Inside another version of Linux tonight, and when I say inside, I don’t just mean a virtualbox. I reformatted the HD and went and did a proper install. I’m inside it for real. All virtualboxing will have to be done from here.
SolydXK, good luck. They are, it seems, quite a small and devoted Linux community with a fine product. It lacked on several fronts for me and that’s why I switched. By tweaking here and there I was able to get SolydXK to do everything I wanted – play games, different desktop workspaces, watch streaming movies on Netflix and Amazon, and generally feel comfortable all around. There were other annoying, small problems which appeared to require long term fixing issues. In the end, via continuing to test distros in my virtualbox, I settled with Manjaro.
I did the installation last night.
I survive because I keep /home from distro to distro, and therefore essential files are protected. I also have a backup called /home2. These are on different physical Hds so the risk is minimal.
Manjaro xfce. Looks the same, but things are better. I now have different desktop backdrops for each of my 6 workspaces. Something I couldn’t do in SolydX. It’s also different under the hood – radically – in 17 years I’ve never gone this way. This isn’t based on an RPM or .DEB distro. This is Slackware underneath. Aquiring files is not done with apt-get install or that sort of thing anymore.
There’s a chart on Wikipedia showing the history of the development of Linux, which began in the early 1990s. The biggest fan club is definitely the Debian tree. Then there’s an RPM tree and a Slackware tree. These are Linux families and their offshoots. I’ve been testing RPM and Debian based distros for the last 17 years. This is the first time I’ve been standing under the Slackware umbrella, and it feels sheltered here.
It’s safe. Things work as expected. It’s solid. There are cool YouTube instructional videos for fine tuning. My desktop looks good. It’s already getting fine tuned.
These days Linux distros are pretty easy, since De’s (Desktop Environments) like xfce, KDE, gnome3, Mate and Cinnamon are available pretty much on all of them.