Kubuntu 14.04.1
I'll wager you were thinking openSUSE or Debian Jessie or what ever!
Actually, that decision was made with great care and following lots of testing.
I had discounted PCBSD because I speak Linux, not BSD, and it reminded me of RH 5.0 in connectivity and functionality. I could have chosen PCLinuxOS, Mephis or several others but none of them are as polished as Kubuntu, Mint or openSUSE. Mint is in the same boat the Kubuntu is in, dependent on Ubuntu. That left openSUSE as the most likely candidate, especially considering that I had used it for 5 years in the past and my VirtualBox testing of it revealed it to be VERY polished in appearance and depth of graphical capability, and stable. I couldn't test bare metal functionality in VB, and I never connected a printer nor did I install VB inside the guest OS.
Also, I realized that I had not booted to my Win7 partition in over six months and hadn't used it for anything in the last three years. All I'd do with it is update the security, patches and AV data file. "So", I asked myself, "why was I wasting 40% of my HD space on an OS that I am not using?". "I don't know?", I told myself. So, I said to myself, "It time to overwrite both Win7 and Kubuntu with openSUSE." Yesterday I did that.
That's when the problems began. The install went beautifully, just like it did as a guest OS. Then I began connecting to my HP Laserjet Professional p1606dn duplex laser printer. I installed CUPS and went with it. It failed to discover the printer, which is connected to my E2500 Cisco wireless router by a cat5 cable and configured as 192.168.1.99 by MAC recognition in the DD-WRT open source router firmware. So, I installed HPLIP and tried it. The ppd file for the p1606dn was not among the choices in openSUSE's offerings of printer drivers so I went to the HP website. There I learned that the 3.14 version of HPLIP won't work on openSUSE 13.2 and I had to install 3.15, provided I didn't have the 3.17 version of the Linux kernel. I installed that driver and it recognized my printer and allowed me to complete the setup. Unfortunately, printing a test page hung the print spooler.
I had some mp3 files to edit and post to a website by the end of the day so I downloaded Audacity. It included a msg that directed me to an offsite webpage (no associated with openSUSE) which instructed me on how to install the "pacman" repository, where mp3 codecs, DVD codecs and other proprietary files could be downloaded. That repository was a minefield of potential RPM conflicts, "dll hell", and it took awhile to figure out from its labeling terminology which of the plethora of files to install. I got Audacity to load the mp3 file and proceeded to edit it. Then I saved the edited portion and uploaded it to the webpage. The player on the webpage refused to play it because it was a "video" file.
After several attempts and a couple hours later, I fired up my wife's Acer Aspire 521D notebook, which is five years old and running Kubuntu 14.04 like a champ. It took 20 minutes to download the file, edit it, upload it and verify that it played nicely.
I installed Stellarium, QtCreator, git, and a host of other applications. Then I noticed that the display was tearing, something that didn't happen as a guest OS. I never took the time to debug and fix it because other matters gripped me and began to cast doubt on my choice.
All during this period snapper and the snapper zypper plugin were creating snapshots by the hour, and whenever I fired up Apper or YaST. I had tried snapper on my Kubuntu 14.04 btrfs system a year ago and back then it left a lot to be desired. It has greatly improved, but it has some glaring holes. The older a btrfs snapshot is the bigger it gets. Snapper's config is set to delete the older snapshots on a regular basis. However, regardless of whether snapper automatically deletes the old snapshots or you delete some manually, the empty snapshot folder is not deleted. A nit to be sure, but annoying when you see a couple hundred empty folders in the ./snapshot folder. Worse, however, is the "undochange" command. I learned that if I wanted to undo a series of pre & post snapshots doing them with a single command, like snapshot undochange 90..145, the process didn't complete properly. But, the undochange process worked well if you did it in two steps with a single pair of snapshots:
snapper undochange 144..145
immediately followed by
snapper delete 144 145
You still have to delete the empty snapshot folders manually.
The delete syntax does not include the use of ".." between snapshots. They are either separated by a space, or a group is deleted at one time or by have a dash between the first and last. Deleting a snapshot out of the middle of a list instead of from the bottom or the top produces unfavorable results. I found it was best to create a "single" snapshot manually with no timeline option to mark a significant change. Singletons are not automatically deleted by snapper. You can set age and timeline config settings to "no" or "0" as the case may be, and stop snapper from creating hourly, daily, monthly or yearly snapshots. By uninstalling the zypper snapper plugin you can stop the package manager or YaST from creating a pre and post pair of snapshots every time you ran Apper or YaST. In that condition snapshots are made manually and using the single option without a timeline makes them permanent until manually deleted.
Snapper is installed with a root config file in /etc/snapper/configs directory. In openSUSE the directory structure is made up of a dozen subvolume directories. Because the /home account isn't modified by snapper snapshot undochange commands one has to create a config file for /home and assign the account name as a user. snapper -c home create-config /home, creates a config for home. I found that it is best to create singleton snapshots on both root and /home at the same time following a significant activity. That way one isn't reverting to a previous state in root and not the same state in /home. Otherwise, configurations and icons in /home no long work if /home isn't reverted equally. Big pain. If one is careful and uses singletons on both simultaneously snapper works reasonably well, despite its clumsiness. And, as I said, snapper in openSUSE 13.2 is significantly improved over that used in Kubuntu a year ago. Snapper in openSUSE 13.2 can also handle kernel and grub changes, but one has to be careful to reboot following the undoing ( snapper rollback) of a kernel installation. In fact, because of KDE config files in the home account, it is always a good idea to reboot after any reversion to a previous snapshot. These factors and other annoyances led me to replacing the openSUSE install with a fresh Kubuntu 14.04.1 install on my ENTIRE hard drive.
My choice to remain with Kubuntu was based on a few very important factors: the ease with which it automatically configures most printers and devices when you plug them in, the ease and power of apt-get and muon, the power of the "@" (root) and "@home" paradigm of btrfs that Kubuntu employs, btrfs commands to revert to previous states, the ability to mount the partition on which the live distro is running simultaneously to manipulate the mounted system without having to boot from an external device, and it is just as beautiful as openSUSE.
So, time will tell if my decision was sound or foolish.
I'll wager you were thinking openSUSE or Debian Jessie or what ever!
Actually, that decision was made with great care and following lots of testing.
I had discounted PCBSD because I speak Linux, not BSD, and it reminded me of RH 5.0 in connectivity and functionality. I could have chosen PCLinuxOS, Mephis or several others but none of them are as polished as Kubuntu, Mint or openSUSE. Mint is in the same boat the Kubuntu is in, dependent on Ubuntu. That left openSUSE as the most likely candidate, especially considering that I had used it for 5 years in the past and my VirtualBox testing of it revealed it to be VERY polished in appearance and depth of graphical capability, and stable. I couldn't test bare metal functionality in VB, and I never connected a printer nor did I install VB inside the guest OS.
Also, I realized that I had not booted to my Win7 partition in over six months and hadn't used it for anything in the last three years. All I'd do with it is update the security, patches and AV data file. "So", I asked myself, "why was I wasting 40% of my HD space on an OS that I am not using?". "I don't know?", I told myself. So, I said to myself, "It time to overwrite both Win7 and Kubuntu with openSUSE." Yesterday I did that.
That's when the problems began. The install went beautifully, just like it did as a guest OS. Then I began connecting to my HP Laserjet Professional p1606dn duplex laser printer. I installed CUPS and went with it. It failed to discover the printer, which is connected to my E2500 Cisco wireless router by a cat5 cable and configured as 192.168.1.99 by MAC recognition in the DD-WRT open source router firmware. So, I installed HPLIP and tried it. The ppd file for the p1606dn was not among the choices in openSUSE's offerings of printer drivers so I went to the HP website. There I learned that the 3.14 version of HPLIP won't work on openSUSE 13.2 and I had to install 3.15, provided I didn't have the 3.17 version of the Linux kernel. I installed that driver and it recognized my printer and allowed me to complete the setup. Unfortunately, printing a test page hung the print spooler.
I had some mp3 files to edit and post to a website by the end of the day so I downloaded Audacity. It included a msg that directed me to an offsite webpage (no associated with openSUSE) which instructed me on how to install the "pacman" repository, where mp3 codecs, DVD codecs and other proprietary files could be downloaded. That repository was a minefield of potential RPM conflicts, "dll hell", and it took awhile to figure out from its labeling terminology which of the plethora of files to install. I got Audacity to load the mp3 file and proceeded to edit it. Then I saved the edited portion and uploaded it to the webpage. The player on the webpage refused to play it because it was a "video" file.
After several attempts and a couple hours later, I fired up my wife's Acer Aspire 521D notebook, which is five years old and running Kubuntu 14.04 like a champ. It took 20 minutes to download the file, edit it, upload it and verify that it played nicely.I installed Stellarium, QtCreator, git, and a host of other applications. Then I noticed that the display was tearing, something that didn't happen as a guest OS. I never took the time to debug and fix it because other matters gripped me and began to cast doubt on my choice.
All during this period snapper and the snapper zypper plugin were creating snapshots by the hour, and whenever I fired up Apper or YaST. I had tried snapper on my Kubuntu 14.04 btrfs system a year ago and back then it left a lot to be desired. It has greatly improved, but it has some glaring holes. The older a btrfs snapshot is the bigger it gets. Snapper's config is set to delete the older snapshots on a regular basis. However, regardless of whether snapper automatically deletes the old snapshots or you delete some manually, the empty snapshot folder is not deleted. A nit to be sure, but annoying when you see a couple hundred empty folders in the ./snapshot folder. Worse, however, is the "undochange" command. I learned that if I wanted to undo a series of pre & post snapshots doing them with a single command, like snapshot undochange 90..145, the process didn't complete properly. But, the undochange process worked well if you did it in two steps with a single pair of snapshots:
snapper undochange 144..145
immediately followed by
snapper delete 144 145
You still have to delete the empty snapshot folders manually.
The delete syntax does not include the use of ".." between snapshots. They are either separated by a space, or a group is deleted at one time or by have a dash between the first and last. Deleting a snapshot out of the middle of a list instead of from the bottom or the top produces unfavorable results. I found it was best to create a "single" snapshot manually with no timeline option to mark a significant change. Singletons are not automatically deleted by snapper. You can set age and timeline config settings to "no" or "0" as the case may be, and stop snapper from creating hourly, daily, monthly or yearly snapshots. By uninstalling the zypper snapper plugin you can stop the package manager or YaST from creating a pre and post pair of snapshots every time you ran Apper or YaST. In that condition snapshots are made manually and using the single option without a timeline makes them permanent until manually deleted.
Snapper is installed with a root config file in /etc/snapper/configs directory. In openSUSE the directory structure is made up of a dozen subvolume directories. Because the /home account isn't modified by snapper snapshot undochange commands one has to create a config file for /home and assign the account name as a user. snapper -c home create-config /home, creates a config for home. I found that it is best to create singleton snapshots on both root and /home at the same time following a significant activity. That way one isn't reverting to a previous state in root and not the same state in /home. Otherwise, configurations and icons in /home no long work if /home isn't reverted equally. Big pain. If one is careful and uses singletons on both simultaneously snapper works reasonably well, despite its clumsiness. And, as I said, snapper in openSUSE 13.2 is significantly improved over that used in Kubuntu a year ago. Snapper in openSUSE 13.2 can also handle kernel and grub changes, but one has to be careful to reboot following the undoing ( snapper rollback) of a kernel installation. In fact, because of KDE config files in the home account, it is always a good idea to reboot after any reversion to a previous snapshot. These factors and other annoyances led me to replacing the openSUSE install with a fresh Kubuntu 14.04.1 install on my ENTIRE hard drive.
My choice to remain with Kubuntu was based on a few very important factors: the ease with which it automatically configures most printers and devices when you plug them in, the ease and power of apt-get and muon, the power of the "@" (root) and "@home" paradigm of btrfs that Kubuntu employs, btrfs commands to revert to previous states, the ability to mount the partition on which the live distro is running simultaneously to manipulate the mounted system without having to boot from an external device, and it is just as beautiful as openSUSE.
So, time will tell if my decision was sound or foolish.
Kubuntu's LTSs are nice, slick, smooth in many ways--easy. Everyone knows our history: Kubuntu tends to push things on its 6-month releases. It's no secret. Why do people who really need stability install a riskier 6-month release when they could do the LTS?!!! Oh, I know! If everyone used Kubuntu's LTSs, what would all the whiners, idle-philosopher-analysts, and complainers have to gripe and post about?
I didn't want to use the ext4 to btrfs converter, so ..
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