What Linux Distro(s) are You Using and Why?

I'm not familiar with any recent linux distros, and my sole experience with it was playing a little while running it off a live CD, back in Windows 98 days.

Past the point of trying several new distros, why would one want more than one at hand? And wouldn't it be nearly as simple to have a second USB stick for another distro?

PrimeOS is actually an Android operating system that runs on Windows hardware. It's quick and light and lets you turn old laptops into useful devices that will run your favorite Android apps.

In my case, there's a certain Android remote access app that I like and use it as a backup to Google Remote Desktop and Teamviewer. It's nice to run it on a full-size screen instead of a phone or tablet.

Our Chromebooks almost got Google Play Store but just missed the cutoff. We love the ones we have, though, and don't want to upgrade. So running PrimeOS fills the gap.

Unfortunately, I don't have any first-hand experience. I just saw a link on another makeuseof.com article you posted and found it interesting. And the comments on the itsfoss.com article about MultiBootUSB aren't very enthusiastic.

The makeuseof.com article says about each of the 4 USB multiboot programs:

Go with YUMI if you don't need QEMU or WinSetupFromUSB if you do? I plan to do this myself but who knows when...

I tried setting up Arnold's Chromium image with YUMI on a NTFS USB stick. Chromium isn't on YUMI's list of supported ISO images. First, I selected 'Unlisted ISO with syslinux'. It failed. Then, I selected 'Unlisted ISO with GRUB'. It went OK. I'll boot it up tomorrow.

It'll probably fail! :stuck_out_tongue:

If so I''ll burn CloudReady to the USB stick without YUMI.

And I was correct. After booting the USB stick where YUMI put Arnold's image it failed with 'GRUB Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format' when I selected it. Maybe because Arnold's image was an .img, not an .iso. Then, I tried CloudReady. YUMI can't boot it. But when I tried the CloudReady USB Maker it build the USB drive and boot it fine. I signed in with a Gmail address and I was a little shocked. Everything is web-based. I guess I'm used to "offline" OSs.

I now want to try a few Live Linux distros. A question for Chelle (or anybody familiar with the subject). On YUMI's list of supported distros (being unsupported doesn't mean it won't work) I see 7 puppies:

Any preference?

I'm using Bionic 64, which is one of the latest versions. I think you'd like it if it's supported.

OK, I'll try it. Thank you.

Well, at one point my daily driver phone was a Nokia n900 that I think I briefly had successfully dual-booting the default Maemo 5 Linux and some version of Android, and then under Maemo I had the plain Debian user environment, which I think was a chroot rather than a VM, but I'm not sure...

But that is beside the point.

Back when I was still in high school, I think, I got hold of the disks and tried and failed to set up the custom distro that the university I planned to attend had for making your computer as similar as possible to working in a computer lab. Didn't mess with it for a while after that.

Later on in university, tried Ubuntu (Gnome 2 days, I think). Hated the UI, didn't last a week. Back to Windows 98 with Litestep.

A while later, found out about Xubuntu. Tried that, liked it. I might still have a laptop running an ancient version.

Found out most of the active regulars in the #xubuntu IRC channel actually seemed to be running Fluxbuntu. Tried that. Not a fan.

Found out most of the active regulars in the #fluxbuntu IRC channel actually seemed to be running Arch Linux. Tried that. Been running it ever since, currently on a LUKS-encrypted NVME using UEFI-boot. Seems like I've got to have been on Arch for...16 years? I even use Arch for my WSL distribution.

Thinking of trying Sculpt, Subgraph, or Qubes, though, and probably Nix at least in a VM.

Edit: I left out the why part.

I did what I did with my n900 because I could.
I didn't like Gnome because of how it looked.
I liked Xubuntu because of how XFCE looked.
I like Arch because of how much control it taught me to have.
I like Nix because of how its package management works.
I like the ideas behind Sculpt, Subgraph, and Qubes because of the compartmentalization.
I have also messed with RancherOS because I thought it was interesting.

Bionic 64 is supported. The above list was from YUMI's website. The application's list of supported puppies adds 'BionicPup, Tahrpup, Puppy Arcade, XenialPup'.

I tried it and it was fine. I'm not not as familiar with it as Windows, but it was pretty good. I chose the RAM option (loaded it and run it on the computer's RAM) and it was so fast! Thanks Chelle!

GalliumOS GalliumOS Wiki was mentioned (by Chelle) in this post in deals thread https://www.nthcircle.com/forum/deals/1357-hot-deals?start=480#36221

Wondering if anyone has experiences/opinion to share & if this is the way to go on a no longer supported old Chromebook.

I haven't tried GalliumOS, but it's gotten good reviews. It seems to be based on and is pretty much indistinguishable from Xubuntu Linux, which I have used in the past and appreciated the speed and simplicity of the XFCE desktop. So I would say go for it. There are a few alternatives below.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/thread/9001706?hl=en

https://cloudreadykb.neverware.com/s/article/USB-Installer-Steps-In-Chrome-OS

From July 2020 to the present, I seriously dug in, spent probably ~100 hours on linux & old computers - (3 desktops from 2000 - 2002, 2 laptops from 2006-2008, and 1 laptop from 2000. Only one device was 64-bit -- the laptop from 2008.

On those old computers, I tried SliTaz, TinyCore Linux, Antix (Core, & Base), Lubuntu, Xubuntu, & Slax. On 2 newer machines, I tried Ubuntu 20.04.

[ul]
[li]SliTaz has spotty support for wireless. And it looks like in the last month or so, the main website & the community support has disappeared[/li]
[li]TinyCore required too much expertise which I hope to have one day, but not now.[/li]
[li]Lubuntu 18.04 32-bit worked well on the 2006 laptop with 2GB RAM.[/li]
[li]Lubuntu 20.04 64-bit worked ok on the 2008 laptop with 4GB RAM (but only 3 useable).[/li]
[li]I was not able to get Xubuntu, either 32-bit or 64-bit, to work on either of those laptops for some reason.[/li]
[li]On the 2000 laptop (a Dell Latitude c600 with 384 MB RAM & 30 GB harddrive), I used Slax, & configured the GUI (aka X) to not automatically start. It's quite usable in command line with wired networking. Slax is very odd & interesting.[/li]
[li]On the 3 early 2000s desktops with wired networking, I eventually installed Antix Core (command line only), removed the optical drives & FDDs, & manually installed the GUI (lxde on the 2 slower ones, and xfce on the faster one). I now use the 2 slower ones as headless fileservers (backing up, staging uploads, converting video formats, etc.) without the GUIs automatically starting, with a total of 8 older IDE harddrives between the two, sitting in the basement.[/li]
[/ul]

I tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a 2015 Win10 laptop (live on DVD only), and in an Oracle VirtualBox on a new Win10 desktop. Ubuntu works well, but requires good hardware. I highly recommend Antix for older hardware, but you have to put in the time to learn how to trim down the services. I documented a significant amount of this, so I can assist if anyone else needs help.

In the end, I recommend Debian-based linuxes unless you're more of a hacker than I am. Every sigle distro I tried above is Debian-based, except for SliTaz & TinyCore.

Yeah, I had mentioned cloudready earlier in this thread and there was a decent bit of follow on discussion re it.