Mark this down - less drivel from Ian

[lovingboth]

I have used Ubuntu's Linux distribution since the first version was released in Autumn 2004. Building on Debian's 'testing' branch, it added a few things that were too.. dirty for the official Debian branches because of restrictions on the software. An example from a couple of years later was the way that, thanks to Mozilla's trademark on 'Firefox', Debian had its own version: Iceweasel. Ubuntu stuck to Firefox. It also had naked people on the default desktop background.

For a while, I was dual-booting it with Windows, but after a while, I barely used Windows. (The kids' PCs have never had Windows and it's made support a lot easier.) Because the online backup service I was using just did Windows and just did a couple of file systems, for a while I was using Ubuntu on NTFS.¹ When I abandoned the backup service, it was time to use a proper filesystem.

One very noticeable thing was how Ubuntu improved every six months in a way that Windows didn't. Sadly, the naked people quickly disappeared from the default desktop though, and there were other issues. The main one was as a result of the desktop environment that almost everyone using Linux used, GNOME 2, deciding - under pressure from Microsoft who started claiming it had patents on various aspects of the Windows 95-style desktop environment - to do things differently for GNOME 3. Very differently.

Ubuntu had already introduced the Unity desktop for netbooks and other computers with wide, short screens. Around 2011, they went for pushing people with better screens to have it too. I thought Unity was just about acceptable on the Eee netbook, but horrible on a better screen.

At this point, I switched to Linux Mint which as well as being even less pure than Ubuntu - you could watch DVDs without fuss on Linux Mint - had two desktops to chose between: Cinnamon, which was GNOME 3 beaten into acting more like GNOME 2, and MATE,² which was the GNOME 2 code updated a bit. I went for MATE.

And I stayed with Linux Mint for few years until its own annoyances got too much for me. The main one was they way that they broke the best way to upgrade between versions. I have used Debian on servers for many years, and it's one bit of editing and about four lines of typing to go from one version to the next. Not for Linux Mint! They had you using their own program which would sometimes mess up rather badly.

When Ubuntu adopted Ubuntu MATE as an official version in 2015, I went back to that.

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 is what's on L's PC, L30's laptop, and what would be JA's PC if she weren't using a Chromebook now. It's supported until 2025 and I'm not going to upgrade those until the next 'long term support' edition in 2024.

Because I like the small improvements in the six month editions, I upgraded to 22.10 a couple of months ago. This PC was bought in 2018, so it's had two versions a year since then: this was the tenth version.

And there were problems. My favourite screensaver stopped working. One of Ubuntu's more annoying recent-ish changes is making people use their own format for some critical programs rather than the '.deb' format that has worked for decades.³ Then through under-resourcing the snap server, some Firefox security updates were 'rationed' and it was two days before I (and others) were allowed to get them.

The main justification for snaps is that some people don't install security upgrades, so making me use them and then keeping security upgrades from me was the last straw.

So I am back on Linux Mint, MATE edition. Moving from one to the other wasn't hard, but it is true that Ubuntu MATE do MATE better than Linux Mint do.

One side-effect of doing this was that every non-default program I have installed has had to be reinstalled. This isn't hard, and it's been an opportunity to go 'Do I need that? No!' to several of them, but one casualty has been Drivel, a LiveJournal (and thus Dreamwidth) client.

It stopped being developed some years ago, and even Debian dropped it. But the files from the last version would install on Ubuntu and the wonderful Debian-based package system meant it would stay happily working with upgrades to everything else..

.. but it simply wouldn't install on the current Linux Mint. Some other packages the Drivel one depends on are either gone or won't install themselves.

So because using a client is nicer than the DW 'post' page, I am now using dreamwidth-js, which takes text formatted as Markdown - having asterisks on two sides of some text makes it display in italics etc etc - and posts to Dreamwidth via a simple command.

Annoyingly, it seems to be almost my only option, beyond running the Windows Semagic program via WINE. But it does work, and using Deepdwn as the editor is nicer than the DW one.

1. It always annoyed me that the service in question didn't use NTFS itself because of its problems, but they were quite happy to insist that its users had to use it or FAT.
2. The author's Spanish, so it's 'mat-eh' rather than 'm-ate'.
3. You can get around using 'snap' for some programs, but it's a pain.