I’m a retired Unix admin. I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I’d developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.
Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn’t even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don’t have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don’t understand what that means…) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can’t have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It’s very clean and no video tearing. I still don’t have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I’m very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I’m used to that already after only a day.
It’s only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.
All that’s missing is a fetch screenshot to celebrate
Glad for you. It is not as easy as they paint it, specially here, but moving to Linux still good in so many aspects and I applaud you for doing so. Hold on tight on the ride, it is frustrating sometimes but worth it overall.
Why not slackware again?
Also welcome back!
Because I only used it for a few months and it was a while ago! It was ony mentioned to age me. Not long after I installed it we got nice new RS/6000 860 laptops and I ran an AIX desktop for a couple of years. Then we got Intel laptops and Windows.
I went with Debian because I’ve been running Ubuntu servers at home for years (since zfs on Linux became solid enough that I could switch from FreeBSD) so I’m comfortable with apt package management and wanted to stick with that. I didn’t want to stay with Ubuntu because of the commercialisation creeping in.
That’s fair man! Debian is pretty nice. I haven’t daily driven it but you do tend to get stuck on older versions of things unless you’re on sid (similar with slackware unless you’re on current) Oh damn what were your reasons for moving from freebsd back to Linux?
Also feel free to stop by the Slackware community!
Oh damn what were your reasons for moving from freebsd back to Linux?
My work was AIX, HP/UX and a bit of Solaris. Linux development was starting to get to the stage where our customers were looking at using it for “real” workloads and I figured I should get comfortable with it again so I’d be in a position to take on production servers at work.
I don’t think I’m concerned about being on older (stable) stuff - I really only use Firefox (I dumped the Debian release and added the Firefox repository) and a few utilities like a music player etc.
I was also considering openSUSE Tumbleweed and didn’t really decide not to do it - it’s just that a USB with Debian was sitting on my desk when I decided to do it, so that’s what I used. A big part of my anxiety about switching from Windows was getting my data under control - now that I’ve done that it won’t be an issue to switch distros so I might give it a go. I may even try Slackware again now that you’ve got me thinking about it.
That makes sense. The world runs on Linux, freebsd and then somewhere down the line macs and windows servers.
Thats fair. That problem only comes into play when you’re dealing with really new hardware like things with NPUs or the amd ai processors.
Hahaha love it! And the anxiety is legit I used to have an NTFS partition for the longest time till I found a way to consolidate things to my Linux partition.
Woo hoo!! Fair warning while somethings have become easier, Slackware is still Slackware tho but better build processes thru slackbuild etc. The rest of the Linux space has kind of crustaceaned with how they do things due to systemd.
