Running other operating systems šŸ”„

Awesome ā€“ I think I may explore this approach. Thanks for the tip!

1 Like

Iā€™ve been dinking around with xubuntu on an old laptop. Iā€™m not too impressed.

There was a story recently where Linus was quoted as saying that Linux is not ready for the desktop ā€œyet.ā€ He then went on to bemoan the bloat (his word) in the Linux kernel, of which he is the god. Overall it didnā€™t give me a very favorable impression of the state of Linux.

Xubuntu is just one variant of Linux, and judging by the screenshots on their website, itā€™s an old-style Linux distribution that we might have seen 5 or 10 years ago.

So while all cars are not 1985 Plymouth Reliants, all Linuxes arenā€™t Xubuntu, and I wouldnā€™t reject Linux out of hand based on soley evaluating it. You certainly can :slight_smile:, but I wouldnā€™t.

The distributions of Linux that Iā€™ve been using (Ubuntu, CentoOS) are terrible as desktop operating systems, but Linux has become the de facto standard Unix (like) operating system, and so far Iā€™ve not found anything that compares when it comes to ā€œgetting things doneā€ at scale and beyond the desktop.

Having said that, thereā€™s almost nothing that most day to day users would find of genuine use beyond curiosity, unless they really immerse themselves into it for a while.

tl;dr: If your first reaction to a problem isnā€™t, ā€œIā€™m going to write a little program to solve that,ā€ then Linux probably isnā€™t going to be of much interest to you :slight_smile:

You are absolutely correct, but when youā€™re using a 10-year-old laptop you go for something lightweight. I tried all three of the Linux Mintā€™s first, then lubuntu, which I didnā€™t like at all. I tried Ubuntu but while it was pretty, it was too much for my machine. I also tried Elementary, which seems to be trying to appeal to Mac users, but it didnā€™t move me.

I worked on X for years and xubuntu looks like X, so itā€™s familiar. Iā€™m keeping it around, at least for a while, but I donā€™t know what Iā€™ll do with it yet.

Obviously Iā€™ve only tried a small subset of the (seemingly) jillions of distros out there, but (to me, at least) they all look kinda similar, and I canā€™t see myself switching any time soon. I canā€™t see any advantage other than $$$.

This is how Linux grew up, and thatā€™s why it feels so disconnected. Just my $.02.

1 Like

Like several other folks here, I keep a copy of Windows 10 around inside a VM, although my need for it isnā€™t as great as it used to be. Iā€™m also trying out Linux Mint, and considering using that as a basis for doing web development work.

Iā€™m playing the Witcher 3 from a a win 10 instal on an external Samsung t5 :eyes:

Oh! I didnā€™t know that you could install Windows on an external disk! (I assume BootCamp?)

yep, even if itā€™s been a bumpy road for me.

First Bootcamp refused to partition the internal ssd with a fresh Catalina install.

So I found these two videos

but both VMWare and parallels refused to recognise the external disk connected to the Mac as described in the videos.

Luckily (well, luckily just for this specific matter) I have access to a windows machine so I used that to run the application that allow to install on the external disk.

Once itā€™s done it runs like a charm (I run it on a 2016 MacBook Pro 2.7GHz core i7 quad core with 16 gb of ram)

2 Likes

Iā€™ve been wanting to try this. Look forward to having a decent tutorial.

1 Like

Thanks! Iā€™ll have to give this a try!