Xfce Forum

D.dave

Member

Registered: 2019-12-06

Posts: 92

Finally, I introduce myself

Hi All, I'm on this forum since 6 December 2019, and my journey with Linux operating systems, started in late '90s; In 1998-1999, for the first time, already totally tired of Windows, I was lookin' for a replacement, and firstly I tried Mandrake Linux, based on KDE.
I remember it like a strange/alien OS! I attempted various time to use it (on live cd, never installed), then I renounced to use it, and I made a very wrong choise: I bought the Compact Disk with license, of Windows Millennium Edition! The worst OS I ever tried, was also very pricy (at the time there were no the Euro).
Long story short: after that I installed a magnificient OS: Beos! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS thanks to BeOS i also started to learn how to use the terminal. Was a very good OS, but a little buggy here and there.
Then after some years, I tried Haiku OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) nice, but immature, with the lacks of various things like fully hardware support: Haiku OS has started in February 15, 2002 and is still in beta state.

Then (I don't remeber when) I switched to Windows 7, which worked almost well. But in last times (2018/2019) I've found it very limited and buggy: the sleep (suspension to ram) was unreliable, and furthermore didn't supported newer technologies (eg: unable to properly display emojis), then on February 2019, I made the definitive jump to Linux: I have been distro hopper for some time, and I focused on Manjaro Linux, since I wanted a rolling release OS. On the USB stick I tried various flavours, and there were two candidates: KDE and Xfce: this one was, for me, the best Desktop Environment.

Since I use Manjaro I studied Linux a lot: I tweaked a lot the system under the hood: memory and kernel management
(also in /etc/sysctl.d/), niceness/priority levels of running processes, different IRQ managements, CPU scheduler, disks schedulers (eg I deeply tweaked the mq-deadline I/O scheduler, especially for the SSDs); I added a lot of kernel parameters to GRUB. Currently I am experiencing a very good performance of the system: is snappy, fast, can handle very well the multi tasking (eg: i can compile programs without slowdowns of the rest, eg: I can play music and browsing the web without hiccups);
I am to the point when I can deliberately saturate almost all of my ram (big images and big GIMP projects) and the OOM killer never trigged, and the system remains stable as a rock (however I have ZRAM).

I made a lot of bash scripts and Udev rules to automate various tasks; I also tweaked a lot Firefox, which is working amazingly and higly smoothly (a lot of changes in about:config and in styles with the extension stylus, to optimize Dark Reader). There is also Tamper monkey with usefuls scipts for privacy and performance. Obviously I also have uBlock origin, but not only: on Manjaro I also installed and set https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy, to have different DNS servers and a lot of blocklists.
I also study SystemD: I made a lot of services and timers: in my humble opinion is far better than cronie.

My currente hardware:
CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M @ 4x 3.1GHz
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000
RAM 16 GB DDR3
SSD1: Samsung 870 EVO
SSD2: (yes: my laptop have the ability to replace the CD/DVD with another disk) Crucial MX500

Obviously I also tweaked and personalized the look of every element of Xfce, mainly thanks to this Forum, where the user ToZ is not only very expert, but also very helpful!

Long live Linux and Xfce!

Last edited by D.dave (2025-01-29 09:51:42)

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OS: Manjaro x86_64
DE: Xfce 4.20

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,815

Re: Finally, I introduce myself

Welcome to the forum. Glad you're here. Its interesting to hear people's experiences with computers, operating systems, and how they came around to Linux.

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D.dave

Member

Registered: 2019-12-06

Posts: 92

Re: Finally, I introduce myself

Welcome to the forum. Glad you're here. Its interesting to hear people's experiences with computers, operating systems, and how they came around to Linux.

Thank you, Toz. I'm glad too, to be here on this forum.

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OS: Manjaro x86_64
DE: Xfce 4.20