Wow! Talk about distro hopping… The last couple of months has been a super busy time for me sorting out a ton of websites, working with various clients, and to top it all off… getting my own computer up to speed.
I use a Lenovo G560. It’s a great laptop, but I’ve been hunting for the ideal OS for a while until I settled for Arch Linux. I’m not a Windows user, and I’ve been using Linux for over a year now. I love it.
I was using Arch Linux for a good 3 months, but after a long tired day I (stupidly) decided to do a full system upgrade:
Pacman -Syu
It caused a kernel panic (to non Linux users, this is like the Windows “blue screen of death”). As Arch Linux is “cutting edge updates, something went wrong with the latest drivers and my graphics card on my laptop. This was a real pain! Especially as I had a ton of pending deadlines and had a load of work to do that day!
I learned how to “Chroot” into the system, which was awesome (and been very useful), from there I had to try and fix/figure out the error causing the kernel panic. I burned far too much time trying to get it going again, so, in the end I had to cut my losses and decided to start fresh with a new installation.
Thanks to me backing up all my really important stuff on my external hard drive and also on Dropbox I saved any headaches on file loss. This is never an issue. It’s more the time spend setting up and building the system to my liking.
The formatting of Arch Linux was pretty devastating to me (seriously!?), as I’d actually spent so much time building my “perfect OS” but, oh well, that’s always going to be an issue with running a “cutting edge OS”, with as they say “bleeding edge updates” – it’s all a learning curve.
I have since tried the following Linux distributions on my Lenovo G560:
- Peppermint OS
- Minut Mint 11
- Linux Mint Debian
- Linux Mint LXDE
- Sabayon Linux
- Chakara
- Linux Debian
- PCLinuxOS
And a few more I can’t think of off the top of my head. I know it’s a ton of distros to try out, and they were ALL tried as a “hard install” on the laptop, not in a virtual machine, so I’ve gained a lot more experience on a variety of Linux distros and come a little closer to finding the Linux distro I want to call “home”.
Currently I have rolled back to Linux Mint 9 (LTS), and I am on that at the moment. I’ll give my overviews of each of these distributions listed above, in separate blog posts, if and when I have the time, but so far, I’ve not found anything better for my current needs than Linux Mint 9.
Linux Mint Debian was the closest to take my Laptops “home” distro, and recently they’ve announced “stable upgrade” repo section, so it looks like I’ll be heading back over to LMDE soonish… It was my favourite out of the selection listed and was Soooo QUICK! I was using it for a good week, but they had an error with the graphics drivers that forced it to boot into “tty1″ and lose the GUI, I able to fix it, but I wanted something more stable, so, at the time, it forced me to try something else.
For now I’ll be sticking with Linux Mint 9 and getting my other websites and projects up to speed.
No related posts.
