Linux has over 6% of the desktop market

[Falna]

I never could find a good "offline" calendar program/application for Windows 7.

I've been using the Pro version of VueMinder on my Windows machines for years.

[Night Wing]

I never could find a good "offline" calendar program/application for Windows 7.

I've been using the Pro version of VueMinder on my Windows machines for years.

But I am no longer using Windows and haven't been since January of 2013 when I started using Linux Mint. And VueMinder does not have a linux version.

[UCyborg]

Installed Linux Mint 22.2 (Cinammon) on my laptop (dual-core AMD E1-6010 APU @ 1.35 GHz /w Radeon R2 graphics, 2 GB of RAM) that everyone is raving about. It forgets screen brightness I set on every boot. Trying to play a H.264 level 4.1 video (1280x720 @ 60 FPS) in Firefox with hardware decoding hangs the machine, so can only reset.

So, not much has changed in Linux land since years ago.

Mint also hides GRUB boot menu by default for some reason, even if having another OS installed. And they set RTC clock to be interpreted in local time. I heard this was for Windows n00bs who can't set their Windows to work with RTC clock in UTC, which is odd if they implicitly try to prevent you booting back to Windows.

[Night Wing]

Installed Linux Mint 22.2 (Cinammon) on my laptop (dual-core AMD E1-6010 APU @ 1.35 GHz /w Radeon R2 graphics, 2 GB of RAM) that everyone is raving about. It forgets screen brightness I set on every boot.

Mint also hides GRUB boot menu by default for some reason, even if having another OS installed. And they set RTC clock to be interpreted in local time. I heard this was for Windows n00bs who can't set their Windows to work with RTC clock in UTC, which is odd if they implicitly try to prevent you booting back to Windows.

The Cinnamon desktop environment in Mint has something named, "Night Light", which helps with screen brightness. It should be installed by default in Cinnamon. It might be in Accessories.

Night Light is not available in Xfce which I use so I have to use a small application named, "xsct" (without the quote marks). Xsct helps my eyes at night time.

As for the Grub Menu, the Mint developers made a mistake with it in my opinion. Because in their mind, most laptop computers have one hard drive, so I think, they think the Grub Menu is not needed. But lots of us with desktop tower computers have at least two hard drives in them like I do.

There is a line of code where they changed one word which hid the Grub Menu. They changed the word, "menu" (without the quote marks) to the word, "hidden" (without the quote marks). If you want the Grub Menu back, you will have to use the Terminal. The instructions follow below. This worked for me in Xfce, but I am hoping it will work for you with Mint in Cinnamon.

1) Open the Terminal
2) Type at the prompt: sudo nano /etc/default/grub
3) Tap your Enter key
4) Type in your password
5) Tap your Enter key again
6) There will be a some lines of code
7) Edit the line where it says: GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
8) Replace the word, hidden, with the word, menu

9) To save: Hold down the Control Key with a left finger and with a right finger, tap the "x" (without the quote marks) key
10) Hold down the Shift Key with a left finger and with a right finger, tap the "y" key (without the quote marks and which makes a capital Y)
11) This exits back to the Terminal

12) At the Terminal prompt, type: sudo update-grub
13) Tap your Enter Key
14) At the prompt, type in your password
15) Tap your Enter Key
16) Then tap the "y" (without the quote marks) key to continue
17) When finished, exit out of the Terminal
18) Then reboot your computer and the Grub Menu should show up.

The above instructions are why I "dislike" using the Terminal in Linux.

[f-117]

Funny you should mention the "No boot menu" in grub...

I just did this last week to fix my "No boot menu" in LM.

I used the steps in this article and it worked out fine. Grub menu came back.

[SOLVED] No Boot Menu- Duel Boot- Win7 and Linux Mint 22.1
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=439765

Give it a try!

Scott

[frostknight]

Zdnet seemed to think it was even harder... 10% in fact. A recent bit of news.

Even as a linux user, being in favor of libre software, I cannot say that I believe that. It sounds too good to be true.

I do however believe its at least 6%.

[Mæstro]

Beside my own figures for the USA and arguments about how the Statcounter ones could be reconciled with them, the widely cited W³Schools figures, continuous since 2003, suggest Linux and Mac are used less often than others suggest. They give roughly two Mac users for every Linux user, and Mac commanding maybe a tenth of desktops, since the early tens. (Older figures suggest Mac and Linux enjoyed about equal use before then, which I think is an artefact of the site’s audience.) I wish YouGov or some other survey organisation would call up a few thousand people in several Western countries to ask about their desktop habits. This alternative method to user agent-based accounting could give us better figures, even if it would be hard to apply in hindsight.

[UCyborg]

Seems hardware video decoding causes hang only when attempted through Firefox, media players are OK. Mozilla seems to be confident this works now, given they enable it by default.

Night Light deals with color temperature, my issue is with backlight. It's not new, it was discussed as far back as over a decade ago. Not sure how to solve it, xbacklight program is not effective and the brightness file /sys/class/backlight/radeon_bl1/brightness can only be written to by root, so I guess I can't put the script that would change it on login on the list of normal startup programs.

I know a thing or two about GRUB config, the absent boot menu was already solved before I wrote the post. Not the first time changing it, I always set it to remember last used entry.

[Night Wing]

@ UCyborg

Since it seems you are using Mint and you have some things which do not care for, have you ever taken MX Linux for a "test drive". I used Mint for twelve years. But with the changes in version in Mint 22.1 with Xfce, I did not like what the Mint developers did to quite a few those changes which I used on a regular basis.

With the above said, even though I had been using Mint for the last twelve years, this past Summer is when I decided to quit using Mint and started using MX Linux as my daily driver of choice. After using MX on a daily basis since then, I have come to realize I should have been using MX ten years ago, instead of Mint, when MX made it's first public release as a linux distro.

[back2themoon]

As a Windows user (not admirer), I have to say this is great news.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

As a former (mainframe-mini-workstation) Unix and Linux user I often wonder how new users make their choice between different flavours, and seems to equate a flavour with its DE (Desktop Environment). My (initially and for a long time at work) experience was just with two flavours (Suse then (X)Ubuntu) and the key choice we made was based on the richness of the repositories (*). Concerning the look and feel, one should always be able to load an alternate DE, or work without a DE (like I did since we left Unix) using a plain window manager (I use fvwm ... your window manager, your way ). And also to load a package normally associated to another flavour (I use kdiff3 and atril for instance).

(*) I am not afraid in building from sources (I do it for a couple of utilities on a new installation), but I might said I got bored of it, and I'm generally happy to load something from the repo, even if it is not the latest version. Of course I'm equally happy if something is provided as a tarball, outside of any repo, like for Pale Moon.

Of course there are trends I do not like, e.g. move to wayland instead of Xorg, or use of snaps and alike.

[Mæstro]

Linux spreads by word of mouth, social or parasocial. My uncle, a retired engineer, suggested Mint to me when I was a teenager, and I kept this in mind when I became ready to move to Linux, ie after I stopped believing Linux needed antivirus. Newbies seldom know about desktop environments, repositories or the like; this is why Mint and Ubuntu offer themselves with several. I probably knew more than the average newcomer when I migrated in 2020, for I knew enough by then, mostly through conversations with a then-friend, that Canonical, Snap and Flathub existed and I wanted nothing to do with them, hence choosing LMDE over LM and uninstalling Flathub support. Many people today probably select a distribution because HowToGeek or some technology reviewer on YouTube endorsed it for Windows refugees and it looked the best out of the five or six evaluated in that batch. I should ask my friend why PopOS and Zorix stood out to him and his sister when he comes online tonight.

My Buster repository has always worked the best. My recent experiences show how unreliable other methods can be. Free .deb packages and tarballs work most of the time, but not always. Neither building from source nor Appimage have ever worked for me. Uniquely, my VPN was installed through a .run file, and updating has always been easy. The times, maybe once or twice a year, I need to hunt for additional software outside the official repository, except for the few retained from pre-Linux days and which all behaved themselves, are never happy. My situation with respect to software support now is virtually identical to how it had been in Windows 7 at the end, or even how it would be now if I had stayed with it: recent versions of software tend to neglect Windows 7 or Debian 10. The only real difference today between the two for me is security, thanks to ELTS. (I muse elsewhere about OS versions and software support some more.)

What would I choose if I were installing Linux today? My old reasons for needing Debian 10 or LMDE 4, which held when buying my secondary computer two years ago, have gone away within the last few weeks, now that I have got an XP virtual machine with sound. The Mint community have never been much help for me. Possibly, I would choose the current version of LMDE, Debian proper, Devuan (if available in German) or AntiX. My interests are to retain complete control over my computer as hitherto, to continue using the software I have already been using, including making my UI look identical to earlier Windows versions, to maintain stability day to day and avoid reinstalling* or upgrading for as long as possible and to keep my processor running as cool as possible. (Night Wing has heard me give more detail about CPU temperature privately; I would be happy to relate the details here if others are interested.) Giving up Systemd, or making the switch from Cinnamon to Xfce, would only be of interest if it makes my computer run colder. A similar question will face me in four years as Debian 10 reaches end of life, but I have got a sketch of an answer for now, which is good enough until I see what distributions are available and compatible with my hardware then. (I intend to keep using this physical device as long as it functions.) My computer should, above all else, promote my mental and emotional health.

*I have only needed to reinstall LMDE once, about three years ago, after Mint Upgrade had behaved erratically over a period of several weeks and ultimately crashed the system. This is beside a near miss within my first few weeks or even days, where I almost ruined my installation by enabling automatic login to a redundantly encrypted account. I removed the double encryption during the reinstallation.

[UCyborg]

I just put Mint on the laptop because I wanted to replace old Ubuntu Mate. I don't feel strongly about any particular distro (still primarily a Windows user), just keep to Ubuntu base because it's familiar.

Tried Manjaro years ago, but it had some odd behaviors and really dislike the updates philosophy. Then Puppy Linux more recently, but I realized the lightweightness is most apparent in disk space consumption, which I'm not concerned about. There's just less things to play with.

I found the solution for Firefox hanging whole laptop when playing videos. There are two drivers in the kernel that can work with Radeon R2, older radeon and newer amdgpu, Currently, radeon is used for that GPU by default. Using amdgpu instead solves the issue.

But it's not obvious at all unless you're a (kernel) programmer. What pushed me in the right direction was inspecting output of vulkaninfo, which pointed out the unsupported driver. I wasn't even looking to get Vulkan working, just picked up the habit of running some of these info programs to check if things work in theory,

[Mæstro]

Likewise, the Debian family are familiar to me by now and seem to enjoy enough attention from other developers, at least if you are not oldoldstable like me. Antix might appeal as an alternative to reduce CPU load, but there could be hidden flaws unknown to me. For desktop environments, I think the only gain for me, beside any incidental processor cooling, could be the ability to use something like the Chicago 95 theme without more modern icons showing up in system menus because Mint was not completely targetted. Cinnamon is enough for my purposes. It looks better impersonating Windows 7 than XP.

The difference between desktop environments is not only cosmetic. Mate disagrees with my rather simple graphic tablet, which I use to move the cursor instead of a mouse. The inability to navigate sanely in it repelled me from ever testing it again. As for Xfce, I remember trying to experiment with it soon after moving to Linux, but finding that i could not make Mint Report behave with it. Since then, I have uninstalled Mint Report, and returned once or twice to Xfce to see whether I could finish setting up shop there, but enough traces of my previous experiments lingered to leave me the impression that I was pottering about in an abandoned warehouse. Probably, I could use Xfce if I devoted enough time and effort to setting it up the way I like, or had some way (apt purge fails at this) to clear any trace of my past efforts, but should I do all that just for icons in the upper left corners of my early Windows themes? My interest in Xfce was aroused because I heard it was less processor-intensive, or kept my CPU cooler, but I could not observe so much myself when trying it.

[UCyborg]

There was (is?) a time when KDE was actually more efficient resource wise than Xfce. While Cinammon is simpler than KDE, it's the first time on Linux I have proper thumbnails of running applications and not have screwed indicator of auto-scrolling when you middle click on the web page content while running compositor. I messed with Compiz in the past when I still used Mate desktop environment. There were some glitches, including the thing with rectangle surrounding round auto-scrolling indicator. There was a setting to not discard thumbnails for minimized windows, though I don't recall if it worked OK or not. I'm almost certain I missed ability to hover on the thumbnail and have the window shown like on Windows 7.

So Cinammon's taskbar (I forgot the English term for how Linux folks call it...) definitely has Win7 vibes with the thumbnails and peek at desktop feature. In recent years, I've had KUbuntu on my desktop, so KDE desktop. I wasn't even looking for something fancy like Compiz, but ended up configuring picom just because KDE's compositor was a laggy mess on NVIDIA. And yeah, again had the screwed auto-scroller with the rectangle, I think it's a shadow that's not supposed to be there. But it takes a programmer to configure compositor on Linux and I'm forever doomed to mediocrity when it comes to anything programming.

[Night Wing]

So Cinammon's taskbar (I forgot the English term for how Linux folks call it...)

In Linux, it is called the Panel.

[Mæstro]

German Cinnamon calls it Leiste, literally ledge. I appreciate that Cinnamon actually translates various IT terms into German, instead of scattering Anglicisms like currants.
Also, Night Wing, the contents of the Five-Year Post I promised in private messages have been posted here already in the natural course of discussion.

[Moonchild]

Maybe they should just settle on "plinth". It's what I would call it instead if a panel, which suggests a much more screen filling element.
But, nobody will ever listen to me anyway... 😉

[Night Wing]

Also, Night Wing, the contents of the Five-Year Post I promised in private messages have been posted here already in the natural course of discussion.

Off-topic:
Your private reply message to me was appreciated.

[UCyborg]

The Slovenian translation they use for panel translates back to counter. Guess they didn't find more suitable word for it. IT and Slovenian is a strange combination. Even in cases where a word might be available, chances are the other person will look at you funny, puzzled by what you meant. While English word tends to be clear for everyone.