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Author Topic: Which distro will you recommend?  (Read 16024 times)

Handoko

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Which distro will you recommend?
« on: October 24, 2017, 05:03:20 pm »
Yesterday I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu Mate 17.04 to 17.10. I downloaded the iso file, burn it to a disc and tried to upgrade. What, the option for upgrade is grayed! I can only instal it as a new OS, it wasted my time for download. Usually I upgrade my Ubuntu using the upgrade tool not from a CD/DVD ROM. I never knew I can't upgrade from disc. >:(

First time I tried Linux was Fedora, it wasn't beginner friendly. I did some research and I found Ubuntu. What I like about Ubuntu is it has large community, if I ever have problem I can easily find the answers on the web.

The drivers provided from Ubuntu is good. I plugged my Wacom and it worked although the extra buttons for scrolling on the tablet aren't functioning. Basically it worked. The support for NVidia VGA is okay. It ever broke twice, which I had to reinstall the OS but that only happened because manually install the drivers downloaded from NVidia. Lesson learned, use only the proprietary NVidia drivers that suggested by Ubuntu.

Recently, I heard some users have issues installing Lazarus on Ubuntu. I never had serious problems installing Lazarus on Ubuntu. But I think it maybe the time for me to try other distro.

My computer is not very high-end, but I want the OS that can support my NVidia Geforce 430 and Wacom tablet. It should has good userbase and documentation, so I can easily find answers if I ever have problem. And of course, it must be Lazarus friendly. :)

What Linux do you use? Which one will you recommend me? And why?
« Last Edit: October 24, 2017, 05:05:02 pm by Handoko »

tudi_x

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2017, 05:39:34 pm »
hi,
i use LINUX MINT 64b XFCE.
i use it because:
- i like the interface. although it can be minimal it can be elegant (has also an osx panel option)
- easy to configure
- never had an issue with Lazarus installation on it (http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/BGRA_Installation_on_Linux)
- small footprint
- no drivers issues on what i use
- installs very fast
- configured better than Ubuntu (it is number one distro MINT according to https://www.distrowatch.com/)
- uses Ubuntu LTS

strongly recommending.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2017, 05:47:43 pm by tudi_x »
Lazarus 2.0.2 64b on Debian LXDE 10

Handoko

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #2 on: October 24, 2017, 06:06:28 pm »
But, I remember I heard many complaint that it is hard to install Lazarus on Mint. Am I wrong?

MoellerCLaus

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #3 on: October 24, 2017, 06:09:02 pm »
No It is straight forward to install Lazarus on Mint
I had problems with Ubuntu though.

Bram71

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #4 on: October 24, 2017, 07:40:45 pm »
I use Ubuntu XFCE,

I had some problems with Mint, keep in mind it comes with many flavors (of destop environment). I used Mint Cinnanmon for a long time until a moment (in 2016) where every keystroke in Lazarus resulted in double characters in SynEdit (IDE editor window). XFCE and Mate as desktop environment dit not exhibit that behavior. Never figured out what was the cause under Cinnamon for this to happen.

Shortly after when this started i upgraded to a SSD and i tried Ubuntu XFCE and was pleasantly surprised. For me everything worked out of the box (on my HP laptop!) including wireless and LCD dimming e.d. (witch did not work under Mint). Maybe it was the newer kernel version, drivers or whatever. Everything just worked and i have sticked with Ubuntu XFCE since then without regret (i am still on 16.04.x).

Yes it is not the most fancy desktop environment but what is there works (for me). For me that was and is very important. As a developer i wasted many many days on bugs in display and or functionality suspecting my own code to be te cause when in reality the cause lay in some incompatibility because of the desktop environment (or M$ Windows not behaving as documented,  printing to multiple printers and bins from a single job eney one?).

I also don't have a thread ripper performance like system and am able to compile a 100K source line (commercial) project (with ssd of course) now under 7 seconds.

I have a dual boot to Win10 (for testing) and the best performance i ever got there was around 30 seconds while making use of a ram drive for the temp files...

Just give it a shot. XFCE is fairly simple to configure to your preferences and (just speaking from my own experiences) never lets you down...

Working with a near plain vanilla Ubuntu variant also has the advantage that (to my knowledge) any application compiled with FPC "just" works in Debian and derived distro's. Just chek out https://xubuntu.org/

* I use FPC / Lazarus (and cross compilers) combi installed thru FPCupDeluxe, not the ancient version as provided by the Ubuntu repositorys...

Windsurfer

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #5 on: October 24, 2017, 07:58:54 pm »
I use Linux Mint 18.2. fpcupdeluxe is the best way to run Lazarus. The help files are downloaded but not set up. Everything else is great. I am running Linux kernel 12 on my Dell laptop (Edit: I use
 Cinnamon.
.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2017, 08:01:20 pm by Windsurfer »

avra

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #6 on: October 25, 2017, 12:18:01 am »
I used Mint Cinnanmon for a long time until a moment (in 2016) where every keystroke in Lazarus resulted in double characters in SynEdit (IDE editor window). XFCE and Mate as desktop environment dit not exhibit that behavior.
This is my exact experience with Cinnamon. I prefer it's look but once it started to behave bad with Lazarus I dropped it. XFCE works nicely and it looks good with dark theme.

I use Manjaro, Mint, LMDE, Debian and Raspbian (in this order). On Debian based (last 4) I use fpcupdeluxe, but for Manjaro I use repo.
 
Breaf info on top ten distros: https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
ct2laz - Conversion between Lazarus and CodeTyphon
bithelpers - Bit manipulation for standard types
pasettimino - Siemens S7 PLC lib

schuler

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #7 on: October 25, 2017, 12:28:48 am »
:) Hello :)

I like Ubuntu. Have been using for 10 years. To be able to upgrade, I would do this:

Disable/remove all third party repositories.
Run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reboot.
Run: sudo do-release-upgrade
Reinstall any needed third party repositories.

Got above instructions from:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/909323/ubuntu-gnome-17-04-ubuntu-17-10-upgrade

Kind regards,
JP.

GAN

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #8 on: October 25, 2017, 12:52:35 am »
Hello, in my case, I changed Ubuntu for Mint 17.2 Mate. For the installation of Lazarus 1.6 and FPC 3.0.0 I had no problem. Then one day I had the already very commented problems of the double accent on the characters but has a solution through a script (commented on another thread).

Kind regards,
GAN.
Lazarus 2.0.8 FPC 3.0.4 Linux Mint Mate 19.3
Zeos 7̶.̶2̶.̶6̶ 7.1.3a-stable - Sqlite 3.32.3 - LazReport

dbannon

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #9 on: October 25, 2017, 02:00:46 am »
"Burnt to disk" rather than put the image on a USB drive (diskkey, thumbdrive or whatever) ?

I usually update using the USB but Ubuntu's own "Startup Disk Creator" is notoriously unreliable when using the next release's ISO. So I use https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb - its not pretty but works reliably. Might be worth trying.

Anyway, for my main working machines I use Ubuntu Mate LTS, upgrading is a time consuming and somewhat nervous time, the LTS version minimizes that problem. Its pretty rare for me feel I am missing out on anything by not doing the 6month cycles, the very few things can be covered by a PPA with latest release.

I did have problems with the official Ubuntu Lazarus DEBs, perhaps because I expected things like F1 help to work out of the box, not sure. Anyway, using the 1.8rc series, manually installing using the FPC/Lazarus DEBs, no problems (maybe because I'm now happier with the Lazarus approach ?).

For some software testing, I have been using debian Gnome 3 in a VM and it looks good, I'd expect Ubuntu 17.10 would be similar but maybe too demanding of resources on my laptop. I may put 17.10 on the desktop and would expect Lazarus 1.8rc to go on easily. I would not use the Ubuntu packages to install Lazarus.

My experience with Mint dates back to when Ubuntu started shipping Unity. While its probably a lot better now, not everything I needed was quite convinced it was Ubuntu. Mint looked great but I went  to Ubuntu Mate for an easy life.

David



Lazarus 3, Linux (and reluctantly Win10/11, OSX Monterey)
My Project - https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng and my github - https://github.com/davidbannon

soerensen3

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #10 on: October 25, 2017, 02:13:10 am »
I also use manjaro since I had a lot of trouble with getting my nvidia card to work along with the internal Intel on all other distros I tried. In Manjaro it worked out of the box with nonfree drivers (I usually prefer open source but in this case...). I think every distro has it's strengths and weaknesses and some might suit better depending on what you do. What I like about Manjaro, which is based on Arch Linux, is the packaging system. You can use the repo packages which are usually up to date. For Lazarus the latest available version is 1.6.4, so it does not provide the RC 1.8 versions yet. You also have AUR with many packages that are not provided in the repos. It is similar to PPA on Ubuntu or to COPR on Fedora, except that it does not provide binaries. You have to compile all the packages yourself but the good thing is that it is made really simple, like installing a package from a repo. Arch has a very helpful community and a very good wiki. It is also very fast.

I also like Korora, which is based on Fedora but trying to achieve a better out of the box appearance. But in my case it didn't work so well with my new Laptop (With my old Laptop it did for a long time).
The standard version of Linux Mint is also based on Ubuntu but there is also a debian based version callled LMDE. I did not try it for some time now but I heard it's good for using with Lazarus. The official deb packages from the Lazarus website are meant for Debian afaik though they kind of also work on Ubuntu.

For making a usb stick I usually use dd from command line or gnome-disk-utility. It is very easy to use. You can simply use "restore disk image" on you USB stick and write the ISO file to it.
Lazarus 1.9 with FPC 3.0.4
Target: Manjaro Linux 64 Bit (4.9.68-1-MANJARO)

benohb

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #11 on: October 25, 2017, 02:23:39 am »
manjaro - debian

cdbc

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #12 on: October 25, 2017, 05:45:26 am »
Hi
I run PcLinuxOs with the KDE desktop on all my systems, laptops and stationary.
It just works and plays nice with Lazarus  ;)
Great community and forum, lots of help available when you need it  :)
Regards Benny
If it ain't broke, don't fix it ;)
PCLinuxOS(rolling release) 64bit -> KDE5 -> FPC 3.2.2 -> Lazarus 2.2.6 up until Jan 2024 from then on it's: KDE5/QT5 -> FPC 3.3.1 -> Lazarus 3.0

segfault

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #13 on: October 25, 2017, 10:32:12 am »
I use Q4OS, which you've probably never heard of. It's based on Debian stable so I don't know whether the packages will be up-to-date enough for you, but it's very fast and stable. The user base is fairly small but the forum is quitte active and the developers are very helpful. I have had no issues installing Lazarus from the download debs (the official packages from the repo aren't up to date). It was initially targeted at those looking for a replacement for XP so the default desktop has a very Windows look, but there is the option to choose other environments.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2017, 10:34:51 am by segfault »

mdalacu

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Re: Which distro will you recommend?
« Reply #14 on: October 25, 2017, 10:53:27 am »
Come on, Ubuntu is Ubuntu for a reason, is the most reliable and stable distribution. The problem is that the debs are low quality and they interfere with the one shipped by Ubuntu, it is a versioning problem..  You should use fpcupdeluxe and that's it, it will work great and Lazarus installed by it will not interfere with the one shipped or installed from debs. And no, i don't know how to make a quality deb package. All of this problems could be resolved on Ubuntu in 2 ways :
1. make Lazarus a snap package and publish it in Ubuntu Store All your  problems gone.
2. make Lazarus part of Ubuntu Make (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-make) but they need someone to create deb packages for  Lazarus.  (ex. The person who publish the debs on Lazarus site, but i don't know how to reach to him.

 

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