Testimonial: A Convert And Newbie

by lonewolf

It doesn't appear a lot of folks wanted to announce themselves. I guess I'll be the odd duck out here. I just wanted to say hey to everybody. I've been running ONLY Linux on my personal computers for 20 years or so. I converted my wife about 15 years ago. She now uses Linux on her home computer, but still has to use a Windows PC at work. Just ask her what she thinks and you'll get an earful about having to reboot the work computer 5 or 6 times a day. The good news is that she has finally decided to retire in a couple of months so I won't be hearing her complain about that.

I ran PCLinuxOS a lot of years ago, but got away from it for whatever reason. I've run Debian/Ubuntu/Mint distros or their derivatives for a lot of years now. I began having some issues and wasn't getting a lot of them resolved on the various forums. I'm not sure what has changed, but I recently decided to do a lot of distro shopping and hopping to see if I could come up with something better. I was kind of disappointed when I was unable to get their latest releases installed on any of my laptops. Every distro I tried gave me some sort of fit when I tried the install. I had never had trouble like that in the last 10 years and was getting really frustrated.

I decided to look for any distro that is NOT a derivative of that family. I also was looking for a non-systemd distro, and I prefer XFCE. Yep, up jumped PCLinuxOS. I decided to give it a whirl. I was really frustrated trying to get PCLinuxOS installed. The problem I was having was in partitioning my hard drive to suit PCLinuxOS. I was still partitioning for the distros I had been running. I don't use UEFI and I still use a DVD for the installation media. Yeah, I know, I'm a dinosaur.

Anyway, it finally hit me yesterday to allow PCLinuxOS to take over the entire hard drive on one of my spare laptops and set the partitions as needed. WOW! No wonder I couldn't get things to work using my old partitioning. I always had a linux-swap partition set and lately I had been using 8 GB for that. Then I had a 25 GB partition for the OS and the rest of the drive for my Home directory. And sure enough, after letting PCLinuxOS do its own thing, on reboot I had a running PCLinuxOS system. When I looked at the partitioning in Gparted, it became perfectly clear why I could not get a system to boot after the install. LOL!

I've run into a couple of really minor glitches (so I thought) that I managed to get ironed out with a little research. For instance, I like and use Simple Screen Recorder to record performing certain tasks, then I upload the videos for my old customers and friends/family to see. I found that it is as easy as trying to use a remote desktop. When I searched for simplescreenrecorder I was disappointed to see it was not on the list of packages available to me. I think it was on the second site I found when doing a search for possible screen capture apps that I saw a mention of "ssr". I went immediately to Synaptic and searched for ssr. Now, I'm a happy guy.

So, I'm here to stay since I had so much trouble with the other guys' distros. But, I do have one question to put out here. I'm a little tentative to bring it up after what happened to me on another forum. I use, and have used for about ten years, Bleachbit to clean things up occasionally. I asked for assistance in doing a certain thing relating to Bleachbit and instead of suggestions I was hit with comments like, "Only an idiot would use a wrecking ball on his own system" and "If you're stupid enough to use a piece of crap like that you don't deserve help". Now, keep in mind that was on one of the largest Linux distro forums on the 'Net. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. So, I responded saying that if you don't have suggestions or advice to help me, please stay off my thread. I further stated that I had used Bleachbit for ten years without a problem and then added that if somebody else DID have a problem, then it might be that they weren't using the program correctly. I ended up having my thread killed and then I was notified my account was being deleted. Yep, they did. I no longer have access to that forum.

So, without causing a ruckus on here, I will have a question about Bleachbit to pose over on the correct board. BUT, before I do that, I'll ask. Is Bleachbit a sore subject on this forum? If I ask my question will I get possible solutions or will I be bombarded with negative comments about Bleachbit. Considering it is included with PCLOS by default, I'm hoping I can finally get some help.

I know for a fact I'll have many questions as I tweak and use PCLinuxOS. So far I'm impressed with the quickness and stability and the limited use of resources to present the desktop. Right now I'm showing just over 900 MB of memory used and I have my browser opened along with a terminal window. That is about 500 to 600 MB less than the previous distro. Pretty impressive!

I look forward to chatting with you guys as time goes by.