So Debian i386 / i686 is not “true” 32 bit? Basically the grandaddy of distros (other than Slackware)?
X Windows!!! It’s not even a lie (unless of course it’s using Wayland )
I didn’t really have much to do with it - I just knew it was hideous compared to MS Exchange… I vaguely remember some customer running Novell Small Business Server, and Groupwise came with it…
Groupwise was a pig of a thing - 16 bit from memory… single tasking… I managed a Solaris UNIX box doing DNS and SMTP gateway circa 2001 - and the bottleneck was Groupwise being unable to process simple streams of text as quickly as Solaris could send them…
I’ve got an old (several actually) IBM Thinkpad T4x (i.e. before IBM sold the brand to Lenovo) - couldn’t get ANY i386 distro to boot on it - 'cause they ALL defaulted to PAE and this Thinkpad CPU didn’t do PAE and would panic…
But I eventually found a way to get Debian to boot with a non-PAE kernel… I think I ended up using FreeBSD on it 'cause the FBSD 32 bit kernels never had PAE (or it was a special thing you had to add yourself)…
I remember it cost a small fortune too… i.e. before Linux and FOSS became as ubiquitous is it is today… and slightly before that, DOS / Windows users would pay a small fortune for a TCP/IP stack! Microsoft killed that industry (and it deserved killing too!) with TCP/IP addon for WFW 3.11…
Products like Hummingbird Exceed, or Reflection that cost literally hundreds of dollars…
I recently (maybe 2019? 2020?) experienced a customer who wanted me to get Hummingbird Exceed to work tunnelled over SSH - using another Hummingbird product (forget its name). It was one of those products / brand names that went where all shit “legacy” software goes to die: “Microfocus”. I NEVER got the piece of crap to work and then asked the question - “Why aren’t you just using MobaXterm? Which does this OUT OF THE BOX???” And the answer to that a couple days later was “Oh, yeah, it works, we’ll just use that!”… Doh!
~15 years ago (before I ever heard of Exceed) I used to do “tunnel X over SSH” on MS Windows with PuTTY and some free / OSS X display server, I think it was called MING??? That’s pretty much what MobaXterm does, but takes all the hard work out of it… I really can’t do my job without MobaXterm…
I have test driven many different distros over the last year, heck, even the last few months. I wanted to like Elementary OS, but I found it frustrating to use and bailed on it quickly. After I spent some time with other distros, I saw my opinions about what I liked – and didn’t – change quite a bit. So I gave Elementary OS another go. Same result.
Specific criticisms: Limited customizations. TOO limited. In an effort to stress simplicity, it seems to be ridiculously confining. Software management. Just problematic. Read what others have to say. Also was a bit glitchy. While it is polished, it is not smooth, if that makes sense. Some distros, like Fedora, have similar glitches at times, but Fedora feels more powerful out of the box that Elementary OS. Like you can dig under the hood and tweak many things that might be problematic for you. Elementary doesn’t feel like that at all. Those are merely my impressions, but I would not encourage anyone to start their Linux journey with EOS. And more experienced users will find it unnecessarily confining.
OK, if EOS is not good for a starter in Linux, can you tell us what is a good choice… there is a discussion ongoing at the moment about new user mistakes… it seems like choosing EOS would be a mistake.
My top recs in no particular order:
Pop! OS - very smooth, very robust, very polished, very intuitive. Strong software repository/app.
Zorin - Familiar layout and setup, good flexibility for customization, intuitive and easy to understand,
Ubuntu (Gnome or Budgie) - As much as I hate saying it, it’s very strong out of the box, it’s intuitive and support is awesome.
Mint - Very familiar, very powerful, very capable, easy to customize, incredible support, easy access to apps.
Nothing revolutionary with that list, but I currently have all of them running on my various laptops, some as old as 8 years. I’ve been through quite a few more distros including various Ubuntu flavors (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu), Fedora, Solus, Elementary, Manjaro and a few others. Those listed above are the best in my opinion… or maybe the better way to say it is they work best for me.
Debian is by far better than any of the ones you have mentioned. As for myself,
I keep it simple!!! If you want stability, install Debian, if you want cutting edge,
install either Gentoo or Arch. Stay away from derivatives, they are nothing but trouble.
Or the Achilles Heel!!! You use Void but Void is independent, and like most independent distros,
they are rolling release, mostly based on Arch, in one way or another. While on the other side,
Debian based distros are a dime a dozen, but I see very little functionality improvement, in using
Debian and any of the other distros based off either Ubuntu or Debian. I know MX, but all MX is, is a spin-off of Debian-stable and antX which is also based on Debian-stable.
Well, both. In order to grow , you have to experiment. Most experiments fail, but the one that succeeds, eg Debian when it started, is the future for Linux. It is Ok to have 2 competing successes. It is OK to have lots of failures. It is ok to have some under evaluation… Its all part of the future direction.
I did my first install of Debian yesterday. I got through it but in the middle somewhere it informed me that there were 4 or 5 files missing that I would have to obtain elsewhere and install them from local storage. It gave the file names, but I have no idea what they do or what they have an effect on, or where to obtain them, or how to install them. So I just ignored that and completed the install, and verified that Firefox and Files, and a few other programs ran. I’m left with the feeling that in the future some things are not going to work because of those missing files, and it may not be easy to fix. I see that on the ItsFOSS website one article suggests that Debian is not the best choice for those new to Linux. It’s easy to believe that Ubuntu is based on Debian and the other distros I have used are based on Ubuntu, because Debian looks and works very similar to all of them. I also got the idea that Debian would be a good candidate for elderly computers (as long as the missing files are not a problem).
That sounds great! When you did the installations did you get those messages saying that certain files were missing? Did you ignore them and they just aren’t needed?
i.e. Debian by default, won’t install anything proprietary. This usually / often stymies new users, because this often applies to their WiFi adapter…
Ubuntu is less anal about OSS and proprietary code - so happy to install proprietary drivers for WiFi, and other things like NVidia GPU proprietary drivers. And also some medai codecs for music and video files…
If you must start with Debian - I suggest you look for a download mirror and get one of the release ISO files that includes non-free “stuff” - like here :
Me? I usually just lke stuff to work. Despite using Linux for coming up to 30 years, I prefer the smoothest path that gets me what I want - a stable platform with the best compatibility, to install Steam and my games library - and - get a terminal - Ubuntu LTS does all of the heavy lifting for me (well not all - but most) as I do most of my file management and software installs and configurations from the shell in a terminal…
As @daniel.m.tripp says, most likely non-free firmware
You can get Debian to make non-free packages available by going to /etc/apt and editing the file sources.list. Just add the word non-free to each line
My Debian sources.list file
nevj@mary:/etc/apt$ cat sources.list
#
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 10.7.0 _Buster_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20201205-11:17]/ bullseye contrib main
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 10.7.0 _Buster_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20201205-11:17]/ bullseye contrib main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main contrib non-free
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free
deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free
# bullseye-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main
Then you can add any non-free package you require in the normal way, ie apt-get install packagename
The trick is to find out the required packagename. You do that by looking at dmesg for messages about things missing at boot time.
)