Edit: And in the end, it’s back to good old Fedora with Xfce. I guess I’m an old man, fixed in my ways. Haiku was interesting, but not nearly as stable as needed. OpenSuSE with Xfce was rough, it requires more polish.

I’ve been a Fedora Linux user for a million years by now, and I haven’t touched any other OS (outside of Windows 10 and 11 at work).

Lately I got a refurbished ThinkCentre from ca 2018 (7th generation Intel i5, 16GB RAM, Intel HD 630). The initial idea was to use it as a media PC but the small form factor ended up not being small enough for my living room.

Now I’m thinking of using it as a desktop PC for a while, to see if it can make my laptop be a portable machine again instead of always plugged, always on. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll use it as a home server.

Since this is all an experiment, I want to give a new OS a shot before I settle for the familiar Fedora.

OpenSuSE is the first on my list, but even from the LiveUSB I noticed that the software selection is more limited than I’m used to.

I’m thinking of giving HaikuOS a shot as well.

What else has been going on in the world of free OSes since 2007? What’s one that you are excited about?

    • cnnrduncan@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      I used to run FreeBSD on my laptop on high school, worked pretty good - even stuff like wifi and bluetooth with a bit of effort - but the battery life was atrocious compared to Linux or Windows.

    • Entikan@mastodon.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      @vahid @agrammatic For me hardware support on my Dell Latitude has been (almost) plug and play. It probably depends on (the #FOSS ness of) your hardware. But I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t like fixing things. Funny story though, the video driver for my #nvidia quadro atm (470) is not supported by #archLinux where #freebsd has a prebuilt package ready to go.