## 56 Back to Mint
Last month I had a big problem with my profile on my Ubuntu LTS... Impossible to have network, impossible to have USB and therefore impossible to restore my profile. I was not very happy with Ubuntu and Gnome 3. I had two choices to repair: the same Ubuntu or a new distribution. I chose the first and had problems with the versions of Ruby for the Jekyll dependencies... This made me think of a simpler version for the French blog in the future, like this one. So I switched (after 1 hour to find versions of Ruby, Rubygems, Jekyll, etc...) to a new distribution. I also had to choose the right one. I'm a big fan of Debian, but with those damned dependencies of Jekyll, I might have another problem in the future. So I decided to use the last mint in the mate version (because I used mate before... and cinnamon is too green for me, ha ha. I prefer to eat it). So easy to install, everything worked on my old X270. So easy to configure with the Mate desktop and...Jekyll worked easily too. Just one change in the YAML con
fig, as usual. But only one line. I put the backup files on my home and it was OK again.
I chose Mint for a different reason. It's the distribution I would put in the hands of someone new to Linux. I used it for my parents several years ago and what went wrong was... the hardware of the PC after 10 years of use (an Acer...ha ha). No problem for my mum who was using Windows XP. I was the admin and she was the user to avoid problems. Not a single reinstall over the years. OK, I would definitely use a Cinnamon for her next time. But Mint is always a good choice because it's very reliable, it doesn't use Snap (but Flatpack...) and everything is out of the box after half an hour. If I had other needs, I would choose another distribution. But if I need to lend my PC to my wife, she'll be able to use it without any problems.
I remember the last version I used: Julia ... it was 14 years ago. It's not so different for me, but I'm very happy to use it. Ubuntu seems like a draft to me compared to mint. But I'm also a Debian user and Debian is also close to my heart because it's stable, it's the perfect base to have a minimal system, even without a desktop like XFCE. Now in Mint, everything seems to be OK... except for one tool I have been using for a couple of years: Zettlr. I don't know why it doesn't work well. So I decided to go back to another tool I used before : Geany with the markdown plugin. I'm also testing Ghostwriter, which seems to be a good markdown editor. But Zettlr was better for maintaining two blogs and several drafts... I thought so. But I've put some plugins into Geany to have a real project panel and that's great. And finally, the WYSIWYG in another panel is better than the Zettlr mode (which is like a classic word processor) because I see the code and not just the result. But I'm not ready for Emacs or VIM toda
y, ha ha.
I thought a conky wasn't necessary with the MATE desktop... a mistake, because I'm old and have habits. But I forgot to save my conkyrc file. It's not very difficult to rewrite it because I don't need many indicators and graphs. I'm not that far away from the RAM usage I had with my previous Ubuntu desktop, even though I've got too much flatpack software on at the moment. It's always like that when you discover a new version of a distribution: you have to test a lot of things before you keep just what you need. I still have a bug with the Pcloud client, like with the Ubuntu distributions, when the PC wakes up from hibernation for the 3rd or 4th time. The status of one of the pcloud processes is "zombie"... And it's not just for Halloween. Not a big problem until I need to back up something.
Everything else is fine, and the old X270 never slows down or freezes. I hope to have many years with it, even though the main problem with PCs is ...browsers and their memory consumption. My little Toshiba N300 was no longer able to open Firefox, but it also took a long time to generate the website with Jekyll. Now it's back to a few seconds for more than 1800 articles. The X270 is also very good at encoding videos in H264, 265 or AV1 with Shutter Encoder, for example. But that's another story...
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