Linux OS

Running W10 on dual boot on VMWare virtual.Irony at work but can't make W 11 install

Yup, I went to Red Hat c.1998 almost entirely due to one thing: RPM (and RPMbuild from SRPMs).

I tried Mandrake for a short while and then went to Fedora from FC3 to F30 or so. I still have a customized FC4 distro (with some pieces written by me decades ago during the heydays of Sourceforge) which run on several Centrino-era laptops running some legacy Windows apps on Wine.

I used Slackware quite a few years back but eventually got tired of spending time endlessly compiling things and chasing down dependencies. Then used Mandrake for a few years and moved on to Mint which I consider the best user-friendly distro. I run a couple of VPS's (virtual private servers) and one has CentOS and the other Alma Linux. I have CentOS on my main work laptop (not a distro of choice but it enabled me to exactly replicate what was on the VPS to make working on things easier). My older Toshiba L850 work laptop has Mint installed and an audio recording desktop is running AV Linux.

Linux heads! I don’t and won’t do anything important on a Windows computer. Too risky.

For me, I love Linux. It takes a bit of getting used to if you come from Windows, but things are so much more logical and able to be worked with.

I posted the other day about pie-hole.net. It’s built in Linux and runs on a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is an educational, extremely inexpensive full-on computer that is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and still packs a lot of power. The hobby world has gone nuts with them. There’s a tiny version that is about 1/3 to 1/4 of that. They have camera interfaces, bluetooth, wifi, USB, and a double row of interface pins.

Anyway, they run Linux - a special flavor of Linux called Raspbian - but connect the video (HDMI) out to a TV or monitor, plug in a keyboard and mouse, and it’s a computer and a pretty powerful one at that.

There’s tons of good things to say about Linux. Anyone interested should look into the Pi and then you can experiment all you want. The whole OS fits on an SD card so you can swap out complete OS versions by swapping the card and rebooting. Huge for security and keeping financial or other stuff off a main system that is more vulnerable.

One last thing is Linux isn’t a panacea. Linux can get hacked too. The advantage is that it’s easy to wipe and reinstall the OS without affecting user files or installed programs, and thanks to Linux still being niche in spite of so many businesses and governments using it for critical missions. Linux’s profile is rising though, making it more of a target. Linus was designed from the beginning to be secure. It’s based on UNIX which was basically always a multiuser OS with built-in security protections. Windows was wide open until it became such an embarrassment for Microsoft that they were forced to do something.

I've been on Lubuntu 18.04 for a few years, and before that on Fedora (until F30 or so). I started on SLS (Soft Landing System), then went to Slackware 3.x, then Red Hat 5 or so, and stayed with it for ~2 decades before switching to Lubuntu.

For fixing grub/bootsector problems, keep an install CD or DVD handy, and boot with it to go into rescue mode, then re-install grub and reboot - that should fix grub problems most of the time.

I've tried a couple of distributions out, and liked them a lot, some for their simplicity, and others for how well they look & 'feel".

For anyone starting out, I'd highly recommend Zorin OS. It has a windows 10 "feel" to it, and is user friendly for those starting out on the linux adventure.

I use Ubuntu Mate the most, still user friendly, but allows for a little more customisation than Zorin.

Deepin is the "eye candy" but being developed by a team in China, and it's repositories based in China kind of puts up a lot of red flags (no puns intended) for me.

One to watch is Garudalinux with different editions targeting different types of users, including a "gamer" version with apps like "steam" already built in.

Sadly the 2 programs I use the most for video editing, and web cam filters requires Windows to run, I've tried, and tried to get them to work on linux, but after countless hours of hitting a "brick wall" I gave up, and went back to windows for those programs.

I avoid trying to dual boot, as after a windows 10 update, it screwed up the grub loader and like yourself, I tried everything I could but to no avail.

Best to try it on a separate computer, much safer that way.

It has been many, many years. Long enough that I started on Slackware... long enough that I used Windows "batch" files for multiboot -- but I can barely remember. I worked in the tech field, Unix platform (Solaris on x86 no less -- who does that? --my company did).

But I've given all that up.

I now teach violin, privately... a surprisingly hard way to earn a living... and my brain has otherwise gone to mush...

I miss the technology field! Interesting co-workers (not all of them)... cool toys... the creative challenge of working as a technology generalist, mostly in Operations... where every day is a struggle, since it's constant bootstrapping, working for a start-up... but I was young, then... sigh! 🙂