@Eriequiet The antiš«-derailmentš & threadš§µ hijackingš« threadš§µ ā - #4209 by amal
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Thanks @Locutus
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I usually have three or four computers running around the house. All with different uses. I recently lost (broke) the use of two of the old junkers and I need at least one more.
Problem is, I refuse, utterly refuse, to go to windows 8 / 8.1 / 10. Iām still running 7 on everything. Itās the cobbled together mobile style interface that I canāt tolerate.
I think it might be time to seriously explore linux. I thought Iād solicit some opinions as to which one of the many many options. Iām looking for something that has a traditional style desktop interface, and which will play well with some older hardware as I tend to scrounge and re-use some older systems.
All the reading Iāve done so far says to go Linux > Mint > Cinnamon. Iāve downloaded an .ISO and intend to play with it as soon as I can find a donor PC to install it on.
Thoughts? Opinions? Sarcastic wise cracks?
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Linux mint is decent 
itās a lot of peopleās āgateway distroā. Easy install, straightforward desktop environment, but without too much hand holding. Pretty much all software can easily be found either as a .deb or a PPA.
It was my go-to distro a few years ago.
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I mean, like, Ubuntu?
Kali is good too but not necessarily as an everyday driver.
I run Linux Mint / Cinnamon everywhere. Itās Ubuntu with a Windows7-ish interface - which I happen to enjoy - without the Ubuntu idiosyncracies. Iāve never had any problem with it, save for a botched apt upgrade a few years back.
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I would go a step further and say that Kali is useless as an everyday driver 
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Cool. Thanks all.
Now I just gotta find a few more olā junkers to sacrifice / revive.
Can I just say how surprised I am about how many people seem to get implants on a whim, without knowing their capabilities or understanding their limitations/requirements or doing any research at all?
Now Iām not knocking them, new budding biohackers are good.
A factor is maybe also the fact that some (like specifically the NeXT) slot neatly in the disposable-income impulse buy price category.
At the risk of sounding like Iām tooting my own horn, I really canāt afford to do that. I research everything about a thing that I want to the point that I even know how to use it even before I ever order it. I am just surprised (and maybe a little taken aback) that this isnāt a more common approach. I have had to save up for this for more then a year and I am still not implanted with anything (ruh roh now they know Iām an impostor, Iām getting kicked out 
). Hopefully that will change soon
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Linux Mint a solid choice. Itās moderately light weight and fast with all the niceties of a fully fledged desktop OS. And as @darthdomo said, Its a lot of peopleās āgateway distroā. It was mine. If you get around to wanting more out of your systems or perhaps less overhead(really only noticed on very old or low performing hardware) then there are extremely light weight distros out there for exactly that. You can even run debian on a 486 if that is what you want to do 
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Iāve also ran Debian on my old iMac G3 with a 32-bit PowerPC cpu 
Itās crazy how well stuff can run on Linux on low-end machines.
Given that this is the derailment thread, I recently installed OpenBSD on a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with an UltraSPARC IIi SPARC64 CPU at 400MHz, upgraded to 256MB of RAM. Worked just fine, although installing XFCE took like 40 minutes.
Even current linux is bloated when compared to SunOS 4.1.4 or Solaris 7, though. Early-late 90s UNIX was impressive to run, so little overhead.
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Iāve heard good things about PopOS!
Havenāt tested it out myself yet though
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For newer machines PopOS! is fantastic, not sure if Iād recommend it for anything a bit old, though. GNOME shell/GNOME 3 (not sure of the name these days) is still a bit rough in places on lower spec hardware.
For any laptop with hybrid graphics, PopOS! is a must, though. Itās the only distro out there with decent Optimus support.
Iād also recommend it for anyone wanting to do no-fuss linux gaming.
Most of my dealings with different distros were pretty painless.
Iāve dealt with a 2000-era machine that originally ran Win 95 and it was an absolute nightmare getting anything but that to run on it (I managed to install XP but it wasnāt very pleasant). When it was purchased it was really decked out costing an equivalent of 5k USD in todays money. The difficulties were probably due to a really strange motherboard with funky firmware. I know that I burned at least 30 discs with different distros trying to get anything to work, and it just wouldnāt. Most would shit themselves during installation. I got Puppy Linux to work but then it just crapped itsself and never recovered.
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The disc burning is a real annoyance. On my oldest Sun machine (a SparcStation 5), itās only SCSI, and too new to use something like a SCSI2SD adapter.
In the 2 weeks or so Iāve had this particular machine, Iāve burned over 20 CDs.
I was really glad when I get networking working, transferring stuff over FTP is much more convenient. Still no other options for installing operating systems, though.
I started out with the original Slackware distro, that came in a gloriously humongous stack of diskettes. I installed that on a brand-spanking new Pentium 90. It wasnāt exactly what Iād call painless
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Do you ever sleep? 
Well I am a much younger man than you so I havenāt had to deal with that
The only time I messed with diskettes was installing some old Indiana Jones videogame on an old family computer
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Youād be hard-pressed to find a diskette drive these days - let alone diskettes to go with it.
Thatās one technology I donāt miss. And CDs. Thank God for the gift of USB fobs.
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Iāve got a few right here USB floppy drives are readily available, and still useful for working with older machines.
Iāve got a lot of machines that use 5.25" floppies as well. Those are a bit trickier to work with in the modern day.
I donāt think thats quite trueā¦ if nothing else, some quite critical infrastructure still relies on really old technology
I can jump on Amazon and get a USB floppy drive and 10x 3.5" floppies for about 50ā¬
Maybe the older formats are harder to come by though
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