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Your Worst Distro


raymac46

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What was the worst distro you ever used? I have two - both preinstalled on netbooks back in the day.

The absolute worst was a brain dead version of Ubuntu 8.04 which was on a Dell Mini 12 netbook. It had a terrible cartoonish interface, was heavily modified to suit the Dell's unfriendly hardware, and once Dell abandoned the Mini 12, was impossible to update. I never got that netbook to work right until AntiX came along and even then it was a dog.

The other was the aptly named Linpus Lite - Linux combined with bacterial infection. That was a really ugly Chinese version of Fedora, installed on an Acer Aspire One. Again it had a dumb interface you mercifully could turn off to get Xfce. At least the Acer had decent hardware so any light Linux version would work on it. Lubuntu was a good choice.

Both of these 32 bit monstrosities have been recycled. And their preinstalled distros are lost to history.

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Haven't had too many problems with anything I've installed myself. One LXQt version of Manjaro was iffy because it was not officially supported.

Most issues were hardware related. For example, Dell desktops were/are great for Linux but their laptops could be nightmares. For Linux laptops a Thinkpad has always been my choice.

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securitybreach

Maybe the crap distro than came on the EeePC back in the day but that was the only distro that sucked. I quickly installed archlinux on it.

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Boy, I've tried some crappy distros....  I'm not going to count Red Hat 7 cuz back then, I really didn't know what the hell I was doing .  I agree with Raymac...I don't like the cartoonish interfaces either.  I never used it but I did dry test Puppy and that was really terrible. 

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I don't know what the reason for bad UIs on netbooks back in the aughts was...maybe poor video graphics, or maybe they just thought Linux was too techy for a new user so they had to dumb it down. Most of the Acer and ASUS models were at least Linux friendly. Dell was another matter. 
Dell seems to have sorted this out by now but their laptops were ugly Linux candidates 10 years ago.

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On 3/3/2022 at 8:45 AM, securitybreach said:

Maybe the crap distro than came on the EeePC back in the day but that was the only distro that sucked. I quickly installed archlinux on it.

 

That's the one I thought of on seeing this topic. I had EeePC 900 and quickly installed sidux on it. 😁

 

Of today's distros, anything with Gnome or based on Ubuntu I steer clear of. I even installed Debian Gnome recently to see if it had improved since a few years ago but nope, it is worse. 💩

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I believe the EeePCs had Xandros as their preinstalled Linux. That was a pretty weird one that came from Corel Linux. Based on Debian, used KDE with some proprietary tweaks. Not very compatible.

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GNOME I find OK if you put in a few Shell Extensions. The problem is that every time you get a major "upgrade" to GNOME, it breaks the Extensions.

Edited by raymac46
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securitybreach
10 hours ago, raymac46 said:

GNOME I find OK if you put in a few Shell Extensions. The problem is that every time you get a major "upgrade" to GNOME, it breaks the Extensions.


Yup, broke extensions on almost every update or so I have heard over the years. At one point, you couldnt even change the wallpaper without gnome-tweaks. How ridiculous is that?

 

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And don't even think about using Wayland with GNOME unless you run the most basic vanilla interface. Nothing will work otherwise.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Probably Gentoo (Redcore) Never could get it to run right. Also the newer Arch Linux. to much work for the install. Manjaro is a improvement, but you have to use their grub. Which I don't care for. I multi boot several Distro's on SSD disks and prefer to use Mints grub to boot them as mint is my primary Distro. My computer holds 6 SSD's and I multi boot 3 of them.

Mel

 

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V.T. Eric Layton

Gentoo is one of the few Linux distributions that I never tried. It just involved too much time/work. For those who love it, though, it is a labor of love.

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securitybreach
5 hours ago, mhbell said:

Also the newer Arch Linux. to much work for the install

Mel

 

 How so? You know you can always use the normal installation method.

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2 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

 How so? You know you can always use the normal installation method.

No I did not know that. I must have tried a older version. That was why I tried Manjaro, Endevor, and Garuda. guess I will have to download latest version and try again. I notice that Arch is way down the list on distro watch.

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23 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

Well distro watch ranks are just the page ranks for each distro but does not reflect the user base.

 

Well I downloaded the latest arch and it is still the same. a pain and real time consuming install. No thanks I'll stick with other arch derivative distros like Manjaro and Garuda. I may even try Red core again which is a Gentoo derivative. much easier to install compaired to Gentoo

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Hedon James

Windows has been MY worst distro.  With Windows 3.0 and WindowsME being the worst of the worst.

 

Despite being such a crappy distro, I was actually somewhat pleased with WinXP and Win7.  Win8 sent me packing though...

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securitybreach
8 hours ago, mhbell said:

Well I downloaded the latest arch and it is still the same. a pain and real time consuming install. No thanks I'll stick with other arch derivative distros like Manjaro and Garuda. I may even try Red core again which is a Gentoo derivative. much easier to install compaired to Gentoo

 

You do realize that the arch installation method has been the same for many years now, it's always been a manual process. They did add a menu driven, guided installer a couple of years ago if you want to use that https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall but other than that, it is always been a manual process where you set up most aspects of your system. That is one of the appeals of installing and using archlinux, you get to customize your distro from the ground up rather that doing so after the installation. At one time, there was a ncurses driven installer like Slackware but no one wanted to maintain it so that went away in like 2010.

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2 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

 there was a ncurses driven installer like Slackware but no one wanted to maintain it so that went away in like 2010.

That was probably the one I remember installing years ago probably in the 90's. I do know that it was a lot easier to install than present day arch linux. I guess some people like the challenge Like linux from scratch and gentoo, But anymore I don't care for any distro that has to be a manual or text install, the exception being slack. I'll take the GUI any day over the rest. Just my 02 cents worth.

Mel

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V.T. Eric Layton
7 hours ago, Hedon James said:

Windows has been MY worst distro

 

HAHAHAHA! I'd have to agree. ;)

 

Although, I did have a fav of that OS -> 98SE... probably the most trouble-free version of MS Windows I ever used. Sadly, they made MANY HORRIBLE "improvements" when going to XP. Actually, XP (and all the "service packs") was the MAIN reason I came to Linux. :clap2:

 

 

 

.

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Well I quite liked Windows XP once I had it tamed. An I quite liked Windows 7 once I had it tamed but both kept going t**ts up on me after updates which was a real pain in the b**********.

 

Even worse that those two though were the early Mandrivas. I tried Mandriva Free Spring 2008 64 Bit  and 2009 and 2010 versions spurred on by th fabulous PR that they promoted.

Such as we have made so many improvements and fab easy to use stuff that will make your life so much easier. Pah what a load of old bovine scatology. Yes they did look slick and yes they had made so many changes that it took forever to work out how to do the simplest thing. Once installed they all worked until you did an update and the they just borked on you. I gave up in disgust after a while and found Widow Maker which had all the super new features that Mandriva had and it may have looked a little old fashioned but hey do you know what it worked and kept on working day in and day out. An if you spent a little time you could make it look just fine and dandy and guess what it never ever went t**ts up and still works fine today. 😂

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