After trying a few new Linux Distros

A week ago I posted a complaint about new Linux distros from an old timer. After a week of trying this and that, I thought I'd share my experience because some people might find it useful. I'm not looking for help or advice myself, but other peoples' comments may also be useful for anyone shopping around.

The occasion was getting a new motherboard, CPU and memory and assembling a new computer. It seemed like a good time to explore and experiment. My current computer is running pclinuxos and, after a long time, I've gotten it configured in a way that I'm really comfortable with.

So, I tried Endeavour, MX Linux, pclinuxos, Debian, Devuan, and Mint. Endeavour was, in a way, the most intriguing, but I'd find myself getting in some weird configuation and couldn't back out easily. (This happened with other distros as well.) Debian was the worst. When I started the installation disc it couldn't even figure out how to display properly on my monitor.

MX Linux I was almost ready to make my new regular, but a weird thing happened. Gnutv, which is an important App for me, couldn't record TV broadcasts! Kaffeine could. I could run azap and then cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 to a file and record that way, but not gnutv! So, no MX Linux.

Eventually I went to Linux Mint Cinnamon, which I knew from previous experience was usually a pretty straightforward, trouble free distro. It's the one I typically install for other people to try out or use, and I got it working pretty well. I'm actually postting right now from it. But, one weird thing. When I connect external USB drives, some of them work fine, and others, every time I get I try to read or write to them I get I/O errors, and they're perfectly good drives that work everywhere else. In fact, I wanted to copy some files to my new Mint install and I booted a different distro from a USB just to copy the files. My suspicion is that this is some systemd nonsense but I can't be sure. I have avoided systemd distros, but I thought maybe it was time to give systemd a fair chance. Now I'm not so sure. Pclinuxos doesn't use systemd.

All right, what about the new pclinuxos distros? I tried kde, mate, and xfce versions. The display manager for kde seems to be really buggy, I'd get all kinds of weird behavior installing widgets. With Mate I couldn't figure out how to change the display resolution, even after searching the internet for advice. But xfce, where everything is kept simple, seems to work really well. I have it installed on a SATA drive while Mint is on an SSD drive. Right now I plan to use pclinuxos-xfce install for awhile to see if it also has some insufferable problem, and if not, I'll switch it over to the SSD drive. So far, the only thing I don't like on it is the way you switch virtual workspaces. You use the middle mouse button to bring up the possible selections. On my old pclinux install, they are displayed in the panel. I just have to glance at the panel to get an idea of what's going on in each workspace and then click on the one I want. I don't know why I can't get that in the new distros. In Mint I have to use control alt Up-arrow to see the workspace selections. It's annoying when you've gotten used to something better. Maybe I should mention that I'm a command line guy. I open xterms or Konsoles or whatever will give me a terminal with a command line to do lots of stuff. I never use those fancy file managers for example. With my scripts and old unix uttilities like ls, rm, mv, grep, find, tar etc I can do every thing so much more easily from the command line. I will admit there's a learning curve for them, but, being an old timer, I was using unix before they had windowed systems and I got those commands firmly into my muscle memory.