A Thin Client

by Bryan

After my latest encounter with Windows 10 I think M$ is continuing the trend it started by moving Office and Outlook to the Internet, and now moving almost everything online.

Consider 50+ seconds to load the ‘Solitaire app’ and then a request to log in at the XBox gaming site. The difference between the last time I loaded the app and this time, is that I have moved my modem and this box is now on WiFi vice Ethernet. The things that were slow before are now crawling.

Of course, this was after it took 3 minutes to boot up because M$ thought I should choose a background from a series of pictures and gave no option to stop screwing around and bring up the system. Having the time prominently displayed when you are wasting someone’s life just pisses them off. [If you don’t understand why I get so annoyed about wastes of my time – wait until you are my age and you will understand.]

Every time I go to do anything on Win 10 I see the light on the WiFi adapter start blinking like crazy. I think tomorrow I will see what happens when I boot after unplugging from the ‘Net.

6 comments

1 Shirt { 04.23.16 at 10:20 am }: You get what you paid for! I’m porting my wife back to 8.1 with my 8.1 license and I’m going to windows 7 for the duration.

If Microslop (uS) thinks I’m going to go to an OS which they can hijack at any time… No sir! uS behavior in forcing people to upgrade is reprehensible! Disguising their win10 as a common upgrade should be illegal. They change the terms of ownership and assume the right to upgrade you to whatever they want regardless of what you want. I regard it as distributing malicious software.

I need to learn more about open source Linux and get away from uS entirely, including the Office. Pointers, anyone?
2 Bryan { 04.23.16 at 9:52 pm }: Ubuntu Linux is a relative easy transition and it comes with LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird as an e-mail program. I use Libre, FF, & TBird on all of my Windows and Linux machines. For an individual it really is easy to get used to for Windows users. While you are certainly welcome to donate to the various projects that created and maintain these programs, you don’t have to.

Try it to see if you like it.
3 Kryten42 { 04.25.16 at 4:56 am }: I’ll throw in my 2 cents! 😉 😀

One of the best Linux distributions, especially for new users, is Linux Mint. It comes in several flavors, but all minty! LOL Ahem. Sorry.

There are two main versions, one based upon Ubuntu Trusty, and one based on Debian. As Bryan said, Ubuntu is probably the way to go. One of the things with linux is that there is a lot of choice and flexibility. Both a blessing and a curse. 🙂 The current Ubuntu based Linux Mint v17.3 “Rosa” has four editions, mainly due to a different desktop/user interface choice. Cinnamon, MATE (pronounced ‘maté’ not m8), Xfce & KDE. 🙂 Probably the easiest (and most widely used) is Cinnamon.

Here’s a user review of the four that may help:

I used each of the aforementioned desktop environments for one week each. Here is a short summary.

Cinnamon – This is the one that ships with Linux Mint by default. Adhering to the Mint philosophy, Cinnamon gives a desktop experience that a Windows user would expect. The taskbar-esque panel at the bottom, the start-esque menu on the left corner and the notification area on the right make it look very close to a Windows desktop. There are some options you can find in cinnamon-settings but customization is nowhere close to what you get on other environments. For most users, customization or the lack thereof is not a deal breaker here because a Linux Mint user would expect everything just work out of the box.

XFCE – This desktop environment is, for the lack of a better word, underrated. The out of the box setup of XFCE is in no way representative of what it can do. With the lackluster default configuration and the tiny memory footprint, one would expect XFCE to lose this battle but it is only after using and playing with it’s settings that it shines. XFCE can be tuned to the users liking and you can make it look/work however you want. Personally, on the first day of use, XFCE looked like a big no, but by day 5, I was completely hooked. A neat combination of fast, lightweight and flexible.

MATE – Mate started as a GNOME 2 fork for those who didn’t quite like the (to quote Linus Torvalds) “unholy mess” the GNOME shell had become. While GNOME Shell was receiving negative reactions for the massive UI changes, Mate quickly had users hooked by providing exactly what they wanted – the familiarity of Gnome 2. If the friendly two-panel setup and the grandfather Applications menu is all you want, then the default Mate setup is your way to go. Mate, like XFCE is flexible but personally, I prefer XFCE for all that customization.

NOTE: Linus Torvalds has switched back to Gnome 3 saying the desktop’s shortcomings can be fixed by the use of right extensions.

KDE – The Plasma 5 desktop is what I used for the week I had assigned for a trial. It takes a while to install and load but my goodness! It is pretty. Perhaps the prettiest looking desktop environment there is. It is also highly customizable with widgets and all. With all the smooth, shiny surfaces and Gaussian blur thrown all over, Plasma 5 doesn’t fail to impress. (Read in zefrank’s voice) “Imagine OSX, but better. That’s how Plasma is!” Another notable thing with this one is compatibility with GTK3. (Albeit I found it painful). Personally, I really liked it for its eye candy and flexibility but its ever-so-slightly high loading time and resource-intensive behavior tips the scales towards xfce for me.

There is a more in depth discussion here: Linux Mint: what it is and how to select the right flavour for you

The advantages for Mint are: Long & wide testing before release, huge user community for help, each major version (17 in this case) is supported for 5 years including updates.

You can either download the version you want, or buy a DVD for $5.95 including shipping. The advantage is that the shipped DVD can either be installed or run live from the DVD without installation. Handy to try out before install. 🙂 You can also buy all versions on a 12 DVD set for $38.95.

I’ve used Mint for years (since v7 actually), and rarely had a problem. It comes with everything most people need or want, such as Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, multimedia CoDecs and good audio & video players, among many other things. You can install everything, or select the app’s/tools you want when installing. A lot of work has been done to make it more power efficient on portable devices compared to Ubuntu “out of the box” for example. 🙂

Good luck. 🙂
4 Badtux { 04.25.16 at 11:13 am }: For desktop environment I’m using MATE. Gnome 3 has some serious problems operating on multiple monitors, MATE just works. I tried KDE, it has some massive memory leaks in it that kill my system after about a week (I usually reboot my Linux systems once every six months whether they need it or not, LOL). XFCE required too much work to get it to where I wanted it to be, and I found Cinnamon to be usable but lacking some of the features I remembered from Gnome 2. So MATE it is….

I guess I need to look at Linux Mint. Thing is, I’m operating in a RPM-based world (Amazon Linux AMI) so it really helps to be running an RPM-based distribution on my work machine. On the other hand, I have that partition on the Toshiba laptop… hmm…
5 Kryten42 { 04.25.16 at 11:30 am }: Yep. Mint has been working hard on improving display output & management, and other related issues. From the 17.3 release notes:

Support for multiple monitors was significantly improved. The mapping of new windows, dialogs, OSD info (such as the workspace names) was reviewed to make sure everything appeared in the right place and on the appropriate monitor.

Improvements related to frame synchronization which were implemented in Mutter (the GNOME Shell window manager) in cooperation with NVIDIA were ported to Muffin (the Cinnamon window manager). These changes should fix rendering issues with NVIDIA cards but could also have a positive impacts on ATI and Intel chipsets.

Dialog windows are now attached to their parent window by default. This setting was already present in Cinnamon (in “System Settings”->”Windows”->”Behavior”->”Attach dialog windows to the parent window”), but it was improved in version 2.8; Dialog windows are now attached to the center of their parent window rather than their titlebar, and the shading of the parent window was made a little more obvious than it was before.
…
HiDPI detection was improved, in particular for TV screens over HDMI.

XRANDR support was significantly improved, many bug fixes were ported from Gnome Shell.

The Cinnamon Settings Daemon is more robust than before and shouldn’t crash anymore when one or some of its modules fail to load.
…
Better support for QT5 applications, which now look more native and use the GTK theme.
Better XSMP support.

Better logs (You can enable logs to ~/.xsession-errors via the “org.cinnamon.SessionManager debug” gsettings key. Logs now also include time delta information to help identify cases where an application makes the login or logout sequence lag).

A fully configurable auto-start blacklist (The key is in “org.cinnamon.SessionManager autostart-blacklist”. This was only partly configurable in previous versions.).
…
HiDPI support was improved in the MDM display manager.

Many HiDPI related issues were fixed, in particular with HD TVs plugged over HDMI.

The way HiDPI support works in MDM was also redesigned. It used to double the pixel density on HiDPI displays and that sometimes resulted in a login screen that looked too big on some HiDPI monitors. It now works towards an ideal pixel density, so the scaling ratio isn’t just 1x or 2x but an appropriate calculated value in between.

To improve the support for touchscreens and mobile devices, an on-screen keyboard was also added in the login screen. This keyboard is available for the default theme (“Mint-X”) and it provides both common and special characters.

Xorg, Mesa and the Linux kernel were upgraded.

In many cases, this improves hardware support. Imacs for instance no longer need to use nomodeset, scrolling is now functional on some Asus touchpads, suspending is much faster on macbooks…etc.

Kernel 4.2.0 is also available in the repositories. However please be cautious with it if you are using proprietary drivers. At the moment, the following drivers are known not to work with it:
fglrx (ATI/AMD drivers)
ndiswrapper (Windows wireless drivers)

Support for these drivers with kernel 4.2.0 should improve before February 2016.

The welcome screen was redesigned slightly.

LibreOffice was upgraded to version 5.

The screen reader “Orca” is now installed by default.

Nemo-preview is now installed by default. To preview a file, simply select it and press the space bar.

Input Methods are now handled by mintlocale, which replaces im-config in the menu.

Inxi was upgraded and now supports multiple graphics cards.

When using an encrypted home directory, memory swap is no longer encrypted by default and hibernation works out of the box.

OpenVPN support is now installed by default.

Of course, the only way to know if it works for you (or anyone), is to try it. 🙂
6 Bryan { 04.25.16 at 4:17 pm }: The best way is to try them. I’ve been messing with this stuff is so many flavors for so many years that I see connections that normal people would never know existed. The thing is, the software is free, so try it.