press on or go back?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 03:04:21PM -0400, John Martin wrote:
> Any thoughts between Linux Mint Debian Edition and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

Well those are two rather different options.  LMDE is a rolling updates
system that will continually have new stuff come out for it.  Ubuntu LTS
is a don't change anything except security issues and other major bugs
for many years.

> After much suffering over the last year with an older machine running
> Windows 7 I did two things:
> 
> 1. Picked up a very nice new Windows 8 machine (making my wife happy)
> (and StartIsBack making me happy).

I am not touching Windows 8 until Microsoft puts back a usable UI.

> 2. With all the data backed up somewhere else, began a project to
> rehabilitate the old machine.
> 
> Starting from scratch I installed Windows 7 and Linux Mint. New
> software on old hardware solved nothing so the next step was a new
> motherboard (Gigabyte with integrated everything) and processor (AMD
> X4 something or other). This cured all of Windows 7's ills. The Linux
> Mint Debian Edition partition mostly works nicely EXCEPT FOR SOUND.
> I’ve been googling and poking at this problem without success. In one
> of the posts I read, “In Linux, sound either works or it’ll drive you
> crazy trying to make it work.”

Interesting.  I find sometimes killing pulseaudio with a vengence solves
sound problems.  Sometimes pulseaudio solves sound problems.  I hate
pulseaudio (it highly concerns me that udev is now part of systemd which
is led in large part by the person responsible for pulseaudio).

> I chose Linux Mint Debian Edition over Ubuntu even though I’ve been a
> happy Ubuntu user since about 8.04 for a few reasons: DE is supposed
> to be a bit lighter on the CPU than some other flavours; it’s a
> rolling release so I hoped to avoid periodic reinstallations; and
> there’s increasing criticism of arrogance and megalomania at Canonical
> — the initials, interestingly, are MS. Yesterday evening I had the
> bright (?) idea of trying a handy Ubuntu 12.04 LTS AMD 64-bit LiveCD.
> Sound WORKS!

Reinstalling is certainly something I haven't had to do for over a
decade now.

> Which brings us back to the question: press on or go back?
> 
> This isn't a request for help with DE sound. I know there'd be shouts
> of "Not the place for that!" (Of course, if someone has universal and
> foolproof solution to my problems I'm all ears.) But I thought it
> might be worth sounding out (sorry!) the group on the relative merits
> of Ubuntu, Linux Mint Debian Edition or other editions, or other Linux
> flavours for someone who is not scared of the command line and editing
> configuration files but whose Linux knowledge is not deep.

Why isn't this the place for that?

But no there is no single fix for sound problems.  If there was, the
system would have come with that already done.  Sometimes some systems
just happened to be designed differently than intended by the chip
designer resulting in tweaks having to be done.

> (Also with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at end-of-life in a few days, there are a
> few other machines for which I need to pick a migration path sometime
> soon.)

I certainly recommend LMDE to people that don't want to have to deal
with as much setup and choosing packages as plain Debian requires.

I don't imagine fixing the sound issue should be that hard.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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