It's Go on the backend, Postgres DB, Go HTML templates, a bit of jQuery but otherwise everything uses pure JS. It was (and is intended to be) deployed to AWS, and uses SES for notifications and S3 for client storage (e.g. uploading product images).
One of the most significant ones is with constant network dropouts. I'm not talking about Wifi or some weird and wonderful adapter either. Wired ethernet on an Intel i219 - constant dropouts and when you're browsing (e.g. with Firefox) it regularly fails to resolve the host and/or load a page. I've tested this and confirmed it is a problem in Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Neon.
Another issue is with the Gnome version of Ubuntu (doesn't appear in Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Neon etc). When you install BitWarden into Firefox, any time you tab into the password field, it crashes the plugin. Sounds like a problem with the plugin, except it isn't. It's known that Ubuntu packaged an old and/or incompatible library that causes it, and they didn't make any attempt to fix it. Meanwhile, Fedora, Elementary, other flavours of Ubuntu, and Debian all work perfectly with Firefox and Bitwarden.
They may be little things, but they aren't edge cases. They're usability 101 for normal desktop users, and they should just work. I understand though that Ubuntu does "just work" for millions of other users, and I hope that continues to be the case.
Unfortunately, I think Canonical has lost their focus on the desktop user. Every version of Ubuntu since 16.04 has had major issues for me. I have given every one of them a chance to redeem themselves, right up to today trying 18.10. Still no dice...
For me, as boring as it sounds, Debian 9 (Stretch) with XFCE is rock solid as a daily driver. I'm not some fuddy duddy doing nothing but text editing either. I code every day with Golang and Postgres 11 using VSCode. I make music using Bitwig (and sometimes Ardour). I use Shotwell and Gimp for my photography. I run the latest Krita in the (probably vain) hope that I can become a better artist. And I write my always-in-progress novels with the latest Libreoffice 6.1 and FocusWriter.
So to the people asking for a distro that has a better policy on quality, I don't think you can go past Debian.
I suspect that part of the reason that "as traffic rises, the quality of journalism is dropping" is because the types of articles that increase "engagement" appeal to the type of person who doesn't value quality literature, spelling, grammar, or story telling. And so it becomes a downward spiral.
Here in Australia, news.com.au is the main offender. The subject matter of their stories is ridiculous, and the quality of the writing doesn't even classify as journalism.
But it won't change. Society is happy with what they're being fed.
The people that value quality storytelling and journalism are writing (and reading) books.
Thanks for taking the time to do those comparisons. Very interesting. I was always too afraid of using a "terminal text editor", but the last 12 months or so I have made the effort to learn, and it's been quite enjoyable. Having said that, I'm still torn between Focuswriter and Vim for writing my prose, and I haven't settled on one or the other yet.
I've been using Debian Stretch (which was previously Debian Testing) for the last 2 years. I didn't ever have a single problem. But as the months passed I kept getting miffed about old packages. Yes, there are backports etc, but it just didn't feel current enough. I loved the stability though.
When the difference in Firefox versions got to 50 vs 54, and I had written myself a custom bash script to keep Firefox updated, I went looking...
I've been running F26 since the early alpha days, and I have to say that I haven't had a single problem in that whole time. I've been running it on my brand new i7 desktop machine as well as a 7 year old HP laptop. Both have been superb. Performance of Gnome 3.24 is great. Stability of the platform as a whole is rock solid.
In fact, the only issue I have come across is with MakeMKV (which I have written about elsewhere). Other than that, all of my use cases have been rock solid. For reference, they include:
* MakeMKV (for creating MKV files for my LibreElec HTPC)
* Shotwell (for my 15,000 file photo library)
* Quodlibet (for my 140GB music library - including a growing FLAC library)
* vim (for all my writing)
* git (for my writing and my code)
* Krita (with a Wacom tablet for illustrations for some book ideas I have)
* gimp (for image editing. e.g. I mocked up a photo of my house with how it might look with a grape vine covered pergola)
* Libreoffice (including my wife using it for her study, opening and editing MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files from the Uni)
* Ardour & Calf Plugins for music recording. I also experimented with BitWig, which was fantastic, but I prefer to support OSS.
* Golang (1.8, for my own personal development projects)
* Postgres (for same)
* qemu and virt-manager (for virtual machines)
I was a Microsoft .NET developer for almost 20 years. I've been a Linux user in my own time for a bit over 5 years. I'm now happy to say that I use Linux 100% for every single computer related task I have, and I couldn't be happier.
So far, the move to F26 has been fantastic, and it gets my highest recommendation to anyone else that might be considering it.
P.S. I also happily use F26 for the occasional 0AD game :)
I haven't had a single issue with Firefox (54) out of the box. I know that some add-ons can break the multi-process windows feature, but out of the box has been fine, both with clean VirtualBox installs and bare-metal desktop installs.
You can use the "Dash to Panel" extension in Gnome to provide a Windows 7 like bottom panel. I discovered it recently, and it has made my Gnome experience 1000x better.
Firstly, what I use and where I'm coming from: I've distro hopped in VirtualBox (so I can experiment) for more than 5 years, trying out every distro I can find. I currently run Debian with i3 natively / on the host machine. It certainly classifies as "lightweight", running in not much more than 100MB of RAM. It's blazingly fast on my 32GB i7 desktop or my 10 year old laptop.
Secondly, to answer your question "What Linux distro should I start with?" If you've used Debian before, and you know what i3 is, you aren't a Linux novice. So I would recommend staying with the Debian/i3 combination. It will run perfectly fine on the 6 year old laptop you mention.
I think the strongest piece of advice I could give you is "choose one distro/DE combination and stick to it - when the use of that environment becomes second nature you'll have more mental capacity to focus on and learn other things (like C)"
There was a mention of Fedora down below, and I have to give this a big thumbs up. Every time I use Fedora, I find it "just works". Problems with Mono/MonoDevelop on Ubuntu? Works perfectly on Fedora. Problems with GOPATH/PATH with Visual Studio Code on Debian? Works perfectly on Fedora. If it wasn't for the fact that I've spent the last 10 years becoming familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu way of doing things, I would swap to Fedora in a heartbeat. And to be honest, every time I look at the Fedora community, I just have this gut feeling that it's the right place to be.
I think that most people would answer your question by saying "because I need Mac app XYZ and Linux doesn't have a nice equivalent yet". I used to have a MacbookPro. I'm now 100% Linux (Debian). In my particular case, the only reason I would go back to using a Mac is for Logic Pro X (music creation software). I've used Ardour and Bitwig on Linux, but Logic is still superior in many ways. Having said that, it's not enough to drag me back to Mac, and there's no way in hell I'll ever use Windows again on any of my own systems. Generally speaking, I'm now 100% FOSS, and plan to be so for the rest of my tech days.
All true. We're all free to install any DE environment we want. But defaults are definitely useful to the entry level Linux users. I would love to see the day when the first (and easiest) choice for Joe Dad and Mary Mum setting up a computer for themselves and their kids is Linux with an easy to use DE instead of Win10/MacOS, with defaults that include LibreOffice instead of Pages/Office365, Firefox instead of Safari/Edge, and more.
Yes, many distros offer this out of the box right now, but it's not at the forefront of Joe-average's mind, because it's still not easy enough.
I just think that if there was less fragmentation (see my Linux Mint XEd example above), we could make much faster progress toward a FOSS world for the average user. Note, I'm talking about less fragmentation - not zero fragmentation.
I agree completely that experimentation needs to occur. I definitely don't begrudge them for making the decision to implement Unity.
My initial thoughts were more hypothetical - and I definitely wouldn't suggest that Gnome is the best software/DE around!
If we take Linux Mint for example - they've gone out on their own with custom/forked versions of simple things like XEd, XPlayer, XReader. That isn't experimentation, it's just a difference of product development philosophy. I'm not saying we should all be clones and all use the same software, but at what point do we say "ok, there are 57 text editors out there, let's work with one of them to improve that feature set rather than go out on our own with the 58th editor". Surely the hours of development going in to these "X" apps would be better spent contributing back to something that everybody can use and is already using.
I think for me it all comes back to a deeper philosophical and moral issue - why can't we all just get along and work together on shared solutions.
I feel like this is a relevant quote: "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
I'm sure they lost a lot of fans with Unity. They lost even more with the Amazon search debacle. But it's almost certain that they won just as many with both of those changes. I don't really like or dislike Unity. I've used it in the past and been happy enough. Ubuntu did lose a lot of my trust with the Amazon search feature though. My grandmother used to say "trust is hard won, and easily lost".
Well said, they need to do things smarter. But I guess that's what they are doing with this decision. They've determined that Unity has failed as a commercial endeavour, and now they're moving to something different. It just so happens (in my opinion) that moving to Gnome will not only be better for Canonical, but also for the broader community.