Adventures in Linux: Mint, Manjaro, and Kubuntu
A brand new computer this year! Which means dual booting with Linux! 
I haven’t had a new personal computer in a while so this is a chance to spend more time in a Linux environment, and there are many options to choose from… I went through a few options before I finally settled on an option (which I’m sure I’ll change in no time!)
Linux Mint
I really liked Linux Mint when I installed it on an old laptop of mine, and it runs fairly well, considering the laptop is from 2005 and has 1 CPU core and 1GB of RAM and oh yes it’s 32 bit. So, very underpowered by today’s standards, but still surprisingly useable! That’s one of the things I really enjoy about linux is the ability to run so well with fewer resources.
That being said, I wanted to try a different distro, something with a different feel, so I deciced out of curiosity to try out another distro I had heard about: Manjaro.
Manjaro
Everything started out well enough, though in retrospect I downloaded the wrong version of Manjaro to start with - the Xfce desktop. Xfce is very quick and efficient, and runs well on older hardware, but on a newer computer dual-booting with Windows 10 it felt a little behind in terms of feel. It might be a silly reason, surely not a reason based on functionality or efficiency, but the way it was set up just wasn’t slick enough… I wanted something that was beautiful, that would not make me want to go boot into Windows. So with utmost respect to the Xfce version (which I can’t stress enough is clean and quite efficient), I decided to try and install the KDE version.
I decided I’d try switching from Xfce to KDE via the software installer tool, figuring if that didn’t go well I’d just download the Manjaro KDE version and reinstall. I won’t go into details here because I really didn’t try all that hard to make it work… I followed the instructions to install the KDE components, restarted my computer, and got a black screen. Oops that didn’t work. Rather than troubleshoot I just reinstalled the Manjaro KDE version.
I really liked Manjaro with KDE Plasma, it brought back a lot of memories from running KDE back in the day, and was the experience I was looking for. Unfortunately, somehow after running some updates I ended up with the black screen again after rebooting. It also felt a little different, based on Arch Linux, and I didn’t realize how much I had gotten used to Ubuntu over the years. So rather than troubleshoot another problem, I decided for now to run an Ubuntu based distro. I’ll give Manjaro another try sometime in the future, but for now I’ll go with something a little more familiar.
Kubuntu
I really loved running KDE again with Manjaro, so I decided to give Kubuntu a try. Wonderful! Exactly what I wanted.
First thing I did was set up four virtual desktops - this is how I used to use KDE a long time ago - and I really enjoy it. It’s a differentiator from Windows - being able to split web browsing, emails, etc. from development IDEs and other tools - it lets you break up your work modes and keep the windows from getting cluttered up.
Yakuake
Another application I installed, which was installed by default on Manjaro, was Yakuake. It’s almost irrational how much I love this program - it drops down a terminal window from the top of the screen, allowing you to run shell commands - and you activate it via the F12 key. What’s nice is you can drop the terminal down, run some commands, and then send it away, without having to open a terminal directly or ALT-TAB to the appropriate window. It’s also nice if you have a website open as you can scroll the web page underneath with the terminal dropped down - useful when referring to a blog post or set of instructions online. It will also open on whichever desktop is current, so you don’t have to keep moving back to the desktop with your open terminal window. It’s just so nice! :)
So there it is, for now running Kubuntu, with an eye on running Manjaro when I’m ready to try something new. Isn’t it great how many options there are in the linux ecosystem?