True confessions of a distro hopper...

[zxr250cc]

Hi all,

I bought Red Hat 5 in a computer shop in Honolulu in January of '98. I was sick of using Windows 3.1/95/98 and curious about options for other software. I also liked the box with the red hat on it. I was using an old HP computer with an AMD upgrade 133 MHz 486 chip in it for Linux use. I had a ThinkPad 560 with Win 98 as well. I later tried Caldera 2.1 and installed that followed by 2.2 and then 2.3 versions. I quit using that when the SCO lawsuits started. KDE came into use about then, on 2.2. if I remember right. I wanted to try Mandrake at the time but the HP computers 486 CPU I had was not supported; they began with Pentium support only. Caldera had an excellent installer program, Lizard, when others were quite clunky, to be polite.

The next distro used for a good long while was SuSE for multiple versions. I used that for four or five years and thought SuSE 10 was a great version for them and the last one with full documentation in the box. I was buying the full distributions as boxed sets to get the paperwork. After that I was using Mandrake for some time and migrated to Mandriva then Mageia as Mandriva seemed to fall apart with the inner turmoil in the company.I left Mageia in the ROSA period as it did not appeal to me. I used Mageia for four or five years and then moved to Linux Mint mainly and back to openSUSE on an alternate machine. Now I am using Linux Mint in 32 bit and 64 bit four laptops and thinking to put Mageia 8 or Cauldron on a Carbon X1 with 8GB of RAM. That should fly very well in there.

Having always had one spare laptop/desktop or more around it was interesting to download many other Linux distributions to try them out of curiosity. I also liked open Solaris 8. So, I have tried many flavors of Linux over the years and have to say that the fragmentation is interesting but irritating. Let me explain. Too much energy is expended on slight variations of the same theme and collective energy is wasted in ways that would advance the software considerably, I believe, if all energy was on a prime set of less than ten versions. I don't say one as I realize that will not happen. My first computer was a Mac 512 I bought in '85 in Madison, WI. (86?) That software provider has gone on to good results due to good focus of effort. I wish Linux was more focused than it is but it is only an opinion and everyone has one... I know, I am preaching to the choir but I feel like saying it anyway. Other software used was DOS, both MS and PC versions in English and Japanese and then OS/2. Out of all that I have stayed with Linux as my main software for home and in dual boot installs in all the machines when having to share Windows centric stuff with others at the office I was in at the time. From 2008 on all personal usage has been Linux with the exception of a dual boot Windows 10 on an X220 Think Pad bought on fleabay that I subsequently wiped and used Mint on it and one AMD based desktop that mirrored XP computers in an overseas internet cafe in Mindanao done as a charity project.

Of course, still downloading other distros and trying them but think Mageia and Linux Mint are what will work for the next period of time as both are stable and attractive. Can't really like Gnome 3 as it looks and functions and prefer Cinnamon (Gnome 2 fork) or KDE Plasma as a desktop. I have tried most of the desktop programs as a part of using various distributions. With RAM so cheap and CPU chips so fast it is hard to worry about the less demanding desktops versions anymore and loss of support for 32 bit Linux in the coming April will finish off a lot of desktop variants, probably. With no patch updates for security that should realistically clean most if not all 32 bit computers off the net, at least for the users who want some security. I mention that as there are still very many computers online using XP. ??? Security? What is that? LOL

YMMV

Cheers

[filip]

loss of support for 32 bit Linux in the coming April

It will not happen in general. Source?

[zxr250cc]

Hi all,

I had thought all 32 bit distros ending support in 2023; some are and some aren't.

I copied the following from a Debian site: How long will Debian support 32-bit? Debian (and plenty of other distributions) will continue to support 32-bit x86 machines until at least 2024. The previous Ubuntu release (and its derivatives, such as Mint 19) will be supported until 2023, so there’s no need to panic just yet.

I have been using Mint and they have been clear about ending 32 bit in April next year. Not dead yet and still supported longer by some others. That is good.

Cheers

[filip]

Mageia will support 32-bit at least in Mageia 9 release and most probably even later.