It's Critter Time!

It was going to happen sooner or later.

Debian Trixie has a tentative release scheduled for early August now. I'm looking forward to those updates hitting MX Linux, my distro of choice.

Is anyone else here enough of a to get excited about new Debian releases? Do you compile your own kernels? Do you use a tiling window manager?

In contrast to the above, Linux generally just works for me nowadays. I don't mind being in terminal to run things but other than that, there's usually little Linux specific nerdery I have to engage with. Which is great! Though I think also the result of me going out of my way to avoid certain pitfalls.

we've been messing around with debian 13 and it's really nice. the version of kde it comes with it good too. overall, it's just a nice experience

I've been on the linux mint train for a while.

My personal opinion can be summed up as: Linux is great, except for all the problems.

I have a variety of legacy Intel x86 machines here from circa 1998 to 2010. What is the linux distro that is best friendly to older machines? My go-to used to be xubuntu but I'm willing to entertain others.

Ease-of-installation would be the top priority. Able to use Wintel wireless hardware is preferred, which I understand tended to be very closed-source proprietary at this time. Thanks in advance.

Xinjinmeng wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 6:37 pm I have a variety of legacy Intel x86 machines here from circa 1998 to 2010. What is the linux distro that is best friendly to older machines? My go-to used to be xubuntu but I'm willing to entertain others.

Ease-of-installation would be the top priority. Able to use Wintel wireless hardware is preferred, which I understand tended to be very closed-source proprietary at this time. Thanks in advance.

As a former Xubuntu user I've found myself on MX now. I believe it has options specifically for older hardware (read: 32 bit release) but the general "Debian + XFCE + some optional newer packages" should be pretty lightweight. AntiX is specifically designed to play well with older hardware so most of that should translate over. I also like it as a recommendation since it has a lot of GUI frontends for common Linux "Time to go edit a config file" things.

I used it recently when doing some extensive benchmarking of Core 2 Duo era hardware and had no issues, I'm not sure if older/more ram limited systems would benefit more from using the Fluxbox version or a different distro entirely. I've not used the Fluxbox version myself... I should.

Can't say I've had any Wintel/iwlwifi specific issues before though so I have no idea if MX would suffer them or not. But they explicitly include non-free software for reasons of usability so, probably? Is the hardware you use not supported by iwlwifi?

I finally kicked Windows 11 to the kerb recently and am fully on team Linux now, but I'm ready to float around on different distros for a while. Using Ubuntu 25.04 currently and it's served me well. Will poke around with other flavours and OSes in due course but it makes Windows look bloated as hell. Which, I mean, it is, with AI nonsense and stuff literally nobody asked for.

I've had the highest reliability and ease of use with Nobara, although GloriousEggroll has definitely made some questionable decisions such as including AI-generated wallpapers that can be ignored. I like that Nobara includes a drive auto-mount tool, an all-in-one updater, a modified OBS and a whole bunch of gaming-related installers already sourced and ready to run. Uses KDE Plasma and Wayland by default but with X11 legacy support.

I also have a Lenovo Thinkcentre 'gaming box' running CachyOS but it just launches to Pegasus, a frontend, and is controlled entirely with a gamepad. Have run into a few issues getting it to be as reliable as it is but it's been really solid since.

A Macbook Pro M1 with Fedora-Asahi Remix as well that I don't use very often, but it seems to get a lot of criticism that I feel isn't deserved. I've been really impressed with it for what it is, and the installation process was the easiest I have ever seen for a Linux distro and any OS ever. Even has touchbar support!

I'm a long time Mint/Debian with XFCE/Window-Maker/Cinnamon enjoyer, but unfortunately am currently on Windows on my main system for two reasons:
1. I upgraded hardware recently and due to my shiny new 9060xt a lot of my fave distros require kernel updates and just aren't very stable for me
2. My entire social life atm requires getting into VR with no complications at least once a week. No matter what I tried across multiple distros, I just could not get any Linux system to play nice with my Index and new hardware. Which was a fundamental deal breaker.

On the bright side though, nearly 100% of my software used for work these days are open source or extremely Linux friendly :3

Hoping that by early next year my preferred distros will be running new enough backends for my system and that Valve or someone else puts some serious effort into fixing the VR situation and experience on Linux overall so I can ditch Windows for good.

plumpan wrote: Sun Jul 20, 2025 3:31 pm It was going to happen sooner or later.

Debian Trixie has a tentative release scheduled for early August now. I'm looking forward to those updates hitting MX Linux, my distro of choice.

Is anyone else here enough of a to get excited about new Debian releases? Do you compile your own kernels? Do you use a tiling window manager?

In contrast to the above, Linux generally just works for me nowadays. I don't mind being in terminal to run things but other than that, there's usually little Linux specific nerdery I have to engage with. Which is great! Though I think also the result of me going out of my way to avoid certain pitfalls.

I'm sure that before the year ends, I'll be using debian trixie and/or a new twisterOS on a raspi5 lodged inside a Pilet. I'd say "can't wait", but I have to :') Pilet is still in production (hell), I still don't have the pi5, and I now have to waste money on a new screen anyway because my current monitor got some dead pixels.

Glad I don't have to waste money on windows anymore tho

I've been kind of off and on with Linux for the past few years, mainly because of it's lack of good video editing tools (that actually have mp4 support for free, davinci), but last year I got a job and was able to save up to get a MacBook Pro to circumvent that hurdle, and now I've been daily driving Arch Linux for months since then.

Only problems I've run into was screen sharing being a pain in the ass still, not as much as before and sound does work, but I can't use Hyprland specifically for some reason if I want to screenshare, so I've been using KDE instead. The other I've described in the Linux Gaming thread of not being able to use my VR headset.

Other than those two things I've just been loving using Linux, it just feels so much nicer to use compared to Windows at times. Honestly, I think that the reason people are scared of the terminal in part is because the Windows CMD is kind of too barebones and Powershell is hell to use in general.

I'm planning to move to Linux Mint in the coming months ahead of Microsoft killing support for Windows 10. For a start, my hardware isn't officially supported by Windows 11 so it would be hugely wasteful to get rid of a PC that works perfectly fine. Secondly, Windows 11 has yet to offer anything that Windows 10 doesn't already have other than security updates, so there's nothing to motivate me to force the upgrade. And finally, Microsoft is no longer a company I wish to support due to political reasons and because of how aggressively they've forcing invasive AI garbage that nobody asked for. Besides, I'm sick of having to disable invasive settings and crapware, having massive security updates automatically install themselves without warning every other Tuesday, and seeing this PC gradually becoming slower over the past nine years.

Since my hard-drive has plenty of unused space and because this is the perfect time to switch OSes, my plan is to set up a dual-boot so that I can use Mint for my everyday tasks while keeping Windows 10 solely for compatibility purposes. It's been more than a decade since I last seriously considered getting into Linux, but from what I can tell it seems to be easier to switch than ever. Being able to just download software via the console or Flatpak really appeals to me, as is the prospect of having an OS that doesn't take forever to start up. I've already burnt the latest Linux Mint distro onto a USB stick, all I have to do is put some time aside one weekend and install it.

I'm writing this message from my Pi400 which I just resetup to muck about on. I've been running some *nix as my main desktop os for at least a decade probably closer to 15 years - to the point that all my storage of photos, and docs and music where store in ext4 not even something compatible with windows anymore. Though this years I've transitioned all that into trueNAS so I can feel free to break my computer even more now. Partially I'm on here because I've semi broken my install of Budgie on Ubuntu by upgrading to their test candidate and I'm waiting on some upstream fixes to see if that gets solved meanwhile see how this goes!

Overall on a daily basis, I'm just using a browser and then telegram/discord, sometimes games, or software for my photography but mostly, listening to some music or youtube, and chatting. 4 GB on the Pi400 is about about enough to handle that daily usage, if the SOC isn't quite amazing at video. Though maybe VLC might work better if I stream the youtube videos directly to that, something to try!