nanook

99% of what I do is on Linux, I have one Windows partition I occasionally boot into to play games, it is and will remain Win10.

@ryannathans Why bloat the kernel with the microcode for every intel processor that might need it (and there is a similar thing for AMD) when you don't have that specific processor? It does make more sense for it to be a separate, especially on memory constrained systems. I mean if you've got 256GB of RAM probably not a big deal but if you've got 256MB a big deal.

@DaPorkchop_ Oddly, if you build your own kernel and remove the system provided one, the package gets automatically removed as well which is weird, because it is really still needed regardless.

@GolfNovemberUniform @captainkangaroo Yes and Linux includes software to do this.

@ryannathans @captainkangaroo I'm going to make the wild assumption that the kernel will have a table of the current microcode versions at the time of it's release, but I doubt that
will get updated except by kernel upgrades.

Microcode would not be a concern with that particular CPU.

@troyunrau Not complaining, just explaining my choice for a particular desktop and preferences. I realize it's open source and I realize I have the source so if it's severe enough I have the option of modifying it. If only I had infinite time.

@troyunrau KDE wastes too much screen space and too much of my time. It's pretty but inefficient.

@lancalot And for the record, I don't have anything against Mint as an OS, it's Ubuntu with some pretty GUI admin apps thrown on top. I rarely use the GUI's so updates aside it's six of one or half dozen of the other. From a command line perspective, except when things break,they are identical and admittedly the aesthetics of Mint are in my view superior.

@lancalot Consider things like setting up mail servers and web hosting configuration, when you've got hundreds of virtual domains, when you've highly optimized apache compiled from scratch and modified to your needs, that is the kind of thing I'm talking about that is time consuming and I don't wish to do from scratch more often than is necessary.

@jherazob That's great, my experience has not gone as smoothly, I've ended up with dependency loops that in spite of my best efforts, I could just not readily resolve. Things like there is a new version of python required by the new apt, but it installed the apt before the python, so now I'm stuck with a system that has a new version of apt but old version of python, thus apt won't work to install the new python manually. I've not encountered this with Ubuntu but more than once with Mint, like I said my success rate with Mint has been around 50/50.

@lancalot I run an ISP so quite a few servers thus though anacdotal, not a super tiny sample. And again I think it's an important point to consider but a lot has to do with how much effort you are going to put into customization. If your use is very generic, install and go, then no big deal, but if you spend a lot of time fine tuning and installing apps you have to get from third parties and compile yourself then a re-install is a big deal. I find myself often in the latter situation so it is important to me, to someone else perhaps not. For me windows is like the former situation, all I do with Windows is play games, and it takes me maybe 1/2 hour to install the games so do I care about a re-install of Windows? Not really.