Installed Linux Mint 18.3 - now bored

[buster]

Our club's motto: 'If it ain't broke, you're not trying hard enough.'  Finally installed Mint 18.3 and everything now works. So what should I do? Break it on purpose?

#1. Here's the hardware I used: Machine internals about 7 years old. AMD 3 core cpu, 6 gig ram, Gigabyte motherboard, good Radeon video card, 16 year old tower, 16 year old wonderful multi-button keyboard, various and sundry parts, 21 inch 1080p monitor which used to be a TV.

#2. Had been running a Ubuntu Mate system which was perfect. The weather is cold, I was bored, so I decided, inadvertently, to create chaos. Like how stupid can I get? (No answer needed.)

#3. Try one: Installed openSUSE, which is a wonderful system. It was gorgeous in appearance, simple and logical, and quick. BUT... I could not for the life of me get to see shares on MS systems or allow others to see my shares. The terms, the steps, the permissions for this distro are designed for people, like some in our club, who actually understand this local network stuff. So...

#4. Try two: Installed MX Linux, which is a quick, easy to use system running with Xfce as a desktop. Very comfortable. It  was quirky. But it was usable. But Ubuntu Mate was better.

#5. Try three: Blundered through an install of Mint which had all kinds of quirks. Totally not acceptable. Had my local lan one minute, and not the next. Some desktop icons wouldn't open. Not good enough.

#6. Try four: Why not reinstall Ubuntu Mate? I'll tell you why. My old and trusted DVD player decided to die at this exact moment in time. And I have a stack of empty DVD discs sitting from years ago. Life is cruel.

#7. It's not all doom and gloom however. Discovered two things. First I used Mintstick in Mint to create a bootable Mint iso on a usb stick - dead simple. And second, I did this optimistically, because I remembered something from the 'old days'. You can't reuse /home from a different distro, which I had been doing - hence the wonkyness. Renamed /home to /homeold.

#8. The install was easy. Everything worked. But emails, addresses, uBlock, bookmarks and things were gone. And now the magic.

#9. Opened /homeold and made hidden files visible. drag and dropped the Thunderbird and Mozilla Firebird hidden files into /home, and voila! it was like going home to comfort. All the emails, addresses, and bookmarks were there waiting.

#10. Local lan was pretty simple, and after entering my upstairs Win 10 system, and putting in password, and saying remember this, I decided to try bookmarking my home from the Microsoft system. And the bookmark worked the next day in Mint! No password. It's like a local file.

Many will say, yea yea, done that, been there. But now I have a solid wonderful system. And I'm sort of happy.  And it was an exciting 3 days. And I loved most of it. But it is boring when everything works.

[Jason]

Good job. I like keeping my home on a separate partition and then being careful to not reformat it when I do a new install. With all your talk of openSUSE, thinking of giving it (and KDE) a try. KDE is really starting to look good. I played with it a bit as a VM.

Here are some suggestions to bring back the excitement.

1. Install the latest kernel version (under the View -> Linux Kernels in Update Manager)
2. Get ALL the updates including 4s and see what happens then. You might be able to break something if you're lucky (unlucky?) enough.
3. Try Freespire now that it's back or some other wonky distro you've never tried or even heard of.
4. Setup arch using my instructions here:   http://forums.plugintolinux.ca/index.php/topic,230.msg1313.html#msg1313  It's not as hard as you think but it will make you understand a few more things about how a Linux OS is organized. It can be done in under an hour.

[fox]

I discovered Harry's Thunderbird trick (transferring mail folders from one distro to another) a few months ago. A big relief to have access to the local mail you've been saving.

I second Jason's comment about installing Arch if you want to have something to play with. It turned out to be must less difficult than I imagined. And if you like to play, Arch issues a constant stream of upgrades. Enable the unofficial AUR repository to get programs that aren't in the regular Arch repository. Some have to be compiled, which is more or less automatic but a few fail. Then you can have fun troubleshooting them. Despite these occurrences, Arch hasn't broken on me in the more than 6 months I've had it installed (on two computers), and I've been able to get any program I normally use installed and running in Arch.

While I have respect for the look, feel and operation of KDE, I still don't prefer it to Gnome or Unity. If you do install it alongside one of those (i.e. in the same distro), be warned that it will do a few annoying things when you log out of KDE and into Gnome or Unity. It might do the same to other desktop environments.

[buster]

Thanks Jason and Mike for the suggestions. Installing is challenging, easy, inspiring and annoying all at the same time. So if it's a perfect setup, and the machine couldn't run better, why do we feel a bit sad?

If either of you has a machine that works that you don't want, I will play with installs on it. But this is a 'work' machine that I need, and it's old like me so parts stop working every once in awhile. If I told the computer I was putting in Arch it would probably croak.

I didn't actually transfer a mail folder, Mike. I transferred .thunderbird, a hidden file. We always called them dot files. Thus I had Mint's take on Thunderbird, and data from the old system.

Did you mean to say you formatted /home Jason, or you avoided the format? I don't format /home because of all the data files I have in there. Silly of me not to remember the rename trick from home to homeold.

I didn't add in the part about installing the latest kernel upgrade. For this install the kernel stays original, and no more '4' upgsrades!

If I knew more about computers talking to each other, I'd be running openSUSE right now. Good system. But Mint 18.3 is excellent and easy. Should be able to run it for a few years.

[Jason]

If either of you has a machine that works that you don't want, I will play with installs on it. But this is a 'work' machine that I need, and it's old like me so parts stop working every once in awhile. If I told the computer I was putting in Arch it would probably croak.

Not likely, Arch is lighter than most distros because you choose what goes into it. You get nothing by default. Having said that, I've actually demonstrated during a meeting an Arch install from start to finish though I ended up with only the OS and the light LXDE desktop. You still want to learn things, don't you? But being your work computer, I can understand not wanting to play too much. I had assumed given that you tried several distros already that this computer was suitable for playing with. You could always try it as a VM (virtual machine) first.

I didn't actually transfer a mail folder, Mike. I transferred .thunderbird, a hidden file. We always called them dot files. Thus I had Mint's take on Thunderbird, and data from the old system.

That is a folder. It's a hidden folder. You can tell if you look in your home directory using your file manager (and turning on hidden files) and it shows up as a folder. Putting the dot ('.') at the beginning 'hides' it in Linux. Dotfiles are hidden but otherwise regular files.

Did you mean to say you formatted /home Jason, or you avoided the format? I don't format /home because of all the data files I have in there. Silly of me not to remember the rename trick from home to homeold.

That was a typo. Thanks for noticing! I fixed it.

[buster]

"You still want to learn things, don't you? "

Really depends on what I'm learning. Never been fond of work. And once the Arch system is running what you have is still just a Linux system. And a lost pile of hours that you can never reclaim that you spent entering commands and reading about how to do the install.

Learning how to fly a radio controlled model airplane seems like enjoyable learning.

Thanks for clarifying the dot files.

[Jason]

It's well worth the time, you'd be surprised how easy it is, Buster. Fox was.

[fox]

FYI, those mail folders I transferred are inside the "Local" folder which is inside the folder .Thunderbird. It probably doesn't matter which way you do it, but I was being conservative in that I didn't want to chance messing up any configuration files in case they work differently in two different distros (or computers).

Incidentally, I installed Arch on my work computer just for fun, but I never wiped my working Ubuntu partition and in fact I continue to use that for my work. I occasionally use the Arch partition, but it's there just to play with. I don't regret the time I put into it; it was a fun learning experience.

[buster]

Jason suggested I install Arch and said:

"It's well worth the time, you'd be surprised how easy it is, Buster."

So I did this install, in the form of Manjero, into virtual with 2 different installs,
one KDE and one Xfce. Not a fully clean Arch, but a good beginner's approach.

#1. Manjaro's site said that the guest additions would work right away in Vmware. Not true. So I did the usual stuff and still they didn't work. Started reading their forums and saw their solutions and thought, "Why would anyone go through all that? A nice workaround is a different distro."

#2. The Manjaro KDE was surprisingly slow compared to openSuse's, which is quite quick. Of course, this is likely Manjaro's fault, not Arch's. The Xfce is much better. Nimble.

#3. So I called up the software manager, got the correct repositories, and installed TuxRacer (quick), Kpat (quick) and qbittorrent, which was interesting as I got to watch it compile. Binary vs source. And I thought, "A different distro is calling you Harry." Many different distros actually. The software worked by the way. Tux raced very well.

You must remember I was the first human to say, "There must be an easier way." And I have tried to live that motto my whole life. I'll give this  a few more days, but it totally goes against my principles, just as Gentoo did. But I will give it a fair try.

Note: The install software is excellent!

[fox]

Whatever Manjaro's actual shortcomings, installing Manjaro is like installing Ubuntu; not like installing Arch. If your purpose in installing Manjaro is to get to play with an Arch distro the easiest way possible, then it is a good choice. But if you really want to learn something by installing a distro, try raw Arch. 

[Jason]

I understand what you're saying, Buster, though it's important to know that being Arch-based doesn't necessarily make it Arch. The Arch community won't support users of Arch-based distros because:

Arch-based distributions have their own support fora and users of those distributions should be actively encouraged to seek support there. These distributions often use different packages, package versions, repositories, and make custom system configurations silently, practically rendering support for such projects within Arch Linux impossible. Community technical support shall only be provided for the Arch Linux distribution and the Arch User Repository. Issues with, and requesting support for, derivate distributions, or operating systems other than Arch Linux are prohibited.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Code_of_conduct#Arch_Linux_distribution_support_.2Aonly.2A

Fox experimented more with Manjara than I did. I think he had a couple of times that serious things broke with Manjaro (like system wouldn't boot) whereas when he used Arch, this didn't happen. It might have to do with the fact that Manjaro holds back updates and releases them in clusters. Arch might break something but they'll release an update to fix within a day or two at most.

You might decide not to use it on a regular basis but every user should install Arch at least once. It's fun and typing in terminal commands isn't that bad. Especially with <tab> autocomplete of commands and filenames.

To me, the purpose of Arch isn't to have a prebuilt system. It's to build your own. Though cod3poet will probably disagree with me, I really don't think it performs better or is more efficient or slim just because it's Arch. But it can be very slim and fast loading if you want it that way because you customize it. But you can still have a running system in under an hour with a web browser and a few other apps. Next time you have a rainy day, try it, Buster! You will be glad you did; I promise you! Get beyond just installing different distros and make your own OS exactly the way you like it. Or, don't. But you did say you were bored with how easy it worked.

Though I'm not using Arch right now I found installing it quite interesting and it gave me a tremendous feeling of accomplishment even though all I did was follow the installation wiki, though my quick and dirty install is easy because it makes some choices for you so you don't have to read all links in the wiki. I did that reading for you

[ssfc72]

And here is the PLUG Forum Link, to Jason's posting, on how to install Arch:
http://forums.plugintolinux.ca/index.php/topic,230.msg1313.html#msg1313

[Jason]

And here is the PLUG Forum Link, to Jason's posting, on how to install Arch:
http://forums.plugintolinux.ca/index.php/topic,230.msg1313.html#msg1313

Thanks, Bill. I'm going to have to call you Bill, too hard to type out ssfc72 every time I mentioned the link a while back above but doesn't hurt to mention it again.

[buster]

Remember about a quarter century ago when we scraped together used computer parts and put together an actual working computer! And we had problems with hardware conflicts, moved little connectors on motherboards, hoped the ram we had was enough, installed a system we got from a friend of a friend, learned the arcane language of hard drive partitions, tried to get a desktop that stayed approximately in the centre of the screen, hooked up to the phone modem which worked if we were lucky? And then put in Redhat say about 1997 or 8? And actually got it all to work?

That gave me a sense of accomplishment. And there were a number of things I 'accomplished' not in the realm of computers that I still feel good about.

As I close in on 80 years, a sense of 'time well spent' becomes more important than a 'sense of accomplishment'.

It's probably an age thing, driven home, no doubt, by seeing some of my close friends die. And I'm not trying to be dramatic about the whole thing, it's just that what's important to you changes as you get ancient. A sense of accomplishment isn't one of the important things anymore.

But if I was a youngster like you guys.....well...that would be so different.

[Jason]

I getcha though I don't think this is comparable to any of those things. Setting it up takes about the same amount of time as installing two or three distros which you will probably end up doing anyway. I don't spend a lot of time trying to get things to work, either, anymore. But I figured it'd be something fun to try and thought it would be a lot more involved, probably like you're thinking. It turned out it wasn't that involved at all. But I won't try to talk you into it anymore