This is a windy first post about my last and first two weeks with Linux. I love getting to know Linux, but I feel Linux hates me.

All I'm asking for can be summed out at the last paragraph: a desktop environment that isn't fragile, will load when you expect it to, and can play well with others (other operating systems).


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I am definitely not a computer novice - I have always had a serious desire to learn the Linux OS and just never had created the opportunity to do it.

Until recently. At first I underwent an amateur education in networking and this fueled my desire even more.

In this past month I have installed various distributions but honestly I'm losing sleep and sanity over the troubles I am facing.

I have gone through so many distributions because I have ran out of steam not knowing how to get out of these dead ends.

Mint Debian edition was fantastic but then I unchecked PluseAudio from startup, lost my desktop environment - went through two days of different CLI instructions from various Debian forums -- all to no good end.

Fresh install of Kali Linux - I have never seen so many bugs. I reinstalled Kali twice. The first time I had plugged in an BASIC nVidia card so I can run dual monitors. Followed the instructions to replace non-free with proprietary drivers, blacklisted, updated, X'11ed and Xorg'ed myself to death never getting back into either Gnome or Xfce.

Fresh install of Kali once again. The hell with the Nvidia card. I could have begged for a fly swatter at some point. I wanted this to be THE os for me because of all its network tools. CIFS/SAMBA would simply would not function. It simply wouldn't even do a fly through for me of the 19 other alive and well machines up and running here -- all networked (I will go so far to say they have no monitors). The built in networkmanager was shot and Kali depended on ifconfig for all etho. All properly tagged and bagged, updated, upgraded, cleaned, nothing. Menu items would randomly disappear.

Next came CentOS workstation. Ugliest thing I have ever seen but who cares I just wanted functionality. The thing did not even come with a software manager. Not kidding. That was such poor form. It was like "hey don't add anything to do or it'll break on you" so they kept it in a crystalline state. Added the primitive installer. I thought I was setting myself way back using that crap so I just did everything through the terminal from then on. The only problem is that Xfce was insanely laggy on my machine. I don't even want to describe the components I have because it will seem like I'm even crazier than this post. But it's a dual Xeon setup with 64GB of 1866Mhz and Centos was just wicked unresponsive by way of mouse.

Next was Fedora security spin. Worked well off the bat. Except often enough I would simply click on a program never to see it appear or an open one would crash in a silent disappearing act, no goodbye notice like the way Debian gave me the Oh Oh. I knew this was going nowhere positive. Especially when I would simply click on Network to see the other workstations and servers and it would BOTH timeout with an error and would present me with the workstations.

I will not stop. I just don't know which way to go from here. I'm thinking of NetBSD. I installed Cinnamon Mint for my sister on a machine I built her for her birthday a year ago and it's like that one distribution is flawless by virtue of being designed for the desktop environment.

What am I doing wrong? I spend hours and hours just trying to get the smallest things to work. I spend more hours learning that I need to get services started like samba on distribution designed for networking. I don't get it. I need to learn linux but this isn't linux. This isn't real. This isn't learning linux, this is self-generated troubleshooting tickets to no avail, to no end because there is no foreseeable goal and I'm beginning to run these machines with the paranoia of backing up the filesystem before every new (affective) package install to another partition. But that's a joke. I'm creating something like nine partitions upon every install just because I know there is no safety, stability or grounded structure as it's always a matter of losing the desktop environment after some change. How, how, how do you lose an environment? (I know how as I've had to sift through the configuration scripts post-modification) but how can something be that fragile and yet so powerful in other ways.

I don't know if I should just give up on linux with a desktop environment so as not to anticipate imminent disaster and use linux the way I use an HP or Cisco switch but no matter what I do intend on and plan on learning actual, real linux and this is not it.

If you have any suggestions of which distribution to head toward that will give me networking functionality off the bat and be fast to response time then please send me that way. It's either NetBSD or doing the stupid task of installing Gentoo. I'm nearly done in reading the exhaustive documentation of installing it but given that it's such a step by step process I figure I won't have the same kind of disappointment as I do when something that I know should work doesn't because via Gentoo I would at least have followed along its building from the command line to eventually the desktop environment. But the drawback is that I actually want to install programs in the futures and don't want to spend needless amounts of time using the compiler to install the dozen packages that interest me when I'm going through the list.

Is there no end to this? Is there something out there for me that can give me the promise of linux in an networking environment plus desktop without having to churn out lines at the command prompt just to get the menu back?

Please, someone help me or tell me what not to do.

What desktop environment can you trust as an dependable inter-networking environment - meaning you can take it from site to site and it isn't buggy: Windows and Mac workstations don't delay to appear or you won't expect that turning it on you will be greeted by logs that tell you the last update or package broken something?

Hi there.

Distro-hopping won't help you much, unless you have some basics of Linux in the first place. Be patient. Choose one distribution and stick with it until you have figured it out. How to choose? Start from Wikipedia, for example, like this list of distributions, and from there go ahead. Study the genealogy, target and features of various distributions. Read a good introductory guide, like Machtelt Garrels' "Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide", and read your distribution's documentation. Then, if you have specific problems which you have tried to solve, but didn't succeed, come back here: you will find a friendly and helpful community.

I've never used Debian but it is a very stable system and the second oldest Linux still in development. I don't know how making a change to pulseaudio would ruin your Desktop. Makes no sense but maybe a Debian user will come along with some info.

Kali Linux. Extremely poor choice for a Desktop computer. First off, it is desgined specifically for compute forensics and to be used by people experienced in Linux.

CentOS is designed primarily to run in a server environment and often, no GUI at all althoug a GUI is available for Desktop users. CentOS usually uses the 'yum' command for installation but does have a GUI package management tool, don't think it is installed by default but you can check the link below.

https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/D...hical-rpm.html

Fedora is not a good choice unless you have all the newest hardware and are adventurous because it is pretty much always in test mode and has frequent version changes and short term support. It is a very popular distribution of Linux and widely used.

If you got Linux Mint working, why not stick with it. Since the Linux kernel is freely available pretty much anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge can 'create' a distribution. There are well over 500 now and many of them are only superficially different. If you didn't have success with Debian which is incredibly well documented, you might try Gentoo or Slackware which is also very well documented and will teach you to learn Linux. You might also go to the distrowatch site linked below and go to the page hit ranking on the right side of the page which gives a general idea of what are the most popular Linux distributions and also has links to the home page of each.

http://distrowatch.com/

For now stick with Linux Mint, it clearly worked for you, so why not use it ? It is easy to install and use.

Now if you want to learn Linux, then I recommend Slackware. However, it requires some time investment into reading the manual, so right now stick with Mint until things become less hectic for you.

You should use Arch: you have to set up absolutely everything yourself so at least you will know who to blame...

Thank you to everyone you commented with some advice. I woke up and installed Mint Xfce 17.1

I can't believe it, both monitors displayed - automatically. Then it provided something far, far beyond Microsoft even - an optional setting clear as daylight in device manager that let me select by radio button any one of three drivers. Two of which were proprietary. I am speechless.

The designers behind Mint have gone far beyond the scope of the greatest extents of what I have seen in desktop environments from other distros. From what I have seen so far, Mint has outdone even Microsoft's accomplishments at the desktop. The options here are overwhelmingly beautiful. Thank God it's a Debian undertaking, making it possible to pull from the massive repositories that feed Kali, etc.

With all due respect, one final word I want to put in here is that there are certain depths that should be initiated into design that otherwise would send the user back to the dark ages of computer use. I don't care if I am going to install Solaris next, but I do care not to have to hunt down drivers and codecs for the numeral pad built into a basic USB wired logitech keyboard (b-a-s-i-c) because it's mapping isn't recognized and ten years from now I hope the matter with codecs will be resolved. In all honesty, I have set up countless Microsoft workstations for others without having to have resorted to illegally downloaded software or installing trial basis ones. Codecs from CCCP or K-Lite never cost me or the end-user a cent and the modern day Linux user shouldn't have to go through lengths -> in order to simply prepare the desktop as a workable environment. Yes, everyone can gesture to the Ubuntu family but that is not what I am describing; not some complete and polished workarea but having the basics in order before the end-user arrives.

There is a part of me that believes Linux plays dumb by not creating an entire repository as foundational as security updates but for non-proprietary drivers. Whether you run a laptop, workstation, server whatever it may be, it is and started out proprietary. No one made it for free originally. There's an interdependency that isn't at play here that could be and it's embarrassing. I know manufacturers like Lenovo generally always have a linux line. Yesterday I bought a Thinkpad X140e laptop especially because Lenovo proudly stated it is as equally ready for Microsoft as for Ubuntu/Debian. What good are security updates and repositories of ten thousand thousand thousand packages if one has to spend hours getting one single driver to do it's job.

Thank God for Xfce, Mint, and dedicated Linux users and developers out there.

The important word is, proprietary. Someone "owns" those drivers. It is against the law and thus subject to prosecution to distribute something that you don't own or that you lack permission -- a license -- to share. Making this situation worse, some jurisdictions make it unlawful to tell someone where or how to obtain "pirate software" without actually touching the files in question. I wouldn't call is playing dumb to stay on the right side of the law.

Some hardware vendors choose to have proprietary drivers. Some also have proprietary device firmware that their driver loads. Some vendors have contracts with operating system publishing companies that restrict their ability to share driver or firmware details. Some workstation builders also rely on these same business practices.

Regretfully,
~~~ 0;-/ Dan

This posting feels like it was written so long ago. I ended up stripping down Linux Mint to it's bare, bare basics. The server it's on is powerful but strangely it runs terribly laggy in relation to clone machines that are operating the other Cola. It's no taboo in my opinion to mention MS. It's a grown-ups world out there. I'm expected to know more than just one OS. The world doesn't applaud you for specializing in RHEL if your tunnel vision impedes you from knowing how to fix iPhones, how to setup Outlook. This isolation game that people play in hushing other OS is immature. The world wants well-rounded people. That's why even in preparation for grown up life the SAT and MCAT and LSAT tests one on disparate levels of reasoning: verbal, computational, lingustic, logical, etc.

The reality is there is no theft taking place because one is dealing with hardware; the tangible goods. You probably can't even find torrents for drivers because there is no monetary value in them.

Most vendors (including nVidia) happily freely dispurse all of their drivers so long as you do absolutely nothing to modify the files you downloaded from their website. The most drivers (availability) the better their hardware sales. Linux goes on to reverse engineer drivers that they can't get access to the original source for, for more than merely compatibility reasons. A lot of this probably has to do with the orthodoxy of the language with which the GPL licensing terms were written in: the converse the linux ideology of keeping all things free and free in this case isn't a monetary term but having the freedom to take some hardware manufacturers code and tweak it. I can appreciate why hardware manufacturers resist that for a thousand reasons. No one wants fried silicon coming back, no one wants to be innundated with support phone calls for things they shouldn't have done. Even in Windows, Mindows or Cindows no manufacturer wants their code manipaluted so that items are overclocked or pushed more than they're designed for.

Drivers seem so primordial to any system foundation - if one wants to bring up legality, the concept of virtual machines, the concept of Wine; of bringing over a whole battery of software and drivers to piggy back on another OS ... these things far outweigh "getting" two monitors to work.

One can really get dizzy looking the freedom culture by examing Fedora/RH where if it isn't thrown freely in the air it's considered unorthodox. Simple examples: Fedora doesn't include Adobe Acrobat Reader, while Adobe is busy shoving Adobe Acrobat Reader up everyone's asses all day with an update every 2-days on average. The same for Flash. Spammers inundate the web with Flash and Reader pop-up-malware all day long because they're surfing on the wave generated by Adobe roaring download me. Adobe wants Flash out there - Adobe wants nothing more than to wake up to a www of flash-ridden pages knowing they have authored the visible design of the world. In the real world nVidia doesn't care whether one install Microsoft or Apple or Banannas. nVidia wants a chip or card in every laptop, tablet and desktop if they could. Like all adults they're too busy trying to make money and beat the next guy to care about the flavor of the day. Again, however, they don't want people fiddling with their code just as your automobile manufacturer does not want you to remove their chip, install an after-market chip to push your RPM, and piston-timings higher and faster so you could do more than just use transportation.

If it isn't about money it's about politics and there is no higher ground to break than in encryption. Sure, some hardware company make get it's hair tangled if you cross lands with their device but big brother's daddy will take your electronics away from you when he wonders why you have any software that encrypts data past more than just browser-password-bit.

One day someone is going to have to wake up and realize the [relevant] laws in place no longer have merit in a world where I can log into virtual instance [a] from country [b] through hosting service in country [c] without even realizing it, listening to blacklisted format mp3 or someone will wake up someday after clicking the wrong popup to find out they're in jail because the malware installed java or flash or what have you to allow a passthrough and grandma didn't mean to root her tablet, she just clicked the pop-up.