Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" MATE

Installed System: Main Screen + Xed

A little over two weeks ago, I made the decision on what Linux distribution to install and use full-time on my personal laptop. I chose Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" MATE, because I felt that while it could do a bit better for total newbies in terms of usability (as some usability features have regressed since a couple of years ago), it has been a reliable and known quantity for me, and I figured that if I could generally use the live session without much hassle, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch (no pun intended) to imagine that the installed session would likely be workable. As I've covered most of the experiences of installing and using programs and getting around the desktop in my review of the live session, this post will be relatively short, covering only the salient points of the installation and some of the changes I made after the installation. Follow the jump to see more.

Review: Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" MATE

Main Screen + Linux Mint Menu

I've been out of the country for 2.5 weeks, explaining the lack of posts in that time. Before that, I was busy trying to finish a rough draft of a paper outlining the work I did at my UROP before graduation. Now that I'm back and tired from jetlag, I have a little more time to do a review like this, which I wanted to do in June itself.

I'm skipping most further introduction because none is needed for Linux Mint here. All I'll say is that there is no "LTS" label on this post because now all Ubuntu-based Linux Mint releases are based on the LTS releases, starting with this one; this is a move that I support because it should give more credence to the idea that Linux Mint is a stable system that newbies can comfortably use. I reviewed this as a live USB system made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Long-Term Review: Chakra 2013.02 "Benz"

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started.

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started. Finally, for some reason Blogger decided to delete the content of what I had here, so everything up until "Day 2" is very much paraphrased from memory.

Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" KDE

I recently reviewed Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" KDE, and I was quite pleased with it. My long-term review of the Xfce edition just ended, so this one will go for another 8 days. This will be the last such long-term review of the summer, because after this I am going home and won't be back until just before the semester starts, at which point I probably will not be able to continue this.

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 July 29

There was no "Featured Comments" post last week because comments on the previous week's posts didn't come until after that week was done. There were two posts that got a couple comments each, so I will repost all of those.

Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce

Reader Bernard Victor suggested, "Have you tried Xubuntu. I am using it and find it very good. Even able to change to Nautilus from Thunar. All my sound and video files play without any tuning, using either VLC or Gmusicbrowser. Rhythmnbox is also available."

My Installation of Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce

Commenter Innocent Bystander said, "Someone trying to discover the installation of LM14 XFCE would have hard time to learn anything from this article", later clarifying, "Sorry I meant LM13 XFCE. In the article "Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce" http://dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.ca/2012/07/long-term-review-linux-mint-13-lts-maya.html There was too much emphasis about the attempt to replace MDM by LightDM. Although I understand your motive but I was expecting to see if LM13 XFCE is worth a move, in terms of software and "habits" compatibilities. Speaking of MDM, I wonder why a "friendly & design focus" distro like LinuxMint would opt for the inconvenient MDM. Do you know why?"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week will see the publication of the last long-term review of this summer. In addition, I will have a normal review out along with possibly a second (if the release of that [second] distribution happens this week), and I'll probably have another random post about the summer in general. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce

If you've read my very recent review of Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce, you'll know how pleased I was with it. Given that my latest long-term review of Kubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" just ended, I needed something new, so this was going to be it. Follow the jump to see what this is like over the course of 7-10 days.

Long-Term Review: Kubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin"

This is the second of a handful of long-term reviews I will be doing this summer. The initial subject of this was the 64-bit edition of #! 11 "Waldorf", so follow the jump to see how that turned out.

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 July 8

There was one post that got a handful of comments, so I will repost most of them.

Long-Term Review: Chakra 2012.05 "Archimedes"

Reader manmath sahu suggested, "prasanth, liked the review very much and the way it's done over a period of 8 days is very useful. please take Stella (a CEntOS remaster) linux for a spin. i found it good, but would like to know about your experience."
Commenter abveritas, who I think is a leading developer of Chakra itself, had this to say, among other things: "Chakra being a rolling release, it is an absolute must to always update the system, before installing any package. Seems quite a few packages were installed during this review, which were build on newer deps, but only the new app was installed, not the system properly updated. One other thing that is an absolute must on a rolling distro, is for all our users to read the news, when seeing a fairly large update, there is no other way to give sometimes needed instructions to update correctly. In this case, using the rm command was very wrong, and in most cases would have killed pacman, the correct way to update was in the news, forums, and all social sites, to make sure all users would be reached.
http://chakra-linux.org/news/index.php?/archives/68-Manual-intervention-needed-with-next-pacman-Syu.html For the rest, really pleased to see you taking the time to put Chakra thtough a serious test, and hopefully we can get some logs, to see why the crashes, since it would be great to try and reproduce, so a fix can be found. Any and all logs you are willing to provide from /var/log would be greatly appreciated."
Reader Jagdeesh Deshpande said, "Good that you got another PC. It has certainly helped to give depth to your reviews. I always try real installations on one of 6 ext4 partitions among sdb6 to sdb11. Hence presently I can compare mint 9, LMDE-64-mate-cinnamon, openSUSE 12.1, and kububtu 12.04 Before a week, I installed kubuntu 12.04 LTS after a long wait for Mint 13 KDE and feel that at last I have found successor of mint9. In openSUSE 12.1 the configuration module for Wacom Bamboo CTH-460 is broken and so I can't make the touch 'off' and this is interfering very badly moving the courser due to my finger's touch while using the pen. In Kubuntu 12.04 the configuration tool is working as in Pardus 2011.2. The trouble with kubuntu is- by default hibernation is disabled. If 'sudo pm-hibernate' (in konsole) hibernates the system, enable it by referring the forum post https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/ubuntu-help/power-hibernate.html Then I added plasma widgets plasma-widget-quickaccess plasma-widget-lancelot and @ 25 applications Now i am very satisfied with it and may not install mint13kde. If Kubuntu 12.04 is not in your list and this creates interest in you to try Kubuntu 12.04, your review will be very much useful for the Linux community. Thanking for the indepth review."
Commenter Kartik had this suggestion: "Hi Prashant, good review. I myself have used chakra for almost 3 months and found it to be a really fast KDE distro. If you are looking for something long term on your PC I suggest you give Mageia 2 KDE a spin. I found it to be very stable, fast and polished."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, there will be another long-term review published, and the review I was going to do of Fuduntu 2012.3 has been briefly incorporated into that. Depending on how things work out, I may be able to do another regular review as well. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Long-Term Review: Chakra 2012.05 "Archimedes"

For those of you who don't know what this is about, this post should clear things up. Essentially, I now have another computer upon which I can do tests of installed distribution sessions for several days at a time. There will be three more posts like this one this summer; I may or may not be able to continue it through the semester. For reference, I used the 64-bit minimal CD for live testing and installation. Follow the jump to read my experiences with Chakra over more than a week of use.

Long-Term Review: Because Now I Can

I am doing a UROP on campus this summer (as opposed to last summer, when I interned at NIST), and it is a continuation of my UROP from the last two semesters concerning photonic crystals. This summer, my ultimate goal is to be able to use MEEP finite-difference method simulations to recreate the spontaneous emission spectrum of a particular photonic crystal structure of great interest to the research group in which I am working.

To do that, I create the simulations as programs written in the Scheme programming language (a derivative of Lisp) and executed through MEEP. These actual steps are done on a cluster of computers, so the laptop computer that I have been using at my office is merely a terminal for the cluster. Because that laptop runs Microsoft Windows XP, there is no built-in way to SSH into the cluster, so I have to use a UNIX-like terminal emulator for Microsoft Windows; in my case, I use SecureCRT combined with XWin32 for graphical programs like Gedit and Geeqie. Unfortunately, that laptop is at least 7 years old (judging from its hardware specifications and thickness), and with Microsoft Windows XP, it is certainly showing its age; last semester it worked just fine, but a few days ago, it started choking trying to run Mozilla Firefox/Adobe Reader, LibreOffice Calc, and SecureCRT simultaneously. I asked my UROP faculty advisor if I could use a much newer desktop in the office that I use that no one else seems to be using, and he was fine with that; I even asked him if I could run Linux on it, and given that my previous UROP postdoc advisor (in the same research group) ran Ubuntu and helped other people set up Linux for work computers, he was fine with that too.

This presents a unique opportunity for me this summer with regard to this blog, and that's where the title comes in. One of the most common complaints about the reviews I do here is that they use the live session without trying the installation on real hardware at all. Also, because I usually only test the live session, the actual amount of time I spend is not more than a few hours spread over two days or so. Now, I have finally secured the official go-ahead to do with the computer whatever I feel is useful, so I will attempt to take more time to test some distributions (now as an installed session on real hardware) that I have said before that I would have no problem installing, because I want to see just how true of a statement that is. The computer in question is probably not more than 3 years old; it is a Dell desktop with a 64-bit Intel Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, and an ATI graphics card (though I am not sure if the graphics card is integrated or dedicated).

Given the amount of time I have left this summer to work, I intend to test each distribution for between 7-10 days of work, though that may change depending on my schedule and if a given distribution really does not work out. I have already installed Chakra 2012.05 "Archimedes", so that will be the subject of the first real "Long-Term Review" post. Each of these posts will be updated with a daily label detailing any changes, bugs, or other things that I notice. Each post will also have a "Day 0" label at the top sort of revisiting the live session like I normally do to set up my ideal desktop once more. At the end of the testing session (again, 7-10 days), I will publish the full post. While the "Day 0" section will basically be like a full review all over again, the following days' sections will be shorter. It doesn't take a long time to see if my favorite applications work or not, but it does take longer to really feel comfortable with the desktop, look for bugs and quirks, and make sure that upgrades go smoothly. So in these posts, I will really be looking out for details like how well the file manager and panel do stuff that I want them to do on a daily basis, how stable the system is, et cetera, as opposed to simply seeing once if something like Skype works; at my UROP, I only really need a web browser to see some web pages and check email, a PDF viewer to read papers, and a terminal emulator to SSH into the cluster, so I could theoretically settle for something like Ubuntu, but I don't want to waste this opportunity.

Again, I have already started with Chakra. I've always been fond of #!, so I might give that a go too. I'll also give Sabayon a run given that version 9 seemed to work so incredibly well. All of these will be the 64-bit editions because the computer has a 64-bit processor and 4 GB of RAM, so I want to make use of that. That leaves room for a fourth distribution (but probably not more than that); I will have to think about what I want to save for last, and I certainly welcome any comments and suggestions on the matter. Do look out for these posts along with my usual reviews and other random posts.

(UPDATE: Duh. I just realized I could do a long-term test of a prerelease version of SolusOS at the end of summer, and that would be the fourth distribution to test. Hopefully by then a 64-bit beta edition will have been released. I haven't written about it formally, but I have checked out SolusOS 2 Alpha 4, and I'm quite pleased with what I see, especially for an alpha release. Now, I will be able to see if that is really true over a longer period of use on an installed system instead of just a shorter period of use on a live system.)

Review: Kubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin"

Main Screen

Well, it's that time of the year again. Canonical just released the spring editions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu (and with those have come releases of the officially-recognized derivatives Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mythbuntu). Today, I'm reviewing Kubuntu, for a few different reasons.


The first is that this is the last version of Kubuntu that will be officially maintained by Canonical. After the announcement about that over a month ago, the future of Kubuntu appeared to be in flux, but thankfully an announcement was made a few days ago that Blue Systems, the maintainer of Netrunner and primary sponsor of Ubuntu-based Linux Mint with KDE, would also sponsor Kubuntu and would take a couple developers from Kubuntu who were previously at Canonical.
The second is that this is a long-term support (LTS) release, and as this is still going to be supported by Canonical, that means this version will get 5 years of support. To match that, Kubuntu needs to be quite stable and bug-free, so I want to see how well that works out.
The third is that I am looking to replace Linux Mint 9 LTS "Isadora" GNOME with something that will in all likelihood be based in some way upon Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin". I want to see how this version of Ubuntu can fill that role.
The fourth is that this is the 500th post on Das U-Blog! I think that warrants a pretty big review like this one.

I tested the 64-bit edition of this as a live USB system made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Movie Review: Disturbia

To make up for that ridiculously long previous post, this one will be ridiculously short.
I watched "Disturbia" on TNT at someone's house tonight.
Suffice it to say, it freaked me out, but then again, all horror movies generally do. Of course, I'm usually pretty easily scared by anything in a movie anyway.
That's all.