...Annnnnnnnnd back to Pop.

Yeah so I tried out a few distros again after breaking my Pop!_os build...  I KNOW that Pop is basically a gussied up version of Ubuntu, but it feeeeeels different!  I cannot explain it.  It should not feel any different (except for obvious visual and widget differences) but it does.

So anyway, back to POP!!!!!!!  And I am happy.  I will resist upgrading my kernel to the latest and greatest builds.  :)

LG V30 vs iPhone 8

This is not REALLY a comparison, sorry if you thought that.  What this is:  I am getting rid of my V30 and I purchased an iPhone 8 to replace it.

I've owned my V30 for almost a year now and in that year it has been a pain.  It has never worked smoothly, picture quality has been sketchy, terminal pay has been sketchy, it has forced reset to factory settings on me once (lost everything on the phone), the screen occasionally goes black and the only way to fix it is to power off/on, etc.

Hate.  This.  Phone.

So I went back to the old "stand by" and purchased an iPhone 8.

That is all.

Oops! I did it again...

I can't believe I used that as the title to this post...

Anyway, so I ran MX for a total of a few hours and realized... I've actually become attached to GNOME.  I can't believe it really.  When GNOME 3 came out I was totally turned off by it.

Now I have actually become fond of it, even though it sucks up RAM like crazy.

Sooooo... I am running Manjaro 18 Gnome version.  Closer to Pop!_os.  Still have the latest Pop!_os image downloaded and ready to burn... just in case.  :D  I am thinking of poking around for "the best gnome implementations" for linux distros.

But I like Manjaro because it has some pretty huge repositories, allows for the latest drivers (MX is still behind on Nvidia drivers), and it generally looks nice.

So we shall see... if anyone has any recommendations let me know.

Oops!

Soooooooo maybe I broke my Pop!_OS build.

Actually, I thought I was more clever than everyone else out there who has tried this but... I tried anyway.  I tried building in NVidia drivers to a low latency kernel that I installed.

Yeah.  No go.

So in order to start from scratch I decided to install the latest BETA version of MX Linux (if you look back in my blog you will see I used it for awhile and liked it a good bit, still do).

I may yet go back to Pop!_os... remains to be seen.  I really did enjoy it.  MX Linux, if you remember, is an XFCE, debian-based distro.  It is known for being nimble but attractive.

So, for the moment, or until further notice anyway, I will be back on MX, albeit on their beta 18 version.

I am SO excited for this movie.

Mini and Pop

Still on Pop!_os, probably a record for me, except back in the day when Ubuntu was first released and the year I used PC-BSD for work.  I know it is mostly just a gnome distro but something about it just feels ... I don't know, it just stays out of your way.

I recently updated my 4.19 kernel to a point release.  Working fine.  I DID have ONE freeze episode.  I had been playing Borderlands 2 early in the day, but just paused the game and left it running while we went out to run errands, then went to a church event...  so basically for hours.  I came back, fired it up to finish a quick mission and it froze.  So, not a huge deal since basically I kind of abused my poor system for hours.  I give this one a pass.  :)

Our Mini Coopers are great.  My wife's is a Countryman Park Lane, not much more to say about it except that it is a pleasure to drive in.  I've been driving top-down in my Roadster every day.  So much fun!

I will update more about the Mini soon.

...off to work.

Mini post

Pop!_os Kernel update

Told you about my upgrade of the kernel recently, well that kernel had a number of issues regarding video / system freezes.  A new kernel came out not long after and had a number of changes but none of them screamed "fix for video freezes" to me...

Even so, I have not had (knocks on wood) a freeze since then.  No idea why.  Makes little sense to me.  But for reference:

Linux 4.19.6-041906-generic #201812010432 SMP Sat Dec 1 09:34:07 UTC 2018

I *did* have one strange thing happen, while doing several things which included backing up files, downloading files and installing software my system started slowing down drastically.

Network showed fine, I could view directories in my file viewer fine...  so I rebooted and when it came up I had systemd logging errors flashing across... so I rebooted AGAIN and since then everything has been fine.  No files lost, as far as I can tell.  It was just strange.

ANYWHO... for the most part the system has been running very well.