How do you like your switch from Windows/Mac to Linux?

[JesseBassett]

@Anthony2019 ,
Have you heard of GeckoLinux? It uses OpenSuse Tumbleweed....but it makes it more user friendly. I am running the cinnamon version of it. So far so good!

 

[JesseBassett]

If you're installing Zoom at all, you're doing it wrong. Join the session from the browser, no installation needed. Go to the meeting page in your browser, cancel out of the popup link, click Join In Browser on the page, and you're in.

True,
But if you install Zoom it has way more features than the web version.

 

[Anthony2019]

@Anthony2019 ,
Have you heard of GeckoLinux? It uses OpenSuse Tumbleweed....but it makes it more user friendly. I am running the cinnamon version of it. So far so good!

I have just downloaded GeckoLinux and burnt it to a live USB stick for trying. I've tried the Cinnamon version.

I was wondering what advantages you've found with the Cinnamon version of GeckoLinux - compared with Linux Mint? The reason I'm asking is that Cinnamon (as well as its core apps) are developed in-house by the Mint team, so I guess it would very much be part of their "ecosystem"?

I noticed that GeckoLinux uses the Calamares installer rather than YAST. The Calamares installer has always been very good, but not sure why they would want to feature this when it could be managed by YAST?

I love checking out the "live" versions of up-and-coming distros to see what is going on in the Linux world, but as my "daily driver", I always revert to using versions of the major distros - eg. Ubuntu, Fedora and (now) OpenSuse. I think the reason for this is that I feel more reassured by the fact they are owned and/or affiliated with large corporations (eg. Canonical, RedHat, SuSE) which means you are going to get the stability and polish of a professional grade product, a wider choice of software and the confidence that your system will continue to be supported for a long time. Sadly there have been a lot of very promising community-run distros which simply have not had the resources or contributors to keep them going.

 

[JesseBassett]

I have just downloaded GeckoLinux and burnt it to a live USB stick for trying. I've tried the Cinnamon version.

I was wondering what advantages you've found with the Cinnamon version of GeckoLinux - compared with Linux Mint? The reason I'm asking is that Cinnamon (as well as its core apps) are developed in-house by the Mint team, so I guess it would very much be part of their "ecosystem"?

I noticed that GeckoLinux uses the Calamares installer rather than YAST. The Calamares installer has always been very good, but not sure why they would want to feature this when it could be managed by YAST?

I love checking out the "live" versions of up-and-coming distros to see what is going on in the Linux world, but as my "daily driver", I always revert to using versions of the major distros - eg. Ubuntu, Fedora and (now) OpenSuse. I think the reason for this is that I feel more reassured by the fact they are owned and/or affiliated with large corporations (eg. Canonical, RedHat, SuSE) which means you are going to get the stability and polish of a professional grade product, a wider choice of software and the confidence that your system will continue to be supported for a long time. Sadly there have been a lot of very promising community-run distros which simply have not had the resources or contributors to keep them going.

@Anthony2019 ,
I don't use LinuxMint because of the founder Clem's stance on the holocaust and the Jewish people. I feel that his beliefs on it are wrong and I do not support antisemitism. Thats why I use Cinnamon with other distributions. Do you think GeckoLinux will be around for a while or should I try something more like UbuntuCinnamonRemix?

 

[Anthony2019]

@Anthony2019 ,
I don't use LinuxMint because of the founder Clem's stance on the holocaust and the Jewish people. I feel that his beliefs on it are wrong and I do not support antisemitism. Thats why I use Cinnamon with other distributions. Do you think GeckoLinux will be around for a while or should I try something more like UbuntuCinnamonRemix?

Gecko has been around for a number of years now.

I expect that if you are running the "rolling" version of GeckoLinux Cinnamon edition, which should be based on Tumbleweed, you should get a very frequently updated system. Tumbleweed rolls out updates on almost a daily basis - and they can be huge at times! But you will get the latest software packages which have gone through automated QA testing - which means you should have a very up to date and reasonably stable system. I expect this will include all of the latest Cinnamon packages.

I'm not sure if Geckolinux uses Opensuse's BTRFS snapshot feature - but if it does, you can very easily roll back to a previous state in the (very unlikely) event that an update breaks the system.