Posts by The Spider 15 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2022
Oddly enough, whenever I put a fresh install of Mageia (Linux) on my systems, there is also something HP-related, and likewise, I have always avoided their products.
Past experience has shown that it can be at least turned off, but as it appears to affect nothing when I do this, why is it part of a default install?
Mystery...
For a long time, there seemed to be a problem with their repos and I couldn't get a new install to work. Recently, however, they seem to have fixed this and I now have it working alongside Plasma on my Mageia 9 main machine.
It works fine - in fact, speed-wise it is observably faster than Plasma in use - and all programs etc. are accessible. There do seem to be a few which cough a bit but this is Linux, so there will be a way around it.
Congratulations to the TDE team. This is great work (and shows how little my desktop tastes have changed in the last, say, ten or twelve years).
This, exactly. Originally the only choice was Micros˜˜01 as I didn't have enough dough for an Apple (although I was already building my own machines), but since Linux came along, I haven't needed either - unless forced to at work, and then for "compatibility" with other users rather than any real utility above or beyond that of an alternative.
Having said all of this, maybe I should (as stated elsewhere) be grateful that the constant trials of early Windows prepared my mind and gave me experience of installation and maintenance which come in handy whenever I "do" something potentially (or factually) injurious with modern Linux. It's always good to have an "alternative".
As this thread no sooner began than the "Year of the L. Desktop" shtick started, let me offer my opinions.
Currently I work on a range of systems which inclde Mageia Linux 8 and 9, Win10, Win7 (on an old, second-hand mini-laptop), and several incarnations of Android on other devices. The Mageia installs usually wrote over partitions which used to have an incarnation of Win, and I have been using different shades of Mandrake, Mandriva and Mageia consistently here since 2005.
When it comes to the question of migration from W to some form of L, I suspect (based on my own experience) that it is those who, in the now-remote past, had to put up with regular re-installs of Win that would find the transition to L easier; they have experience which includes solving the very kinds of issues that arise during an installation.
However, although I have three different versions of W spread across a number of machines, I don't normally use it because Mageia has all the compatibility that I need; my only gripe is that I am far from sure whether I really need systemd and have been looking elsewhere the last couple of years... but seriously, a person can live without M$Office and the like and still be productive; it hardly takes any flexibility of mind.
So, if M$ actually went belly-up and disappeared some time, I wouldn't miss it because I already have all the functionality that I need - including slic3r for my recently-purchased 3D printer and multiple options for print publishing (the use of which goes as far back as 2008).
However, what amuses me is that when offering their opinions about exactly which version of L a Win refugee might plump for, it's usually either Ubuntu or Mint. I get the impression that they haven't really tried many different distros. Perhaps said refugees need to be pointed in the direction of Distrowatch to choose for themselves?
This makes me wish that Jon had not decided to go down the Chrome route - back in the gold old days of the original Opera, they had their own rendering engine. This, plus tabbed browsing, was wonderful.
These kind of tricks from the Chocolate Factory do make me wish Jon and his team had created their own, new rendering engine.
All this talk of XP reminds me that when I first came out to East Asia, I didn't have a machine of my own, and had the estimable joy of first trying to use XP first on a Japanese language laptop, and later on a Traditional Chinese-language office PC. Later I built my first Korean PC and installed XP home on it.
But you couldn't be too careful... later, I bought my first laptop, installed some (well-known) scanning software, and this detected no fewer than sixteen (yes, 16) instances of Chinese spyware. On a new machine, unused for anything at that point; it looked like they were already in place when the thing arrived. And that was XP, which of course came without even a firewall. Which I then installed.
"Security" and "Windows XP" are words which never went together... no wonder I switched to Mandrake!
I've been living and working in Korea since 2003, and this simply shows that nothing changes. Nobody ever seems to have a plan, and nobody ever seems to think that stuff might suddenly go down or that there will be a serious problem.
I'm not involved in anything to do with computing here, but the principle applies to everything. This is merely a higher-level example.
Clearly they had realised the issue and had instigated a response, but as the author here suggests, it was a bit too late... again, no surprises there...
This is so close to my own use case that you simply wouldn't believe it - except that my last laptop was Win10 and I couldn't co-install Mageia on it.
Started off with Mandrake 10, after arriving here in Korea, and stayed with them until they became Mandriva, then jumped ship to Mageia, which was a very smooth transition.
As others have said here, KDE 4 was a bit of a wreck and around 3.5.10 was mature and well-developed, not to say responsive. Now I am running KDE 5.x and it is better, but I would still be happy with 3.5. Still using the Plastik theme. I can now do almost anything I want and do not normally need Windows, which is usually a work requirement.
The only thing that I think will eventually make me abandon it is the preponderance of Poettering (because it is based on Red Hat), which I think I could live happily without... I was just toying with the idea of downloading a live Slack install to try it with KDE...
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