December Days 2021 #20: Making A Mint
Dec. 20th, 2021 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
I was significantly bolstered by my successes with Kubuntu as a working operating system to keep using Linux as a daily driver, except when I wanted to play games. That said, this is also the time where alone time to go into the office and use the computer there was not very often at all, and even when building a new machine from scratch to attach to the television in the living room, there wasn't actually a lot of time to use it then, either. Having someone who wants you constantly near them and interacting with them in the limited time you see each other between work and need makes it really hard for you to do a whole lot with your computer when they're around. Certainly not impossible, by any stretch, but not the easiest. Add on to that the duties of being first tier technical support for all the technology in the household, the increased workload of taking care of all the animals' feeding and litter cleaning / outside running (except when I was at work), and you can see that the opportunities I had for advancing my own knowledge of playing cool games seemed to be very limited indeed outside of work.
In the intervening time between this computer and the last Linux machine, the thing that has been the greatest strength of Ubuntu was now something I wasn't particularly fond of. The update release schedule seemed too slow to be able to fix problems popping up, and it seemed like after every major release, I had to reinstall the proprietary graphics driver, which always seemed to slide closer and closer to losing its official support with each iteration. That, and there had been a major shift in how things were arranged with KDE 4 and Plasma, which took its cues from disaster OSes like Windows Vista and Windows ME and which seemed determined not to play nice at all with the graphics drivers I had installed. (It was possible to restore the classic menu with a few settings changes, so that wasn't actually was big of a dealbreaker as it could have been, but it contributed to the feeling of "no" that was coming from continuing to use Kubuntu.)
The nice thing about Linux distributions is that if the one you're currently running setups being the one you want to run, there's hundreds of distributions, both new and old, for you to switch to until you find the one that's right for where you are now. The bad thing about Linux distributions is that there are hundreds of them out at any given time, many of which are based in the same basic system. They might offer a different Desktop Environment and default package manager than the others, but a lot of their functionality remains the same, because the programs you are interested in are generally available for just about every major distribution, and therefore available for all of its children, forks, and derivatives. Sifting distributions to determine what's actually different between them takes time, and a lot of the conclusions you'll draw is that they're the same under the hood, but they've gone in radically different directions in aesthetics design and amount of time put into making the distribution easy to use or beginner-friendly.
So I fell for an Ubuntu derivative called Linux Mint, which had good aesthetics, enabled the non-free repositories by default, played a lot better with the graphics drivers, and in its KDE edition, had the classic menu installed by default. It also did one of the better jobs of explaining how critical some system updates were by having its updater tool assign a numerical priority to each update of a package, depending on where it came from and the security necessity of whatever was being patched or modified. Lower numbers were higher priority and shaded more red than the lowest priority things shaded green. And while I tend to update my system all at once, because that's what actually helps keep it all running together, it was definitely interesting to see how they conceived of the importance of each update.
Mint, as a distribution, lagged slightly behind main Ubuntu releases with their own, since they based theirs on Ubuntu. Their naming schemes also followed after Ubuntu's, in a way. Ubuntu's naming convention is alliterative, compared of an adjective and an animal's name. Each release advances one letter in the alphabet, wrapping back around to A after Zed. Mint also advanced one letter with each major release, but all of their distributions are women's names. (The Debian project that Ubuntu forked from uses characters from the Toy Story movies to name their characters, with one name reserved at that time for the "unstable" repository - Sid.) For a few cycles, things seemed to be working well and updating, but there was something that happened, the specifics of which I've forgotten, where I definitely need to have a newer version of a particular piece of software, and it wouldn't be arriving in the semi-yearly updates for a good long while. On systems set up on the release schedule of Ubuntu, while it's possible to find ways of getting new things early, it's discouraged, in that it both requires you to go mucking about in the configuration files by hand and that pinning one thing can often break other things, to the point where one pin can topple an entire house of cards. For people who know what they're doing, it's possible, but it requires skills that I didn't have (and still don't). Rather than abandon Mint entirely, however, because I still liked my K Desktop Environment (even as the requirements for either proprietary drivers or cards extremely well supported by the open source drivers became ever more stringent), I looked into a version that had been recently introduced to the Mint family. Nowadays they have given this distribution the name "Debbie," which is the woman's name closest to the actual thing, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). LMDE was pinned to the "testing" repository, the first step removed from "unstable", which meant it was likely sal the packages in there would get along with each other, but it didn't have the guarantees of being a stable version. Using testing also meant avoiding the same problem that Ubuntu had, except Debian releases work on a much lengthier time between major releases, and they don't always have a supported upgrade path that isn't "reinstall the new system and restore your data and customizations from scratch." So the idea of being a "rolling release" system, without the discrete version jumps and associated install/reinstall/unsupported upgrade process dance, was something I realized I wanted in a distribution, which would allow me to tailor my choices in certain directions when the question inevitably came up about what distribution to install the next time it became a question. (Because it will come up again. It always comes up again when things like new computers enter and old ones exit.) LMDE worked great for me in producing continuity and the ability to keep moving forward with the same system for a good long time. Until, of course, the hardware associated with the box finally died and the question once again came up about what distribution to install on the replacement box.
All the flavors of Mint that I used were based on other distributions of Linux, but they'd had a significant amount of polish applied to them in service of trying to get a Just Works box to appear from the get-go. In addition to the cosmetic changes, Mint also generally included non-free material as part of its defaults, so that when people went looking for accelerated graphics drivers or proprietary software that had Linux releases, they would be able to find them and install them easily. Ubuntu and Debian-based systems would allow for easily adding in personal package archives (PPAs) that could contain non-free or really up to date programs and libraries rather than waiting for the next release, but those were mucking around in the text files changes, where Mint often had them already present and enabled by default. I've moved a little from "ugh, I just want a system that mostly Just Works" to "ugh, I want a system that mostly Just Works and I don't want to have to spend three hours every time I dist-upgrade re-enabling all of the non-free repositories and upgrading those packages and then re-wrangling any drivers and config files to go along with that so I can get back to the desktop I was familiar with." Mint was pretty good about that for the time, so that's the distribution I went with.
These days, there's significant work going into trying to make distribution-independent packages that can be deployed on almost any system without knowing what the underlying parts are. (We should encourage distribution-agnostic distribution so that software is available to everyone, which may lower the barriers of entry for some companies to make Linux versions of their software.) With more development toward these kinds of self-contained packages, it might become less important to know what you're running in favor of browsing what's available in the package store. Crucially, being able to just browse a package store and install stuff would greatly reduce the startup learning cost of Linux as a daily driver. Non-technical persons could potentially use a fully Linux system without having to use the command line at all for their regular usage. Yes, I know, blasphemy, but if you want more share of installations and people sticking around long enough to learn how to do more advanced things, you have to meet them at the place they are at, and for most people who are not the Children of DOS, that means the GUI has to be able to do all of the important things. Yes, even if the GUI program is transparently a wrapper for the terminal to run commands.
I'll get back up on my soapbox about Linux adoption and ease of use later on in the series, once there are tiny affordable computers for people to be able to play with again without being worried at destroying the family computer. For now, though, I'll rest on my intermediate Linux skills and showcase a few other interesting tricks that I'm going to pull off because of that skill and knowledge.
- CPU: Advanced Micro Devices Athlon II @ 2.0 or 2.4 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: nVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 2 GB GDDR5 RAM, max resolution 1920x1080
- Sound: Onboard sound with 5.1 capabilities, connected either to 2.1 stereo system through 3.5" jack or stereo out through HDMI
- Inputs/Peripherals: Keyboard (USB) Mouse (USB), HP 960c combination Printer and Scanner, Gigabit Ethernet port, 3.5" microphone input jack, 6 total USB 2.0 ports, TV Tuner card (unused),
- Storage: 1TB Hard Disk Drive (Primary), 500 GB Hard Disk Drive (Secondary), BD-ROM Blu-ray Media Drive compatible with DVDs,
- OS: Windows 7, Linux Mint KDE 10 "Julia" → Linux Mint Debian Edition
I was significantly bolstered by my successes with Kubuntu as a working operating system to keep using Linux as a daily driver, except when I wanted to play games. That said, this is also the time where alone time to go into the office and use the computer there was not very often at all, and even when building a new machine from scratch to attach to the television in the living room, there wasn't actually a lot of time to use it then, either. Having someone who wants you constantly near them and interacting with them in the limited time you see each other between work and need makes it really hard for you to do a whole lot with your computer when they're around. Certainly not impossible, by any stretch, but not the easiest. Add on to that the duties of being first tier technical support for all the technology in the household, the increased workload of taking care of all the animals' feeding and litter cleaning / outside running (except when I was at work), and you can see that the opportunities I had for advancing my own knowledge of playing cool games seemed to be very limited indeed outside of work.
In the intervening time between this computer and the last Linux machine, the thing that has been the greatest strength of Ubuntu was now something I wasn't particularly fond of. The update release schedule seemed too slow to be able to fix problems popping up, and it seemed like after every major release, I had to reinstall the proprietary graphics driver, which always seemed to slide closer and closer to losing its official support with each iteration. That, and there had been a major shift in how things were arranged with KDE 4 and Plasma, which took its cues from disaster OSes like Windows Vista and Windows ME and which seemed determined not to play nice at all with the graphics drivers I had installed. (It was possible to restore the classic menu with a few settings changes, so that wasn't actually was big of a dealbreaker as it could have been, but it contributed to the feeling of "no" that was coming from continuing to use Kubuntu.)
The nice thing about Linux distributions is that if the one you're currently running setups being the one you want to run, there's hundreds of distributions, both new and old, for you to switch to until you find the one that's right for where you are now. The bad thing about Linux distributions is that there are hundreds of them out at any given time, many of which are based in the same basic system. They might offer a different Desktop Environment and default package manager than the others, but a lot of their functionality remains the same, because the programs you are interested in are generally available for just about every major distribution, and therefore available for all of its children, forks, and derivatives. Sifting distributions to determine what's actually different between them takes time, and a lot of the conclusions you'll draw is that they're the same under the hood, but they've gone in radically different directions in aesthetics design and amount of time put into making the distribution easy to use or beginner-friendly.
So I fell for an Ubuntu derivative called Linux Mint, which had good aesthetics, enabled the non-free repositories by default, played a lot better with the graphics drivers, and in its KDE edition, had the classic menu installed by default. It also did one of the better jobs of explaining how critical some system updates were by having its updater tool assign a numerical priority to each update of a package, depending on where it came from and the security necessity of whatever was being patched or modified. Lower numbers were higher priority and shaded more red than the lowest priority things shaded green. And while I tend to update my system all at once, because that's what actually helps keep it all running together, it was definitely interesting to see how they conceived of the importance of each update.
Mint, as a distribution, lagged slightly behind main Ubuntu releases with their own, since they based theirs on Ubuntu. Their naming schemes also followed after Ubuntu's, in a way. Ubuntu's naming convention is alliterative, compared of an adjective and an animal's name. Each release advances one letter in the alphabet, wrapping back around to A after Zed. Mint also advanced one letter with each major release, but all of their distributions are women's names. (The Debian project that Ubuntu forked from uses characters from the Toy Story movies to name their characters, with one name reserved at that time for the "unstable" repository - Sid.) For a few cycles, things seemed to be working well and updating, but there was something that happened, the specifics of which I've forgotten, where I definitely need to have a newer version of a particular piece of software, and it wouldn't be arriving in the semi-yearly updates for a good long while. On systems set up on the release schedule of Ubuntu, while it's possible to find ways of getting new things early, it's discouraged, in that it both requires you to go mucking about in the configuration files by hand and that pinning one thing can often break other things, to the point where one pin can topple an entire house of cards. For people who know what they're doing, it's possible, but it requires skills that I didn't have (and still don't). Rather than abandon Mint entirely, however, because I still liked my K Desktop Environment (even as the requirements for either proprietary drivers or cards extremely well supported by the open source drivers became ever more stringent), I looked into a version that had been recently introduced to the Mint family. Nowadays they have given this distribution the name "Debbie," which is the woman's name closest to the actual thing, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). LMDE was pinned to the "testing" repository, the first step removed from "unstable", which meant it was likely sal the packages in there would get along with each other, but it didn't have the guarantees of being a stable version. Using testing also meant avoiding the same problem that Ubuntu had, except Debian releases work on a much lengthier time between major releases, and they don't always have a supported upgrade path that isn't "reinstall the new system and restore your data and customizations from scratch." So the idea of being a "rolling release" system, without the discrete version jumps and associated install/reinstall/unsupported upgrade process dance, was something I realized I wanted in a distribution, which would allow me to tailor my choices in certain directions when the question inevitably came up about what distribution to install the next time it became a question. (Because it will come up again. It always comes up again when things like new computers enter and old ones exit.) LMDE worked great for me in producing continuity and the ability to keep moving forward with the same system for a good long time. Until, of course, the hardware associated with the box finally died and the question once again came up about what distribution to install on the replacement box.
All the flavors of Mint that I used were based on other distributions of Linux, but they'd had a significant amount of polish applied to them in service of trying to get a Just Works box to appear from the get-go. In addition to the cosmetic changes, Mint also generally included non-free material as part of its defaults, so that when people went looking for accelerated graphics drivers or proprietary software that had Linux releases, they would be able to find them and install them easily. Ubuntu and Debian-based systems would allow for easily adding in personal package archives (PPAs) that could contain non-free or really up to date programs and libraries rather than waiting for the next release, but those were mucking around in the text files changes, where Mint often had them already present and enabled by default. I've moved a little from "ugh, I just want a system that mostly Just Works" to "ugh, I want a system that mostly Just Works and I don't want to have to spend three hours every time I dist-upgrade re-enabling all of the non-free repositories and upgrading those packages and then re-wrangling any drivers and config files to go along with that so I can get back to the desktop I was familiar with." Mint was pretty good about that for the time, so that's the distribution I went with.
These days, there's significant work going into trying to make distribution-independent packages that can be deployed on almost any system without knowing what the underlying parts are. (We should encourage distribution-agnostic distribution so that software is available to everyone, which may lower the barriers of entry for some companies to make Linux versions of their software.) With more development toward these kinds of self-contained packages, it might become less important to know what you're running in favor of browsing what's available in the package store. Crucially, being able to just browse a package store and install stuff would greatly reduce the startup learning cost of Linux as a daily driver. Non-technical persons could potentially use a fully Linux system without having to use the command line at all for their regular usage. Yes, I know, blasphemy, but if you want more share of installations and people sticking around long enough to learn how to do more advanced things, you have to meet them at the place they are at, and for most people who are not the Children of DOS, that means the GUI has to be able to do all of the important things. Yes, even if the GUI program is transparently a wrapper for the terminal to run commands.
I'll get back up on my soapbox about Linux adoption and ease of use later on in the series, once there are tiny affordable computers for people to be able to play with again without being worried at destroying the family computer. For now, though, I'll rest on my intermediate Linux skills and showcase a few other interesting tricks that I'm going to pull off because of that skill and knowledge.
