Lubuntu

My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.

There’s always Ctrl+R

It could be a music server with mpd – then you could configure it to stream over http to other devices. Or you could configure it as a client for a music server you keep somewhere else.

Just ext4 on my Linux things; I got scared away from btrfs because of some file loss horror stories

Nice. Take that, adware installers! Web exploits and phishing are still (minor) risks though, since they’re mostly platform agnostic.

nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.

I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.