XP was OK. Not great, but certainly the best compared with many from Redmond.
This section is about alternatives the unpalatable Windows 7 (gratuitous changes, mindless complexity), Windows 8 (a train wreck is a gentle way to put it). Windows 10 is basically unacceptable. Compulsory updates, gratuitous advertising, mandated unacceptable services – no thank you.
I have peered at numerous Linux distributions over the years. I used Mandrake between 2005 and 2007 in anger, but the experience was not entirely satisfactory, due to difficulties with Open Office at the time (which have since been rectified entirely with Libre Office 5.0, which I use on windows, Mac and Linux.) No more MS Office for me. So it is interesting to come back to Desktop Linux 7 years later, after a long sojourn with MacOS 10.4.
After a year of research, testing, checking, integration, I have settled on LXLE 14.04.2. A very neat distro, trivial install with sensible choices. Beautiful (although too many) backgrounds. Sane set of basic tools. I am running this on a NUC-N2820-8GB-256GB SSD. 15 second boot. Completely silent.
Pros. Elegant, fast, excellent tools and apps. Just works.
Printers install and just work. Fantastic. (avoids the diabolical HP Windoze Printer CD stuff)
Great HDMI audio with a 34in monitor.
Cons. Dies after a week of quiescent running (reboot required). However if you use it daily, no problems.
No Menu editor for desktop. (There are two, but neither work properly.)
No screen dump (required to manually install “scrot” – I kid you not).
Still haven’t found a simple graphics package to crop, annotate clips.
Caveats: Still necessary to know how to edit files as user and root. (pico, vi etc)
A NAS share – smb://username@nas/folder/<cr> in the task bar of PC man fm.
Need to know about apt-get install package, apt-get remove package, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get autoremove
LXLE 14.04.3 may have taken a minor wrong turn replacing Firefox with Seamonkey, but I respect the authors reasoning.
In conclusion, a worthy replacement for SunOS 3.5 (Solaris was not it).
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