- This topic has 16 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated Jun 11-8:18 pm by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinick
Currently I have the following distributions installed (and I’ll be installing antiX 17 soon over my previous antiX installation):
Linux Mint – I think I installed 18.1 with Xfce and updated through the repository to 18.2 with Xfce. It’s a good, solid distribution, simple and easy to install and use. It consumes more resources than MX and antiX as it’s trade-off between “ease of use”, simplicity and efficiency.
MX 16.1 – an excellent alternative to Linux Mint; it also uses Xfce and it has been a drop in, easy to use distribution that has everything I need without a lot of excess clutter. It runs Xfce better than anything else I’ve used.
Debian 9.2 – I had some issues with Debian 9 because I did not pull a build that had the non-free binaries which include wireless, and my Ethernet card stopped working, so Debian 9 wasn’t working for me until I was able to grab 9.2 WITH the non-free binaries. Instead of installing it, I have used it as a Live, USB-based removable system, but I did use the wireless firmware binaries included to update my Debian 9 installation, so it now works. Once I got this set up I have Debian 9.2 with an Xfce desktop and it performs similarly to MX 16.1, but as indicated, it took considerably more time and effort to get to that place with it, and that’s where I see value in Debian derivatives such as MX; they are real time savers, especially for an every day, casual use system. Now that this Debian instance is working well, it also runs very well.
antiX – I’ve been following antiX since the beginning. I’ve used the Full, Base, and Core versions many times over the years. Right now, I’ve been using an antiX 16 Full implementation, and look forward to installing antiX 17 in the near future.
Fedora 26 – The speed and efficiency of Fedora has markedly improved in recent years, especially compared with Fedora 3-5 in the early days. Fedora still has odd issues; for instance the GUI menus on one of my installations have all of the entries mashed together so that File, Edit, Options, etc. on the top edge of the screen look like
FileEditOptions… so the appearance and functionality is compromised.openSUSE 42 – I’ve been installing openSUSE on my workstations since I moved to a GPT filesystem layout and GRUB EFI instead of the old BIOS layout; openSUSE is one of the few distributions capable of setting this up with either the full secured mode or the unsecured mode – other distributions can support it but seldom set up every possible parameter (most can’t properly handle the secure mode without “help” or hand configuration; no problem with openSUSE.
PCLinuxOS – a nice, relatively stable distribution with lots of software. Interestingly PCLinuxOS is actually an RPM based distribution that originally built packages spawned from Mandriva, but has built its own packages for well over a decade – but even with RPM packages, it uses apt-get command packaging and synaptic GUI packaging. It’s the only RPM-based distribution I know of – other than possibly PCLinuxOS offspring that use the combo of RPM packages and apt-get. Usually RPM-based distributions use the low level rpm package manager or something like dnf or yum (Red Hat and Fedora) or YAST (openSUSE). Aside from this interesting difference, PCLinuxOS ranks well with MX and Mint among the distributions that provide ease of installation and use. Moreover, with PCLinuxOS, you can run anything ranging from commands and low level tasks to simple window managers, as well as many desktop environments and applications to choose from, so you’re likely to find something you can use with PCLinuxOS.
Much as I enjoy many of these distributions, Debian, MX, and antiX remain my top favorites and the ones I most frequently use for every day purposes.
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Brian Masinick
fatmac
Time for you to take a look at Devuan, methinks. 😉
There are a few interesting derivatives now, Refracta was a good start, but I prefer Vuu-Do, after having initially liked MIYO; & there are a couple more if you get the time.
My main distro remains AntiX, I’m more familiar with it, & it has always worked well for me; since the demise of #! (crunchbang).
Linux (& BSD) since 1999
meurglys
As a longtime linux user,and avid distrohopper, having cut my teeth with Mandrake back in the day I’m especially fond of antiX/MX and or good old Slackware.
tlaloc77
Hmm, back in the days of Kernel 0.97, it was Slackware, on about 30 3½” floppies. After that, OpenSuSE 6 – OpenSuse 13, Vector Linux 6 & 7, then things becäme a bit blurry, trying distros (including antiX), moving on quickly, preferring small ones like Puppy, grml and SliTAZ for some time, always falling back to Knoppix. But Knoppix 8.1 didn’t let me remove Apache and other stuff, weirded me out. Tried Funtoo, turned out to be more work than I had the patience for. Next came antiX 17, just today. Installed in less than 30 minutes, looks great, everything worked nicely out of the box. So there. Hope this is not as much Debian as Knoppix apparently is now.
My inxi -zv7, inxi -Fxs and inxi -r are here: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/a-proper-hellp/#post-2981
Brian Masinick
fatmac said: “Time for you to take a look at Devuan, methinks. 😉
There are a few interesting derivatives now, Refracta was a good start, but I prefer Vuu-Do, after having initially liked MIYO; & there are a couple more if you get the time.
My main distro remains AntiX, I’m more familiar with it, & it has always worked well for me; since the demise of #! (crunchbang).”
I have installed Devuan. It’s a stable, usable distribution, but last I checked, it’s not keeping up with current software. It’s based on Debian, and like us, they are among the distributions that provide a systemd alternative, so it’s in the “same camp” that we are. Frankly, we seem to be keeping up with the changes on a more regular basis than Devuan, and while it’s stable, even MX-16.1, probably deserving it’s own new release, still seems to stay more current (with most packages coming from Debian except for the packages with nosystemd). Between antiX and MX, I’m good, and I also have systemd implementations of Debian and Fedora – and probably others too. I have no issue with Devuan, I just don’t need it right now, and of the distributions I have, I’m not able to test them with the frequency I once did – trying or using them every week, some on a daily basis. These days I’m lucky if I have a few moments to login to any of my home systems after a long day at the office (so that’s my EXCUSE) 😉
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Brian MasinickBrian Masinick
As a longtime linux user,and avid distrohopper, having cut my teeth with Mandrake back in the day I’m especially fond of antiX/MX and or good old Slackware.
Interesting that you mention these two distributions. My VERY FIRST Linux distribution was a version of Slackware that came right out of a book that was written by a couple of other people, but Patrick Volkerding and his efforts were well chronicled in that book, which I may still have somewhere, unless I left it behind after one of my moves over the past 5-6 years.
I ran that early version of Slackware on my first PERSONALLY OWNED PC, which I finally purchased way back in 1995. In those days PCs were still comparatively expensive. I think my purchases, along with a couple of books, came in just under $3000 at the time. I did not initially have a broadband network; that came a few years later, so I used Slackware as mostly a local editing machine for any “work at home” I may have done on occasion, and I had to use a modem to dial into my Digital UNIX workstation or Digital UNIX server in the office. Having GNU utilities available to edit files locally instead of incurring relatively slow graphical response over a phone connection made Slackware quite appealing to me.
By 1998 or 1999 I had some kind of AT&T Broadband networking, which was acquired within a few years by Comcast, which dominates broadband networks on the East Coast where I lived at the time. I know that I used Caldera openLinux between 1999 and 2001; I used it on a laptop that I also used to take some online graduate studies. Sometimes I’d use Linux to connect to the online university, but mostly I’d use Windows 98 because Outlook Express, if I remember correctly, had a pretty decent interface for the online university forum. I could access it from a Linux system too, but then it was just a simple Web-based, plain text interface – such things have changed considerably today and most online things I do today work well from anywhere, including Linux systems.
In 2001 I got a Dell Dimension 4100 desktop system, and that’s when I started to run many distributions from the same hardware. That’s when I started reviewing distributions, including Lycoris, Red Hat, SUSE, and an old, very interesting implementation of Debian from Libranet, a western Canadian distribution with a lot of excellent tools. It was Libranet that really turned me on to Debian, and after that, I also started to regularly use Debian Sid. A few years later I met up with MEPIS in 2003 and that’s what started the “dance” here.
In 2006 anticapitalista brought in antiX, and maintains that legacy with both antiX and the successor to MEPIS, the MX variation of antiX that was conceived in cooperation with the MEPIS Lovers Community. Over a decade later, we’re still collaborating, and though I do not test nearly as often as I once did, I still write and share my now historical perspective on the distributions I’ve used over the past 22 years. (I’ve been in the computer industry MUCH longer, dating back to the seventies; I started using UNIX workstations in 1982).
I hope you enjoy history every now and then; I think I may have to add “History” to my middle name!
- This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by Brian Masinick.
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Brian Masinickmmmmna
I have Antix 17 for 32 bit installed on the EeePC900A, works nicely.
I think my Inspiron 1545 has a recent Fedora on it, but I haven’t used it since I installed Fedora almost 2 months ago. Lost interest in the hardware (it is too beat up to hold on to with any safety…. case is quite cracked).
Had installed and initially loved Devuan, but default stuff was so old, I lost interest,. Didn’t try to reconfigure Devuan repositories. My bad.
Brian Masinick
Hmm, back in the days of Kernel 0.97, it was Slackware, on about 30 3½” floppies.
Thanks! I was trying to remember the version of Slackware I used way back when. I think it was Slackware 1 or 2, but one thing I do remember is that the one in the book that I believe Johnson and Reichard (not 100% sure of those names) wrote back in the nineties definitely had a pre-version 1 kernel and I think it was 0.97. I updated it quite a bit by the time I finished the installation and configuration, so I doubt that by that time I was using the early kernel or the very early Slackware releases, but more likely either a later Slackware-RELEASE or Slackware-CURRENT.
I say this because when I first started, I could only achieve 640×480 monitor resolution and 8 colors, but by the time I found drivers and modules to add to gain at least 256 colors and 800×600, and later 1024×768 monitor resolution, I expect that I had unwittingly installed much later software. It wasn’t long before I was grabbing source code packages and compiling them to get new software versions, but as I learned more I’d find out when binary packages were available and I’d only build core software from sources when nothing else was available; all that changed pretty quickly, and around the same time, easier packaging methods and new distributions became available.
What’s also nice to know is that Slackware still uses many of the original scripts and tools, which still work great and are very stable. With more mature software, it’s rarely necessary to have to do anything other than accept the default answers when you install the latest versions today.
Hope this is not as much Debian as Knoppix apparently is now.
antiX is much leaner than the average Debian-based derivative; KNOPPIX, depending on which build you obtain and what you choose to install by default, tends to offer nearly everything, so it is MUCH larger than antiX – more flexible, but also much more complex (and complete).
On the other hand, antiX Full is a really nice choice that offers one of the leanest “Full” customizable distributions available. antiX Base is a lean starting point where you at least want a pre-built GUI (Graphical User Interface) included and a relatively sparse set of utilities an applications, from which you can build add a set of applications that suit your needs. antiX Core is even more lean: all it provides is a system kernel and the bare essential system components and utilities needed to build your own customized solution. With antiX Core it’s possible to build a server-based system that uses a non-graphical console server, and it’s also possible to create a multi-desktop, full desktop capable client or server solution.
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Brian Masinickutu
@mmmmna:
My 1545 is still going strong, except for Win7 which was ransome-wared
sometime earlier this year. Still using the crippled Win7 and UUI
to make occasional Ubuntu-style LiveUSBs, however.@Masinick:
3 1/2″ floppies would have been a great improvement on the mag tape
I used on my TRS-80s a few years back.Knoppix still a favorite with me. I too, wish Klaus would go back to
providing a CD-size, or thereabouts, iso.64-bit MX-18.2 using 4.20.12 Kernel LiveUSB on Dell Laptop
ile
hello masinick
dell 1545 mentioned. yo mmmmna There is a 1545 here available. good case for you. if you are in usa i will mail it to you. gratis. utu, you too, do you either one want it for parts? it has all its parts; it does not power-up.Brian Masinick
Bringing this back after a very long time.
One distribution that I rarely, if ever, install, but I pull it out every now and then, is Puppy. I have a bunch of OSDisc.com USB drives that came with various different distributions, plus I have plenty of other cheap USB drives and 1 or 2 fairly “good” ones. On one of my OSDisc drives that had Puppy Linux Slacko 6.3.2 listed, I actually have Distro: ScPup64 21.01, which is a pretty interesting one.
In some respects it has some really interesting tools. On the other hand, some of the stuff is arguably even more cluttered than our menus that some people want to streamline. I think our menus are easier to navigate, so it’s a trade-off, because Puppy does have a few handy tools.
Overall, though I do still like both of them, I can count on antiX much more as an every day distribution, and I rarely miss a day without antiX, whereas this is the first time I’ve run any variety of Puppy in months.
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Brian Masinick
rokytnji
Managed to pull up a “aw snap ” screen on a GhostBSD install. Did some updates. Aw Snap on reboot.
Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problemsBrian Masinick
Try NomadBSD, very promising BSD and you can run it live. Based on FreeBSD
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Brian MasinickBobC
Slacko has had booting problems the last couple of releases, but I finally figured it out.
I agree it has some really good features, but what is missing is something that doesn’t come on the flashdrive.
The quality and availability of support is the difference.
Brian Masinick
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