I finally decided to do away with windows on my hard drive. I’m always a little paranoid when I reformat my hard drive, but I bit the bullet, backed everything up, and wiped it clean. I recreated an extended EPS partition [post later on GRML] Created a swap partition in case something needs it. Then created a storage partition formatted ntfs for future proofing in case I move back to windows(and when I’m using windows in a box). Finally, I partitioned what space was left in half so I can have two operating systems installed on my laptop. I will have a main OS and then I will have a secondary partition for testing. I try and do most of my testing through Oracle VirtualBox installs, but sometimes you just need to actually install something to tests how it works.
After reformatting everything I decided I’m gonna forego Arch Linux for a while. I went ahead and installed Fedora to my last partition (more later on why Fedora isn’t my go-to for laptop). I wanted to end up with a Debian system running as my main OS so I’ve tried the stable Bullseye and the testing builds. None of the Debian builds have been able to access my Wi-Fi card. I can use my android phone through tethering but no matter what kind of firmware I put in or what kind of installs I do I cannot get Wi-Fi to work. Most of the old answers on the internet seem to point to needing a more up-to-date kernel. Bullseye is stuck at 10.* kernel so so that’s why I tried the more experimental branch through the testing builds. This was a net install iso and couldn’t even get past the installation because because there was no network access. Even trying with an ethernet cable got me nowhere.
I realized what I was really looking for was the APT package manager from Debian but that could also be found in Ubuntu.Back about a decade ago I actually used Ubuntu, however they switched over to the unity desktop that was just horrible to use. I remember Ubuntu was sort of clunky at the time so over the last few years of getting back into Linux I started looking for a new OS that was more snappy.
I guess a lot of what has driven me over the last few years has been using older outdated hardware. I’ve recently updated to newer hardware and I’m needing to find a modern OS that is minimal but still feels snappy. I was avoiding larger OS systems like Fedora and Ubuntu and was looking more towards smaller customizable OS’s. I have been trying to compare things and think about what’s better for my older hardware but now need to shift my mindset. My experience involved moving from a windows installation that takes up 40-50GB to a relatively smaller OS that it take 20-30GB and eventually trying out Arch Linux that installs with around 2GB of space. I also found Arch to have much quicker boot times than other “bloated” OS’s.
There was also the bragging rights of having taken a blank computer, flash drive installer, and installing Arch Linux by the wiki. The process really taught me a lot about how the file system actually works on Linux, and about how networking works; and I’m really excited that my progress has come so far because of having installed Arch Linux.But in the real world I constantly struggle with usability; like being frustrated with status icons that aren’t refreshing, or applets that aren’t functional, and having to constantly “fix” things. Okay, it’s not fixing; more of some new idea or project bringing my awareness to a missing feature in my system. Something simple like wanting to temporarily prevent the system from sleeping or suspending led to me not being able to get “caffeine” installed to Arch Linux.
One of the biggest issues driving me to something like Debian or Ubuntu is OpenLP. This is an open source media presentation software that is designed for churches and worship settings. I have in the past used MediaShout to run a worship service, but have many reasons to not go that expensive route. [post idea for the future] I use this for VBS at my church and I would like to be able to use it for more things so I really wanted it to work on my personal laptop without having to install windows. So this condenses my two big criterion down to wanting to have a nice streamlined OS that is a fixed point release that I’m not constantly having to maintain; and having OpenLP installed along with all my other software programs that I typically use.
What is really strange is that the only Linux operating system I’ve been able to get OpenLP to successfully run on is my Arch Linux installation. I don’t know if this is due to more up-to-date Linux kernel or something else that is going on that I’m not aware of. I struggled to get OpenLP to install and run on any other system like Fedora so it pushes that one out of the running on my laptop. It’s still great for a server which is what I’m running on the two I maintain.
About the installation of Ubuntu: My actual install experience was quite smooth. I downloaded the .iso file and installed it to a flash drive that booted up first shot. That boot gave me a live environment in which I could try out Ubuntu and was able to install it. The install went great and did not cause any problems. I’ve booted up into Ubuntu and it presented me the ugly unity desktop. There’s a really short command and not a lot of jumping through hoops to get my favorite Budgie desktop installed. Once that’s installed and running it works and looks great. It took very little effort to get everything installed; so far everything I’ve looked for to install has either been in the mainland repositories, or I have been able to go to the website, download a .deb package, and install through the package installer. And yes, I finally got OpenLP running in Ubuntu. The stable download didn’t work right off, so I went back and downloaded the newest release Mighty Malachi (OpenLP 3.0 RC1 2.9.4). About the only thing I’m not happy about is the system booting from grub. I’d grown to appreciate systemd-boot and being able to directly configure the boot entries.