The key word there is Desktop. I was going to argue that i3wm is fantastic but then I realized it’s just a way of ignoring an actual desktop as much as possible in favor of the command line & keyboard.
Here is a post on the latest updates to WSL
As I said it has come a long way, plus it’s pretty much designed around solving Tman’s case while keeping him on Windows. If you are just compiling on Linux you can do everything, including edit the code, on existing Windows apps.
Yep, keyword being “for desktop” is why I phrased it that way.
There’s no sense trying to ramp up to a full desktop experience. Get a minimal development environment set up, then switch to your Windows PC (or use remote desktop or a VM) when you want to watch hundreds of hours of Flash videos.
You didn’t set the default for outgoing connections to be blocked. The problem is that the “pico” linux on windows process isn’t recognized by windows firewall, at all. So you can’t whitelist it.
Ah, I get it. You want to block all outbound connections by default and then whitelist by application. You can whitelist by port, but that’s it as far as I can tell. I would expect them to get iptables working in Ubuntu before they add anything like that.
There’s no dependency on iptables. It’s just a bugfix in the windows firewall. This is a known bug, since the first ubuntu on windows release.
Meh,
I got annoyed with Windows 10’s increasing advertisements and decided to go cold turkey on my work laptop with Linux. I haven’t touched non-server Linux since 2005, installed Ubuntu 16.04 and was up and running within an hour (including supporting my docking station, multiple monitors, and discreet GPU on demand). I had some tweaks I did (like making chrome not have massive screen tearing) but there was nothing unusable or that required voodoo to have a completely usable desktop.
Use VirtualBox. No need to mess up your current laptop and worry about not having various drivers. Ubuntu installs on it fine with 0 problems. (Though it’ll take a bit of a performance hit. Modern Ubuntu’s Unity is quite heavy)
Just give the VM a decent amount of ram (2gb?) and 100% CPU.
No worries, Unity is going away :). I’m with Gendal, I3wm for me. I spend most of my day in emacs, mutt, gnus, irc, or on the command line. I can’t remember the last time I’ve run into hw issues installing linux, so I guess I’ve been lucky. Good luck with the project. I’m a Fedora and RHEL person, so not as much help with Ubuntu.
This thread made me think about installing Linux on a spare SSD I have. Tried Mint 18.1. Xserver crashed on boot. I think it’s related to my use of monitors plugged into both my Radeon card and one driven by my Intel integrated graphics.
So I downloaded Kubuntu 17.4 and tried to install that. Kept giving me an error about the partition being misaligned on the target SSD. Was stuck in a loop of trying to delete and recreate the partition only for the installer to give me the same warning again and again.
Try booting it with only one monitor and then adding the others. A friend had the same problem and that worked.
Or try it in a VM first! You can always transition into a real install later :p
So deciding against QT for now…the free version isn’t what I want (GPL) and don’t want to mess with migrations later, so just want to play around, so I download Eclipse.
And every.single.tutorial.and.video shows a nice menu structure, except for me it doesn’t exist.
This window should have File, Window…Help at the top, and yet it doesn’t.
When I right click -> customize perspective, it looks like it should be showing this menu…
Any ideas?
It definitely looks like Eclipse didn’t install correctly, because all those menus you mention should definitely show up. Are you downloading the current version from the Eclipse site? Current version is Neon3 I believe.
Was that the C++ version? They definitely have a linux distro of it (I have installed the Java and the JEE versions on Red Hat EL for work recently so I know Eclipse works fine on Linux). If you’re not sure whether the 32- or 64- bit version works for you go ahead and try both of them.
Try re-downloading and uncompressing the download to the desktop, then drag it to wherever you want it. That’s how it “installs” so it’s pretty easy to try again.
To diagnose: you could also launch a Terminal window, navigate to wherever it unzipped and launch it directly from the terminal - if there are any startup errors you will probably see them written to the Terminal, so you could at least see a bit of what’s going on.
Ubuntu Unity is like a Mac. It has the menu bar at the top of the desktop.
(and I hate it)
(Personally I use Lubuntu + a bunch of tedious tweaks to the desktop pager. All of the Ubuntu ecosystem without Unity)
General tip: if you want all of the Ubuntu ecosystem but without Unity and with a lot of QoL improvements, just use Mint.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for 10+ years for a variety of reasons. About 10 yrs ago, I set up an Ubuntu laptop for my dad and he used it for 2-3 yrs without issues. Now, I manage apps running on 1/2 dozen Ubuntu VMs across several cloud service providers. I also have an Ubuntu machine sitting next to me for ad hoc work and dev support.
One of the first big obstacles to using the platform is overcoming the urge to do things the same way and with the same applications that you would use on macOS or Windows. The easiest way to engage is to do things the Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro) way and then to learn how to reconfigure to suit your needs.
Even though I love the platform as a server, I would never want to use it for day to day desktop computing needs. I’ve spent countless hours editing xorg.conf settings and other .ini files and whatnot. All will be good and then something will break and suddenly you’re working in a terminal without an idea of WTF is going on or how to debug it. The issue here is that Linux people have a masochistic tendency to enjoy debugging that type of thing and to getting to arcane conf files.
“Learning to use Ubuntu,” in my opinion, is something you should do if you want to use it as a server platform. Set it up with Nginx and go to town… it can be very stable in those circumstances. It’s also great as a database server (headless, of course). I’ve spent 3+ hours a day, every day for the past several years, working at an Ubuntu terminal prompt. However, in all that time, I’ve probably spent a grand total of 2 hours looking at Ubuntu desktop. Finally, if the tutorials you are following use 14.04, then you should use 14.04. There have been some significant system-level changes to Ubuntu in the past several years, which might be the source of some of your problems. 14.04 is an LTS release, so it will still be supported by Canonical for another 2 years.
As @rhamorim says, if you just want to use it for general computing, try out Linux Mint, which is Ubuntu with a somewhat foolproof GUI. Either way, give yourself some time to try the Linux specific variants of apps before trying to get back to the apps you use on other platforms. The Linux-specific ones (or FOSS ones) can work surprisingly well and get a lot of love from the developers. Most popular commercial apps are ported to Linux as an afterthought and don’t receive the love you would want to see.
I love Linux, but it took me 5-6 years to wrap my head around what was going on. I empathize with your pain and confusion. Should you choose to stick with it, you’ll eventually be rewarded for your efforts, but by then you may have forgotten why you started in the first place.
Yes, Mint is a far superior desktop.
I personally use Ubuntu with the Mint Cinnamon desktop, so I can stay with the faster updates.
Even for an experienced user like me, the Linux desktop sucks ass when compared to even an ancient desupported version of Windows like Win7. Win10 and modern MacOS completely obliterate it.
Ding, Ding, Ding we have a winner!
(so for those in the peanut gallery, Ubuntu tries to save a single line in your display and instead of docking your normal menus on the window you are on, it puts it on the master window - which is really frustrating because it’s constantly changing depending upon which window has focus and Firefox likes to grab focus a LOT).
No, I used the infamous Ubuntu Software package installer - so I go to it to uninstall and try again AND IT’S NOT LISTED IN INSTALLED SOFTWARE.
I love linux. Not.
Edit: sudo apt-get autoremove eclipse* saves the day. Oh, I did order a book
Mark Sobell’s books used to be pretty good (I haven’t looked at them or owned one in well over a decade so not sure if that still holds true), so this might be a good book on understanding how Ubuntu (and to some extent Debian) does things:
