Maybe this post would be better suited to the Article, please feel free to move.
I was curious to know how long it took to install Linux mint and made a special point of noting these bootup and installation times:
Installing Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela Cinnamon Edition from a thumb-drive:
Download depends upon your local internet connection speed. The complete download installation is about 1.7 Gig. Please note that after downloading a free, small utility is also required to convert and install to the thumb-drive. It is quite easy and only takes a couple of minutes to format the thumb-drive, install and verify.
To boot from the thumb-drive required two Bios settings. Firstly the thumb-drive has to be set to boot first and secondly the USB has to be set to Auto. Save the bios settings before rebooting.
From a cold start it only took 42 seconds to boot into the Linux operating system, recognise both monitors and two hard-drives, keyboard and mouse. Virtually all Linux standard programs can be tried without any affecting your original operating system.
A desktop link activates the install. I selected the option to dual boot on a previously installed Linux Mint 17.1 version - 120 Gig SSD hard-drive. A mouse activated slider adjusts partition sizes. Minimum is about 9 Gig (I selected 25 Gig). There are only a couple of other settings required, Name, Password, Language, Location and Keyboard type.
During installation the menu system and most installed software can be tried. FireFox is installed and useful for surfing while waiting for the installation to complete:)
Complete installation of the dual boot system took just over twenty-four minutes. Option is then to reboot or continue testing.
Booting from a cold start takes less than one minute.
For anyone who already has Windows 8.1 Pro or above, it’s well worth trying out Hyper-V as an option to give Linux a go, without needing to dual-boot or anything daft like that. If an idiot like me can get that running with no support, most people here ought to be just fine with giving it a go.
I don’t have this experience. I used to, when I was running Unity (which is gawd-awful), but it was slow as balls as it really did try to search All The Things.
Now that I am back to Gnome, alt-f2 requires you absolutely know the name of the command. That is, you have to know that the Chromium browser is “chromium-browser” while Firefox is just “firefox”. : )
The good news is, it’s fast. I will take fast launch of programs over a wait-30-seconds-for-irrelevant-crap-search any day. And it couldn’t seem to find the calculator, psh.
I’ve got a new job where I’m expected to run Windows. Switching to another OS from one you’re used to is hard. The hardest part for me so far is, when I try to follow directions somewhere to do something on Windows… if my setup is in any way different from the instructions, I easily get stuck and cannot finish. So when they say “right click on My Computer and then choose the Advanced tab” and I don’t have a “My Computer” and clicking on the closest-looking thing, “computer”, doesn’t offer me any tabs, then I simply cannot go on.
It’s the same with Linux from Windows-- while indeed there are a lot of good step-by-step instructions for things especially with Ubuntu, you need to know how stuff works in general so when the instructions don’t match your own setup, you can still get somewhere.
This is especially true when people say “oh just edit this file” and you look everywhere and it simply does not exist (maybe because you’re distro removed it and uses some complete other separate file to do whatever job it does).
For gnome, you may want to attempt Albert. I’ll admit, I don’t use Gnome, I’ve always been a KDE fan. Albert may suit you really really well in Gnome’s ALT+F2 isn’t cutting it.
As a possible issue, and I think Albert resolves that, you can use Chrome (potentially) to launch chromium-browser, etc. I know in KDE, I simply have to type chrom and press enter to launch it.
Before vacationing in Colombia I decided I did not want to bring my MacBook. Through Ebay I purchased an EEE/PC. I despise Windows so I installed Ubuntu. It wasn’t too bad at first. I used it a little after I got home. Within a week or two though I got tired of hitting the repository and installing software several times each day. To me it felt like a half baked OSX.
A year or two later I built an HTPC and installed Ubuntu again. There was some issue with DVDs and sound. I spent a few hours over a couple days trying to fix it. I never did get it to work. I replaced it with mac mini.
When I look at the cost of Apple laptops sometimes I imagine my next computer as a Linux machine. Then I remember Sony customer service is a joke compared to Apple. Im unsure whose hardware and customer service would meet my expectations after being an Apple user for 14 years. I love the command line, but I don’t want a part time job as sys admin working on my Linux machine. Maybe things get better after a few months of working with it or for more experienced Linux users. I was kind of sad because I wanted to see Linux bury Windows. Based on the complaints I see online from users Windows 10 might accomplish that.
Im not sure @mawburn. I just felt like I was using apt-get multiple times each day to download dependencies and build Ubuntu into what I needed it to be. 3 years ago I was less experienced with the command line.
Well it sort of is a matter of, do you want a bunch of pre-installed applications you may never use, or would you rather install what you need as you need it? I tend to lean for the latter, but I realize others want different things, which is why there are so many Linux Distros out there! (you just have to find the one that fits you best)
I personally have never been a fan of Ubuntu or its different flavors. I reluctantly had to use it for several years because they were one of the first stable distros to support AMD64, but as soon as Debian marked that as stable, I jumped right back.
As far as updates/upgrades go, sure you may see the notification a few times a day (welcome to Open Source and the fact they can deploy them at a whim), but you really don’t have to update each time they notify you. I typically do it on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule.
I update every blue moon or so, unless I see something I want (Orca update came through recently, woo!).
That’s the issue right there with average people using Linux. Ubuntu is sort of the answer to that, except when it’s not. I don’t mind installing a Thingie now and then, but I don’t want everything I need to require a few hours or even minutes of debugging.
That said, that’s exactly what I’m going through with Windows right now. I tried to get git (and msys) going on it, I really did. That was my productivity yesterday. So today, going to use the VirtualBox Debian instead, because apt-get install git is just way easier and I’m lazy as (*).