Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

All hail the easy to use!

Filed under
Linux

I've run Linux since before the turn of the century. I've installed, run, and reviewed LFS, Arch, Debian, and Slackware. I ran Gentoo for years and years. I remember when we not only had to go to the MPlayer site to download and install the win32codecs, but we had to also re-compile MPlayer and Xine to use them. I remember when I had untar, build, and load the NVIDIA drivers and edit the xfree86 configuration file by hand... after I rebuilt the kernel for agpgart. Shoot I remember as far back as to have to setserial support for ISA sound cards, modems, and such - after tracking down hardware addresses and interrupts. I've setup and run Web servers from the cli for years. My point is I know Linux. I love the commandline.

But after 10+ years of fiddling, I've come to realize one significant thing:

All hail the easy to use!

I don't presume to speak for all Linux old timers, but for myself, I like a distro that I can install and go. This includes multimedia codecs and browser plugins. This includes drivers for my proprietary hardware. This includes a pretty desktop. Install and go Baby!

This is why I like SimplyMepis. I like Linux Mint. I like PCLOS. I like Sabayon. I like Pardus.

Oh, I still like Slackware, Debian, and Gentoo too, for nostalgic reasons, but when it comes to choosing a desktop these days, I pick from the first list.

I know why the bigger commercial distros can't include all that stuff and why some others don't. But this is why we hope these smaller projects never give up and go home. They make life easier and these days, we can all use that.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Red Hat in 2000

I can still remember Red Hat in 2000. I was impressed by it, but it was more like a programmer's toolbox, not the type of thing I'd let my parents work with. When you see the change as it happens, it's easy to miss the transitions and appreciate the gradual improvement.

Amen

"I don't presume to speak for all Linux old timers, but for myself, I like a distro that I can install and go."

I've encountered quite a few who follow that path. The further we go, the less time we have.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.