A New Start, and a New Desktop

I love technology, the Internet and all things geeky. I don’t have much of a local group of friends to do and talk about geeky things with. Not having that outlet lately has let me slip away from some of the tech things that I love. I have been thinking, wow I need an outlet for the geekyness to keep myself interested in life. Then I thought hey I have an abandoned blog out there, what a coincidence, I can write about nerdy things of all sorts and nobody will read it, awesome. So as I start to use the blog again some changes will be ongoing, I will be writing about tech more than posting photos, though a bit of that may still be happening, we will see. I am hoping to use some of my impending projects as things to write about. Some of these are, re-building the kids computer, making my raspberry pi do something cool, test Linux distros (Bodhi currently), review and discuss new apps I find and use (Gourmet Recipe Manager coming soon), playing with my Nexus 7 and breaking it, and the ever changing HTPC in my family room. So these are just a few of the things I hope to write about soon. If anybody has any suggestions or things for me to figure out and post on let me know. Today I am going to write for a bit on my experience with the Linux install on my main desktop.

 

Our main computer is a dual booting custom built (by me) PC (my first) sporting an AMD Phenom II 955 overclocked to about 3.4 with eight gigs of ram. It boots Windows 7 and Xubuntu (Ubuntu Linux with the XFCE desktop). I have tried multiple distros on this machine and am pretty happy with the stability and app compatibility of Xubuntu oh right 12.10 in this case. I am a lover of pretty desktops and had to give Cinnamon a try. I know that I could just use Mint, but I have had more problems than I would care to talk about at the moment with Mint over the times of installing it, nothing mind blowing, just enough for me to not want it on my main machine. Installing Cinnamon on Xubuntu is pretty easy, but it does take the effort of adding a PPA, which isn’t much effort at all. The PPA is ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable. I am not going into how to install a PPA today but will in the future, if you want to know now, Google is your friend. So got it installed logged out and back in and great, Cinnamon. My machine had some updates to install which needed a restart, so restart the machine and, well in my case a bit of trouble. Reboot, grub, choose Ubuntu, flashes some boot BIOS related text ( as normal) and black screen, this happens occasionally, so hard power off, and black again. After a few times of this happening I booted into safe mode, did basically nothing, and restarted, boom, it worked, and has worked great every-time since. So who knows, but the moral of the story is, Cinnamon is great pretty, fast, and did I mention pretty or fast. Let’s talk about fast for a moment, I generally evaluate fast on how much RAM and CPU are being used during operation, low RAM usage fast OS, right, well wrong. Cinnamon is using two to four hundred more megs of RAM but feels waaayyyyy faster than XFCE, which is already a fast desktop, and is what Xubuntu is built to run. I really like to settings menus, and all of the customization options built in. Cinnamon at least to me, is a very compelling desktop choice at the moment, and it what I will be using for the near future, fast and gorgeous, like a great car, now if only that kind of car had a similar price tag to Cinnamon. Thanks for reading, see you next time, please if you have any feedback, feel free to comment.

 

TyTheGeek

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