For a few months in 2014, I had fun reviewing one Linux distro every Friday for Pipedot.org, a tech site to which I was a regular contributor. Generally what I would do is visit DistroWatch.org, choose a distro, download, install, and run it in a virtual machine, and explore for a bit. Sounds unadventurous, but after years of using the same Linux distros and FreeBSD regularly, it was a bump out of my comfort zone to see what else was out there. It was also a spectacular opportunity to explore some of the innovative approaches being pursued. Here are some of my reviews, with links to the Pipedot original (where you'll find the embedded links).
Can't believe a full year has gone by since I posted the Selokang article. 2016 has been something else.
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2017: So, to start with the conclusion, our main household machine is now a Chromebox, and it's working out. It's not perfect, but it's way better than our previous situation, which was a Mac. Read on.
The "family" computer has been a Mac since 2004 or so, and for those years there was no question about it: nice hardware, nice software, user friendly, and a generally useful, productive, well-conceived tool that allowed us to buy printers, scanners, and do the sort of things you usually can't do easily or quickly with Linux. I had a G3 Powerbook, then a gorgeous all-in-one that suffered due to international transit, and we've had a Mac Mini since then. The first Mini we bought in about 2010 and it was fast and useful and good. Until it wasn't.
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In 2001 when I first ditched my Win98 install and turned to Linux, Mandrake and SuSE were about neck-and-neck in the competition to be the most user-friendly consumer Linux distribution, with niceties like good installers and hardware detection. RedHat was the other “Big One” but was already more associated with corporate and server infrastructure, in my opinion.
I went with SuSE for many years, and then began playing the field. But in early 2016 I bought a new laptop and needed a reliable Linux distro to put on it, and Mageia – the heir/successor to Mandrake then Madriva – was what I installed. And it stayed on my machine for about two years, where it was a loyal friend that served me well.
You don't hear much about Mageia these days (2021). The Ubuntu/Debian derivatives kind of ran away with the world's attention, and to be fair, the Ubuntu family is a cinch to install, has a huge package repository, and offers overall a good user experience. In my case, I went to Linux Mint long ago and don't regret it. But Mageia has something I sorely miss elsewhere, the Mageia Control Center (MCC), which manages superuser tasks like package installs, system updates, firewall, network connections, in a comfortable, graphic format. So it's always puzzled me that it doesn't get more attention than it does.
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The year is 2021, and I was thinking about getting a device to play my music collection. I had simple requirements:
- It must be Internet-connected, so it can receive arbitrary firmware updates that risk bricking the thing "in the name of security"
- It must use that connectivity to regularly upload information of its choosing, without informing me or telling me what information, to whom it is being sent, or how that information will be used.
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