Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Goodbye Ubuntu, welcome Mint

9 Comments

And so this morning my PC refused to start. It took about half an hour to get it going with an emergency disk, and it turned out my Ubuntu system was completely crippled.
It was possible to save the data, but everything else was gone – time to re-install the operating system.

Now, this is not a tragedy, actually, it’s more of an opportunity – I have been postponing the necessary updates to my OS for weeks now, and really, had I waited for the right moment – a free afternoon, no urgent work to do, no pending projects, I would have never done it.
But necessity pushes everything out of the way – I need my PC to work.

And this is also a great opportunity to move away from Ubuntu, that I love dearly but has become bloated and slow, and to try a different distro of Linux, to wit, Linux Mint.

And here I am, six hours later, exploring this different-but-familiar environment. Everything seems to work fine, my PC is faster and so far the only problem is getting Scrivener to work properly.
But I’ll work on it.
A minor catastrophe turned into a nice opportunity.

Author: Davide Mana

Paleontologist. By day, researcher, teacher and ecological statistics guru. By night, pulp fantasy author-publisher, translator and blogger. In the spare time, Orientalist Anonymous, guerilla cook.

9 thoughts on “Goodbye Ubuntu, welcome Mint

  1. My husband is a big Linux fan. I’m sure it’ll do great for you once you get Scrivener to behave.

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  2. I’m sitting here with my primary home PC still using Windows 7, as does my laptop. My son’ s PC is running Windows 8, and we both installed Never 10 programs when Microsoft tried ramming Windows 10 down our throats. With Microsoft preparing to stop providing support for 7 after Jan of 2020, they are deluging my computers with updates to supposedly help me out after ongoing support ends.

    Every Damned day they’re doing this, interrupting my use and after every update and installation my computers are getting slower and screwier. I have a spare desktop running 8.1 that I will use to replace the current one, and I’m looking at a refurbished laptop also running 8.1 to replace my existing one.

    I’ll be getting rid of the old desktop and keeping the old laptop for standalone, off the internet use and storage purposes. I am so sick and F**king tired of Microsoft and their Bullshit bloatware and spyware.

    I’ve been thinking about Linux for awhile but I’m still on the fence. Any suggestions or opinions you could share?

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    • I’ve been a Windows user for ages, until one day Windows 2000 died on me and I had a paper to deliver. No amount of work helped.
      I was able to recover my files and hit the deadline thanks to an early version of Linux Ubuntu. I moved to Ubuntu and never ooked back.
      My suggestion: download a LiveCD of either Ubuntu or Linux Mint – these are ISO images you can burn to a DVD, and then use to try the system. Basically youstart your PC with the DVD in the drive, and the Linux machine will load. You can play around and get the general feel of the OS.
      I am no longer familiar with recent version of Windows, but I think Ubuntu might be more familiar (but really, Linux Mint looks like a good old Win98).
      A Live CD is the best way to try without any risk.
      I really recommend moving to Linux – no virus, most of the software is free, and it handles resources a lot better, so if you have an older machine, it will still be working fast and smooth.

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      • You can also put them on a USB stick via unetbootin (running on windows)

        I found amazing (and free) alternatives for most of the software I needed (openoffice/libreoffice suite, Gimp for photo editing, inkscape for vector graphics, Scribus as alternative to InDesign: you can do everything you need) and it’s not been harder than Windows at all. You also have several graphic options, even if u stick to ubuntu versions only (kubuntu, xubuntu, lubuntu, whatever…)

        I’m currently working on resetting everything after a new install on a brand new mini pc, I’m pretty happy abt it

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  3. I left the Ubuntu derivatives some years ago, now I’m using openSuse with KDE desktop environment, and happily.
    But both openSuse and KDE are way different than Ubuntu and Gnome: different package manager and system tools, different look and feel, and so on, so this is not really a suggestion.

    Also, an interesting distro is Elementary OS, it’s an Ubuntu derivative, and it focuses on providing a nice and clean user experience, resembling a bit MacOS on both interface and design philosophy, with a bunch of custom lightweight apps.

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  4. Thanks for the advice & suggestions guys. I swear I’m just so F’n fed up with Microsoft.

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