A Day on Budgie

tomscharbach

WetGeek This is going to be an interesting day, indeed!

We look forward to hour-by-hour live coverage.

WetGeek

tomscharbach We look forward to hour-by-hour live coverage.

Well, I'm already quite a bit behind schedule. My granddaughter reminded me that I need to take her to the dentist. She needed to have 4 wisdom teeth removed, so she'd be under a general anesthetic and wouldn't be able to drive herself. I'd forgotten that it was today.

Anyway, I'm finally back at it. I figured there was really no need to put off installing Budgie on the dev workstation, so I swapped the Plasma disk for the big empty one and installed Budgie from the 4.3 ISO. I'm making fairly good progress (I'm writing this from there now), but there's still a lot of work to do.

Since I've been away from my laptop for most of the day, I think I'll be spending some of this project there tomorrow, too, so you'll hear more from me on this thread then. Things are really looking good so far, but it takes a very long time to reconfigure a fresh installation. Installing the distro is the easy part.

infinitymdm

WetGeek I frequently wish there was a tool like Ninite for us Linux users.

That said, I haven't had to reinstall Solus nearly as often as reinstalling Windows. So the need is much less dire.

murbert

infinitymdm It's way easier to install multiple programs in Linux. I keep a text doc with some commands to run on install, including all the programs I frequently run. such as: sudo eopkg it htop neofetch brave evolution qbittorrent vlc telegram lightdm-settings plank deadbeef -y

Brucehankins

You can also pretty quickly whip up a bash script to install all the same software from the repos so you're up in running in less time. Themes and setting the visuals of my DE are where I tend to lose hours of time because I like to explore lots of options and no two are themed the same.

WetGeek

Yesterday was supposed to be "A Day on Budgie," but as I write above, unforseen things caused me to spend most of the day away from my computer. Life happens. That gave me pause to think about this project a little more, and upon further thought, I realized that it's so trivial to swap SSDs in my Dell laptop, I could simply remove the Plasma SSD, insert a blank SSD, and install and configure Budgie on it.

Thus, I can "try out" Budgie on the laptop that I've considered putting it on, and if working with it for a while makes me wish I still had Plasma on it, I can make that happen in less than 2 minutes simply by replacing the Budgie SSD with the Plasma SSD, which I've set aside for safekeeping.

So, that's where I am now in my Budgie project. The Plasma SSD is safely set aside, Budgie is installed and updated on my laptop, and I'm busy installing more software and configuring it. So far I've got a lot done (this post is from there), but there's still a lot of work to do.

WetGeek

WetGeek So, that's where I am now in my Budgie project

UDATE: Configuration is finished now, other than ongoing maintenance. My Budgie laptop now has everything on it that it had as a Plasma laptop.

Vivaldi is set up and sync'd, and it has 8 named tab stacks, namely Financial, Forums, News, Shopping, Health, Racing, Sports and Streaming. Restic has been set up and used to create a backup. Strawberry has loaded the Music share on my NAS.

That should provide an idea of how the project has turned out. I'm not going to list everything I've installed or configured. Suffice it to say that I'm back to where I was a couple days ago, but on Budgie now instead of Plasma. And, pretty obviously, this is now the end of my "A Day on Budgie" project. 😄

EDIT: Oops, I should mention that my development workstation and server are now both running Budgie, so this project han't been solely about my laptop. The only computer left to migrate to Budgie is my wife's laptop. That's another Dell (Latitude), so swapping SSDs is trivial there as well. I just need to wait until she's not using it.

murbert

WetGeek The only computer left to migrate to Budgie is my wife's laptop. That's another Dell (Latitude), so swapping SSDs is trivial there as well. I just need to wait until she's not using it.

My wife doesn't approve of me screwing around with her computer. 😆

WetGeek

murbert My wife doesn't approve of me screwing around with her computer. 😆

Mine doesn't mind at all. She considers me her IT department.

MintSpider

murbert These days my wife and I have our own computer rooms in our home.
All of my machines run Linux.
All of her machines run Windows.
I maintain mine and she maintains hers.
This works fine for us both.

Brucehankins

WetGeek yes, there are some perks to being the family IT support and SysAdmin....My favorite is when I get 32 text messages in a row about an issue from my son, then later on when my wife is telling me about her day I'll hear "I told him that I don't know anything about that, ask your dad and maybe he can help". 😅

WetGeek

In another thread, someone mentioned that a 4.3 .ISO file didn't work for him, but a 4.2 .ISO did. He just need to do about 600+ upgrades to get it current. I decided to try that with the MATE VM I'm trying to make. It did not require a Live User password:

Got it! Only took 585 upgrades, but I've now got a MATE VM. Gonna try the GNOME 4.2 .ISO next. I'm determined to get one each of our DEs. I'd show it to you, but I've tried three times, and just get a javascript error when I try to paste the screen shot.

EDIT: The GNOME 4.2 .ISO file worked a charm, too. After 599 upgrades, I ended up with a thoroughly modern GNOME VM. It hasn't changed my mind about GNOME, but at least I now have a complete set. 😄

WetGeek

Brucehankins I told him that I don't know anything about that, ask your dad and maybe he can help"

Your wife is obviously the smarter one in your family. 😄

WetGeek

Curiosity has been resolved.

Remember the old song, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"? I'm now back on Plasma as I write this.

I worked pretty hard to give Budgie a good chance, but in the end, it takes more than a better dark theme to win me over. I'm not going to detail all the reasons why I've returned to Plasma, because it wouldn't really matter, and because I don't regret having done this experiment.

I'll just say that the old song was right. 100% right. There were dozens of little things that, taken individually I could have ignored, but taken all together were enough to get me to change back.

As I've mentioned, my Dell laptop makes it trivial to swap disks, so it took me about a minute to go back to Plasma. And most of that time was spent pairing my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard again. (I needed to make Plasma "forget" them before I could get them to pair again.)

But best of all, I now have a fully-configured Budgie SSD that I can swap back into my laptop the next time I feel like trying Budgie again. (Maybe when 10.7 is released?)