So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux
I just recently (a couple months ago) updated my Linux desktop experience at home. I had been running an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install, that was getting long-in-the-tooth, as well as being unstable.<p>Part of the instability had to do with various hacks and patches I had put in place, including a big one where I updated gcc to the latest version to support C11; this broke my update process horribly - so much so that when I went to update the NVidia drivers, my system became ultra-b0rked. I had been meaning to do an upgrade - now I was forced to.<p>What saved me a great amount of trouble was the fact that I had partitioned my system; that is, when I had installed Ubuntu, I had put it on an SSD (&#x2F;tmp and a few others were on a RAM disk), and &#x2F;home was on a separate drive. So all I had to do was pull the SSD, drop in a new one, and re-install something else.<p>Actually, I also used a different drive for my &#x2F;home directory, because my old drive was getting old - plus my &#x2F;home directory itself had a lot of old baggage. To that end, I migrated it to a new drive, created a new user with the new OS install, then migrated the files I needed across (moving from Chrome to Chromium wasn&#x27;t as easy as it should have been, but it was doable). For the most part, it was painless.<p>I ended up sticking with Ubuntu - but this time I went with Ubuntu Budgie. What I had done was check several other live distros first (regular Ubuntu, BunsenLabs, Solus, Mint, and a few others) to see what was out there again. See, my old system I had built from 14.04 LTS - but I had started with &quot;minimal&quot; and built it up to look and work almost identical to CrunchBang (#!), because I liked it so much (and #! had died, but its descendents hadn&#x27;t been in a finished state - which is why I looked at BunsenLabs).<p>I ultimately wanted something like the MBP setup I used for work; I thought I had found it with Solus. It seemed almost perfect - except for its package manager. While it had a lot of offerings, I worried about the ease of whether I could install third-party stuff. One thing I had &quot;vowed&quot; to never again do was to &quot;compile and install from source&quot; (that was part of what got my into this mess); if I ever needed to do that, it would be better for me to run it in a container, on a VM, or in some other manner - just not mangled into my main system with no &quot;accountability&quot; as to what was done and where.<p>Solus&#x27; package management was a custom system, that leaned heavily on app images; I liked that, it was something I had recently looked into (like a week before all this happened), so I wanted that option. But their library wasn&#x27;t as extensive as the Ubuntu ecosystem, and I also wasn&#x27;t sure what to do about third-party .deb files and the like - how would I install those. So I looked around for a viable alternative.<p>I found it with Ubuntu Budgie. I could be on the latest version of Ubuntu (I actually chose stability over latest - so I went with 18.04 LTS), but still have the Budgie desktop (with Plank and other goodness). I&#x27;ve found the best of both worlds, and I have a system now that I believe is as close to my MBP (well, OSX) as I can get with Linux; honestly, I consider it a bit superior.<p>I&#x27;ve decided, as alluded before, not to install anything from source, as tempting as it may be, and instead only stick within the confines of what is available via apt and (trusted) third-party PPAs. Otherwise, I&#x27;ll consider using one of the various app image systems, a VirtualBox VM, or something similar - or look for something else. I just don&#x27;t want to end up in the same boat down the line.<p>Is it perfect? No. But it certainly beats the pants off of what I had to do with Linux 10 years before, or 10 years before that.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Linux in one form or another since 1995 (my first &quot;install&quot; was MonkeyLinux, which runs on a DOS filesystem; my first &quot;real&quot; Linux distro was TurboLinux 2.0); back then it was a &quot;nightmare&quot; - a fun nightmare, to be honest. Nothing like recompiling your kernel to get the latest PCMCIA drivers working, among other things. But I&#x27;m pretty past that kind of thing today.<p>Not completely, of course, as b0rking my system with a custom manglement to get gcc&#x2F;C11 working (took me a while to get all the dependencies just right, but I had it up and running - but the update system for 14.04 LTS did not like it at all).