it also takes “E10” which can be produced a bit more environment-friendly, and which costs 6 cents less per litre than the 95 octane “Super” we need now…
As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and watching. Also thanks to Bob and to Josephine, as well as to the people at our car dealers’. Be well and stay safe everyone.
