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Anyone a user of Linux? I installed openSUSE on an old MacBook a few months back, and I'm impressed at how well it performs. I had used Linux before on some old machines, but it was always a "beginner" distro like Linux Mint or Ubuntu. openSUSE blows both of those out of the water, as far as I'm concerned. Stable, and very efficient.

What do you guys use?

I use Windows. Our two sons are both computer geeks and they swear by Linux.

I use Windows on my primary machine (an Asus laptop), but I have a much older desktop tower from around 2008 that runs Linux... and I run Windows Subsystem for Linux for when I need to try stuff out without wanting to turn on a second machine. The Linux machine (and WSL configuration) are used mostly for coding and data recovery.

I find Linux is pretty damned useful for breathing life into older (often *much* older) hardware and giving old laptops and desktops a second life, even if they're just used as internet terminals for youtube and email, and for LibreOffice... The hardware requirements are just so much more reasonable than Windows for whatever reason.

I use Linux Lite, which is based on Ubuntu. It's user-friendly, has a lot of unique features, and is fairly lightweight as I have it installed on an older Acer Aspire One laptop with limited hardware.

At the Monday (2/22) press conference with the JPL Mars Perseverance team, the Imaging leader said that a Linux-based computer is being used on the rover, and the image encodes/decodes are done with FFMPEG. First time that open source OS and imaging software have been used for a NASA planetary mission, and the team thanked the open source community for its work.

I used to run an Ubuntu machine largely for posting on this website back in the 2010's. Now I use my tablet.

Apple OS is built on and a proprietary form of Linux. My Chromebook is essentially Linux. Android is Linux based as well.

I am not a fan of windows because it's a bit of a mess, but I do enjoy Linux even if I don't have a need for it today.

TC Talks wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:06 pm

Apple OS is built on and a proprietary form of Linux. My Chromebook is essentially Linux. Android is Linux based as well.

macOS and Darwin kernel is not at all a form of Linux, precedes it by a few years. It is derived from BSD Unix and the Mach kernel, on which Jobs based his NeXTSTEP OS, which then became Apple's property (and eventually OS X) when Jobs was brought back into the company. macOS and iOS still are in some form using NeXTSTEP code.

Thanks for the clarification, Unix and Linux are kissing cousins though.

Worked at a radio station where our studio system was Linux based. It never glitched or failed.

Lubuntu is also a good OS for older machines, especially laptops. It's a lightweight derivative of Ubuntu with fewer bells and whistles, but still plenty of features to make it worthwhile, even for beginners.

Linux platforms can be incredibly stable. I ran data centers for many years and we had a mix of Unix (Solaris), Linux and Microsoft servers. The Linux ones were the favorites for their reliability and efficiency - you could run them on any old hardware and still get good performance from whatever app you were using. The MS apps ALWAYS needed hardware upgrades to keep the performance reasonable. All of our "tools" boxes and monitoring boxes were Linux-based, because you could count on them working.

However, they can also be the most vulnerable to hacking if not prepared properly.

TCT -- you aren't wrong in that Unix and Linux are practically siblings. I often use many of the same commands in the terminal on macOS that I would use on Linux.

And for all the shit Google gets, they really are doing a great job with Chrome OS and Android (but only on their Pixels; Samsung, LG, etc. fuck it up on their devices). However, since I moved exclusively to Apple, it's hard for me to go back to any other ecosystem.

SolarMax -- I see a lot of the science-oriented government orgs using Linux and OSS a lot. The National Weather Service uses Linux extensively; their AWIPS forecasting software runs on it.

And to km1125's point, Linux and Unix are my only choices for servers. I do not like Windows Server at all from my experiences using it; too much overhead to keep Windows servers running reliably.

I really should get interested in Linux or Ubuntu. I seen someone talking about Lubuntu.

About 2 years ago, I bought an HP laptop with Ubuntu on it. It was for a fundraiser.
Someone had some hand me down laptops from where they worked. Donated for the cause, whatever it was.
I bought one for $50. The battery was sad. I bought a new battery for it.

Basically all I've ever done is turned it on a few times, went "hmmmm" and turned it off.
Clueless in Seattle on what to do with it really.

Mike Oxlong wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 02, 2021 4:00 pm

I really should get interested in Linux or Ubuntu. I seen someone talking about Lubuntu.

About 2 years ago, I bought an HP laptop with Ubuntu on it. It was for a fundraiser.
Someone had some hand me down laptops from where they worked. Donated for the cause, whatever it was.
I bought one for $50. The battery was sad. I bought a new battery for it.

Basically all I've ever done is turned it on a few times, went "hmmmm" and turned it off.
Clueless in Seattle on what to do with it really.

After-market batteries are hit and miss. Some are good. Some are crap. They're less expensive than ordering an original from the manufacturer, but if you're going after-market, best to order from a reputable site with a good return policy just in case. Even with a decent after-market battery, I've found that the overall life span is not as good as with a manufacturer battery. Basically, you get what you pay for.

I made the mistake of buying one with insufficient voltage. It was listed as compatible with my model laptop, but the battery only pushed 11.4V when what I really needed was 14.9V. The laptop would shut down as soon as the battery drained to 51% capacity, as it was drawing more current than the battery could push at that level, and the battery's solid-state chip would trigger a shutdown to avoid over-heating. Finally figured out the issue after using a magnifying glass to look at the specs on the original battery pack. Ordered one with the correct voltage and didn't have a problem.

Another bug in lithium-ion batteries is that the cells don't like to be completely discharged, which can easily happen if the battery isn't used for an extended period or the computer drains it to 0% capacity. Once the cells are depleted, there's a good chance they won't accept a charge. Operating systems, including most Linux distributions, have a setting in the power management where a shutdown can be triggered when the battery reaches a user-defined minimum capacity (I have mine set to shut down when the battery level hits 10%). This prevents a complete discharge of the cells and rendering of you battery to a nice paperweight.

The most stable OS I've ever used is Windows 2000. I used it as my main OS until about 2017 when web browsers that hadn't been updated in years finally became unusable on the modern-day web. However there's a small niche community of computer geeks who still actively update certain software to run properly on this OS, I may have to look into browser support again.

Also in the 15 or so years I used it, I didn't run any anti-virus software whatsoever and never once had a virus that I was aware of.