Tuesday, December 17, 2013

SolydX Works For Me

After several attempts, I managed to install SolydX on one of my systems. I know now why my previous installation attempts failed. Solyd's installer didn't like my AMD/ATI kludge, an E-350 apu that uses the ATI video hardware. I do not have a good opinion of AMD/ATI due to overall poor support in Linux. I had a lot of different problems trying to install SolydX/K on the ATI system. Sometimes the installation completed all the way to the end, and then updates were downloaded, and the system was customized. Upon reboot, I restarted in grub rescue mode. Always I wound up putting Solyd aside and using something else instead. This is by no means an exclusive problem of Solyd's. Manjaro uses a strikingly similar installer and had the exact same problem. I believe Linux Mint Debian Edition has the same problem as well.

However, SolydX installed smooth as butter on my Intel-powered laptop, replacing Linux Mint 14 XFCE. As an aside, I think developers incur a certain risk by releasing a distro that becomes obsolete in a brief amount of time. At that point the user may reevaluate. I sure did. I'm not keen on the idea of reinstalling every nine months or so. Sorry, Linux Mint. You're great, you're wonderful, but I just don't want to bother with a reinstall in order to get the latest versions of my favorite applications.

In SolydX, as with all the Linux distros I've ever tried, there was no need to install any device drivers. Everything set up itself automatically. My laptop accesses wireless or ethernet Internet sources without any difficulty. Contrast this wonderful scenario with that of Windows. I was annoyed recently reading offensive forum messages in a forum stacked with Windows fan boys. They call Linux users "freetards" and claim that the only reason home users use Linux is because they're poor or cheap. Yes, the absence of cost is an important factor to me. However, Linux has a lot of other advantages, and to pretend that it doesn't is not very fair. Windows is good in some ways, such as software availability, but Linux can do a lot, including things that Windows can't do, and Linux is designed with security in mind, and continues to become more user-friendly as time goes on.

I've been pleased with how nice everything is in SolydX. It seems to have the advantages of Linux Mint, such as custom Thunar actions defined from the get-go, without the disadvantages, such as planned obsolescence and outdated software. I like the install-once and forget about it plan. I was pleased to see SolydX pull the latest Wesnoth and Digikam from its filtered Debian Testing repository. While SolydX pulls Digikam 3.5, the latest stable, Linux Mint 14 was only offering Digikam 3.3. I would recommend SolydX to anyone with Intel hardware, which is all I ever buy anymore.

Want to try Solyd (Xfce or Kde), a modern Linux distro? Visit the SolydXK web site.

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