Paul, I just bought a new computer, low to mid range Lenovo and like
everything else it has Windows 10 on it. OMG what a total piece of
crap O/S, I cannot even start to imagine what the developers were
thinking. What would you recommend for a Linux O/S, web browser and
mail program ? It irks me to no end that I have to buy a piece of
crap like 10 just to throw it away.

John Rogi

Linux comes with FireFox and ThunderBird. I like the "Mate"
distribution but more programs will run on Ubuntu. I think there is
something like 50,000 free programs for Linux. Open Shot is a good
video editor and Gimp is like photo shop. For music there is Banshe
and VLC. I have been running Linux for 20 years. Upgrades are free.


I have all the stuff from the news letter for the past 19 years. It
is about 500 gig. When I die anybody taking over the newsletter
better be familiar with Thunderbird. In the beginning  it was
Netscape but all files are compatible with Thunderbird. All thousands
of messages and photos. The command line search engine finds a key
word in 3 terra-bytes in less than 2 seconds. The Gui search engine
is a bit slower.


Paul Lamar

Thanks Paul, Why the preference for "Mate" ? I don't do any brainiac
stuff like you, just simple emails, paying bills, surfing the Web and
watching vids. Seems like MS just wants to sell aps and do social
media.

John Rogi

I just like the look and feel of Mate. There are at least half a
dozen gui's made for Linux and Apple and Mate are just two. People
with Apples don't realize they are just using Linux. In many cases
the aps are geared to the Gui. Especially Apple.

Paul Lamar


Paul, MATE is a desktop environment, which is layered on top of the distribution of programs. So Linux is the kernel, there is a distribution of programs (which could be Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu or another) and then there is a desktop environment as part of that. There is an Ubuntu distro that uses MATE as default, https://ubuntu-mate.org/ which looks good to me. MATE itself is an outgrowth of GNOME which is the desktop environment of the GNU project. Most of my Linux boxes don’t have any GUI at all so I don’t have experience with many GUIs. Apple OSX is the Darwin distro of BSD, not Linux, and has the Mac OSX desktop layered on top of that. But most of Unix has become so parallel with Linux that I don’t notice the difference moving back and forth between them.

The only real snag in any of this is how you handle updates. Keeping the computer as light as possible with only programs you really use makes this simple. Thunderbird and Firefox, and a word processing/spreadsheet combo like Libre Office, plus VNC and GIMP as you have indicated, should be plenty.

David Josephson


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