Are There any Linux Users on This Site?

I'm really into the Linux operating systems. I don't mean that I'm an expert by any means. But it has, for the most part, replaced Windows in my computer life. I think it would be cool to meet more Christian Linux users.

What's your favorite distro?

I use Linux Mint (Cinnamon) for a daily driver and Puppy Linux for forensics and data retrieval from a crashed Windows box. Both are totally GUI, no command lines needed. (I know, I know, some say that means I'm not a REAL Linux user. Don't care.)

The part I like best is how I can install Linux Mint to a flash drive instead of the computer's internal hard drive. I've been running my whole computer system from a low-profile flash drive for about half a decade now. Any computer is my computer because my computer is on the little chip I stick in the USB port. All my files, my settings, my programs, my desktop background and theme... Any computer is my personal, customized computer when I boot from USB.

Mind you, I'm not a fanboy. I'm OS-agnostic. I'll use whatever works best for the task at hand.

My Windows computer is currently the best computer I have (speaking in terms of hardware.) I use it for music making and video games.

If a missionary is going to a part of the world without easy ebay shipping, I am always glad to see him taking a Mac. They are expensive and more limited than most PCs, but also (in my experience) rock-solid.

Linux is for online use. My Windows computer never, ever gets online. Ever. I don't even have Steam - I get games from gog because I can download them and port over to the Windows computer.

I'm not critical of how you choose to use your Linux. If you can get it done in the GUI then so be it. I use the terminal some and the GUI some. Whatever works, is my policy.

Since I don't have anything to add to your two posts, I'll move onto your question.

Linux Mint XFCE has been my favorite distro and desktop. With that being said, a lot of people are saying that Ubuntu is going down the drain. Some are urging us to switch to the debian edition. If I switch I'll be adding the xfce desktop, and maybe remove the cinnamon.

I have three computers running linux. One runs Linux Mint XFCE, and my other two are running PCLinuxOS XFCE. I really like PClinuxOS because it's a slow rolling distro. The community is helpful too. There are some pros and cons between the two distros. Maybe if your curious, I'll talk more on that later.

LMDE is... Well they don't put as much work into it. They said up-front they made it to answer the question "what if Ubuntu vanished and all we had to work with was Debian?" and it should not be relied on as a solid replacement, so I can't fault them for it. But I can't recommend it as your daily driver unless you're willing to tolerate some things, like RAM leaks that make it necessary to reboot every so often. Also the system completely freezing up here and there was a bit annoying.

Now if Ubuntu really is going downhill, maybe they're going to put more resources into LMDE. That would actually be great, as it is also a rolling-release and I would love to not reinstall my whole system every couple of years. Time will tell, but I can hope.

As for XFCE, I used to love it for older laptops that I still wanted to use. These days though, it is a lot more bloated and I'm not sure why.

I used to love CrunchBang Linux which used Fluxbox, but CrunchBang shut down. Fluxbox was BLAZING fast on older hardware. They say BunsenLabs is a community based successor, but I have not yet tried it.

@Lynx
Have you tried MXLinux? It comes with both XFCE and Fluxbox. You just choose your desktop when you log in. It's debian based.

Interesting. Never heard of it.

Lubuntu uses the lxqt environment. They say it IS what xfce used to be. I haven't tried it myself, but I hear good things about it for lightweight uses. (Their mission statement threw me off the first time I looked into it though. It read like a missionary who was convinced all other missionaries were hopelessly in error, talking about "yeah there are other lightweight distros, but we feel they have strayed from the true goal of..." So I never did try it. I notice their mission statement has changed since then though.)

I like Linux and prefer Kali Linux. BackTrack 5 was also solid in it’s day, still is in some regards.

@Lynx
I have messed around with Lubuntu and LXDE. I haven't spent enough time with lxqt to form a working opinion. But just out of the box experience, I prefer the way XFCE works in comparison.

@Runningman
I only downloaded Kali one time, and made a DVD out of it. I tested a bit in a live environment, and then just got distracted onto something else...

I never heard of BackTrack 5. What does it bring the table?

it’s mainly used for pen testing, quite similar to Kali in many regards.

The only pen testing I would like to do is on my own network. I would like to know, just how secure, I actually am.

Depending on what you’re doing exactly it’s possible to break things so proceed with caution. You could always download Kali for free and just experiment with it. Just be sure to stay on your internal network.

I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing that or not.

That's the main thing I like about portable Linux install on my flash drive. I don't even care about pen testing. If you hacked me and wrecked everything, I would just clone from another flash drive install and keep rolling. All the files I care about are stored on multiple offline devices.

"The most secure situation is not having to care about security."

My concern isn't that so much. It's a hacker grabbing something that I might have temporarily in ram.

Ah. Online banking passwords and such. Yeah, that could be a concern.

There again though, I'm such an old fogie that I do all my banking online.

I guess they could get my Amazon password... Couldn't do much damage on it either though, cause the only card I have is a debit card and I never have any money behind the card unless I'm just about to buy something.

Speaking of which... It seems like somebody should have made a function where the computer stops what it is doing and purges ram. I mean sure you could just reboot, but it feels like there should be a way to purge ram without rebooting.

Of course the computer would have to reload everything it is working on to ram again, so it would be almost the same as rebooting anyway.

@Lynx
You probably heard, that about a year or two ago, there was a problem with intel chips that allowed hackers to get in and read what was in memory. So all the OSes had to do something to disable that feature, which slowed the processors down, but made them more secure. I guess even AMD had a similar issue too.

You mean the spectre exploit? Weeee, that was fun!

Fixing it didn't slow processors down though. It just made them stop pretending they were magically fast. See, for a long time processors have been doing work they thought you would probably want while they waited for you to ask them to do something. They kept all the "user might need this" work in a sandbox, and when you made a choice they would pull your choice out of the sandbox and present it to you, so you would think, "Wow, this computer is BLAZING fast!"

Nobody was supposed to be able to use the stuff in the sandbox. Technically the stuff the processor kept in the sandbox didn't even really exist. But it turns out you CAN use it... and you can use it to access parts that those processes shouldn't even be able to access.