I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.

20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.

Mint isn’t too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.

I’m running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I’m playing around with local AI… Mint isn’t fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.

I tried Deepseek Coder 33b; it runs at around 2 words/second which is really slow.

Deepseek Coder V2 16b; seems to run as fast Gemma3

I don’t know, it is running much faster than I can read.

So I’m not sure why more performance would be needed, the only thing I was looking for was big VRAM, and AMD gives much more bang for you buck (especially in NZ). To get 16GB of VRAM on an NV card in NZ would have set me back an extra $800…not something I was willing to do.

q4_k_m

8.1GB file size

I have ollama running locally on my RX9070, I have to use kernel 6.14 since it’s such a new GPU.

The 16G VRAM means I can run decent models, faster than I can read… currently running gemma3:12b, it’s crazy fast.

Works perfectly on my Asus Zenbook.

I don’t use it much, but it works.

• sshfs (mount a remote file system locally)
• sshuttle (tunnel your traffic over SSH, ephemeral VPN)
• mirror a remote port to a local port (I use this to manage syncthing on my server)

It is the 2nd of April, the rest of the worlds (mostly) April fools day.

I used to run Ubuntu, but started liking it less and less.

After jumping around for a while, I settled on Mint. It is really nice, stable and easy to use for beginners, but everything is there for advanced users also.

What are people doing with their laptops, mine never break, except one time when I knocked a cup of water into one in 2005.

My latest one, Asus Zenbook is already 3 years old and no issues. Has a dent in the top cover where a nurse kicked my bag when I was in hospital.

My previous one, a dell Inspiron which my 9yo has had for 2 years, is 6 years old, he is not gentle.

Previous to that, I had a work supplied Alienware that lasted 7 years, I traveled internationally with that one quite a few times.

Not sure if I’m lucky, or more careful than average. But I hear about “build quality” issues a lot in internet posts. I’ve just never seen it in the wild…

Note: all ran/run various flavours of Linux.

True, but I was suggesting Flatseal, more for once the issue was resolved.

If you are looking to mess with what your flatpaks can do, Flatseal it is really nice for managing permissions, for your flatpaks.

It may not be what you are looking for, but though I would drop it in just in case.

Mint.

I have my mum (67) and my partner using it.

Libre office and Firefox cover 99.9% of all the things mum actually does.

My partner uses blender, krita and audacity also.

Auto updates… Almost no tech support.

This would be really great.

Commercial applications and a donations framework.

I made the switch in 2010.

I dual booted for a while, one day I realised that I hadn’t booted into windows for 3 months. At that point I reinstalled, no more dual booting. I haven’t looked back.

I keep a windows VM, currently has Win10 installed, I haven’t had to use it in about 3 years.

My advice is, keep dual booting. One day you’ll realise that booting into windows feels like a chore, you haven’t done it in months, so why keep it around…

Hybrid is best.

I use the GUI quite a lot.

But some things are just easier in CLI, especially if you have to do that thing often.

The other reason to use the command line is automation, it is very easy to write a bash script and run it as often as needed, if every day at midday you want to update something CLI is much easier.

e.g everyday at 2am, my rsync script runs to backup my important files.
e.g 2, I have a small script to combine all the pdf’s in the current directory into a single file using pdftk. It is so much faster than any graphical way.

I had a similar issue, running Mint.

It took me a while, but I tracked it to a buggy firmware on the nvme SSD (WD black 4000). Once I updated the firmware, all the stability issues disappeared.

If your system in under heavy disk load when the issue appears, take a look at your SSD firmware.

Choose your starting level!

Honestly, ultrawide for spreadsheets is awesome.

Great comment.

I switched full time in 2010, but was mostly using Linux from 2008…I don’t really miss my 20’s, maybe the physical side of being sub-30.