[Solved] - Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

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essjam
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[Solved] - Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

This is my review and impressions of an all Linux household after 3 weeks of use. Due to the EOL of Windows 7 the decision was made to move the remaining workstation to Linux Mint. An old laptop had been changed to Mint back in 2016, so there had plenty of time to test drive the OS. See my signature below for the machine definitions of my environment. Please note that these are the impressions of someone that has used Windows in one form or another since Windows 3.1.

First off the positives:
1. The boot time from power off to an active login session is extremely fast. Roughly 15 seconds if I don’t fat-finger the password. That includes an internet connection. On W7, it was approximately 25 seconds to get to the login screen, and then still more time required to connect to the internet after the session was established.
2. Nearly all of the hardware associated with the PC is working flawlessly. The install of Mint 19.3 Tricia was painless. All of my external drives have been recognized and my original document and data files are working in the Linux environment correctly.
3. Access to the wealth of applications thru the Package Manager has been amazing. Using Gimp & Darktable as a replacement for Adobe’s Lightroom & Photoshop rental bundle is a definite plus. Being able to cancel the monthly subscription fee for the Adobe products made me smile.
4. Access to many channels of support including this forum has been amazing. There is a wealth of information out there if one is not afraid to dig.
5. Learning Bash programming has been a lot of fun. It takes me back to my AIX days in the 80s. It has been enjoyable scraping the rust off after 35+ years.

Now some negatives:
1. Scanner does not work. I have a Epson V550 Perfection flatbed scanner. After several hours of trying to make it work, I found a reference on the SANE trouble shooting site. The scanner is currently unsupported by Linux. The decision points are either buy a new scanner or setup Virtual Box with a Windows environment on it. I really want to avoid the V-Box solution. I did not test my scanner adequately before the move.
2. There is a steep learning curve ahead for Gimp and Darktable. I process RAW media files from my camera and was familiar with the Lightroom workflow. Darktable is going to take a while. I have used Gimp in the past, so it is more comfortable.
3. The selection of text in documents or on web pages is unreliable. I have not been able to dial in the mouse sensitivity so that it acts like my W7 experience. This leads to some frustration. Selecting half words, moving text when only trying to select, etc. This will be sorted out eventually but is currently annoying.
4. The Sound environment is strange, the sound settings spontaneously change from one output to another depending on the YouTube video or music file I am accessing. There is occasional random popping thru the speakers when this happens. The laptop does not do this, only the workstation. I have been studying the Sound and Multimedia forums but haven’t found anything applicable yet.
5. The default settings for window snapping was strange. Snap to the left or right edge and the behavior was similar to Windows. Snap to the top edge and the window was only the top half of the screen. There was a setting I found that changed it to my expectation; System Settings → Window Tiling → Maximize instead of tiling when dragging to top edge. I was surprised that this was not the default.

Overall impressions:
Overall I am very satisfied that I made the switch to Linux. I had grown tired of the Microsoft updates that crashed, disk fragmentation, and the perpetual nagging to upgrade to W10. And the big one; I look forward to not spending any more money on anti-virus and malware programs.
Linux Mint Cinnamon was chosen because it is very familiar to W7. This was a strong factor in the distro selection. I do not regret this choice.
I am becoming more comfortable with the shell and will eventually write some scripts for automatically backing up my data. I am looking forward to that challenge.

Random thought:
I do not understand the purpose of all the distro-hopping, or distro snobbery that is apparent on some YouTube channels. I throw this question out there. If Linux is built on a common kernel, then doesn’t all the arguing and pontification boil down to personal configuration of desired applications running on that common platform? What am I missing?

Cheers
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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dorsetUK
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by dorsetUK »

Hi essjam

I'm glad to hear that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

As for your scanner - and bearing in mind that I have no knowledge of such things - have you tried this http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/searc ... archModule? Type in V550 and select Linux, hit search - Perfection V550 Scanner Driver 2.30.4 All-in-one package 08-22-2019. Download the .deb.

HTH Jon.
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Pierre
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by Pierre »

the getting your Printer is relatively straight-forward:
- double-sided printing - not so easy
- - your scanner - not so easy.

of course, this also varies with the hardware used, of course .. some AIOs are better than others
- - you don't have to always buy an HP machine - either.
:o
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Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by stephanieswitzer »

It's great to hear what seems to have been and mostly painless transition, a leap of faith. There are definitely some frustrations to deal with as with the camera not being recognised on my MacBook Pro, but the important thing is that you're up and running.

Welcome to the land of mint.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

We're not quite a total Linux household yet - but I have my eyes on my wife's laptop! I converted the first laptop at Christmas, and the second a week or so ago. I'd bought the first one in 2013 with Windows 7 installed. I progressively updated it to W8 then W10, but it had become impossibly slow, and completely unusable when doing an unseen Windows update. I was very pleased with the conversion. It still takes over a minute to boot up, but is now usable again. I then converted the new laptop I'd bought to replace it. This has worked OK too, generally. It was very fast with Windows, and is still as fast, but there have been a couple of issues.

I've had an issue with very small type sizes, not all resolved, which I think is due to the higher screen resolution. I've resolved most of the issues using the standard adjustments available, but he initial login screen text is still tiny (apart from the time, which is huge!), and Spotify also. I tried changing to a lower resolution and thought I'd cracked it, until I opened Spotify and found there was no cross in the top RH corner for closing it - it had overfilled the screen. I found the screen resolution line in the config for Spotify but didn't feel inclined to meddle with that so I changed the resolution back, but the type is small.

Interested to see the report of the scanner problem, because I've just hit it too. I have a Canon MG 3650 printer/scanner/copier. It worked fine immediately as a printer, but I've just wanted to scan something and when I go into Simple Scan it says No Scanners Detected. Any guidance would be welcomed.

I don't do any sophisticated editing of photos, but I do want to do some basic stuff - cropping, improving colour values and brightness. I used to be able to do that in Windows. I can do it with Google Photos but I don't want all my photos on there and having to upload them to do it and then download them again to print etc. isn't efficient. I don't need or want the high level of sophistication and complexity of GIMP or Darktable. I installed the simpler Pinta but it just crashes every time I try to use it. Again any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks.
ColdBootII

Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by ColdBootII »

daisy42 wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:30 am Interested to see the report of the scanner problem, because I've just hit it too. I have a Canon MG 3650 printer/scanner/copier. It worked fine immediately as a printer, but I've just wanted to scan something and when I go into Simple Scan it says No Scanners Detected. Any guidance would be welcomed.
Hi,

I don't know if repo package installs ScanGear by default, to use the scanner so, you might want to read through this article:

http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/201 ... -04-18-10/
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by Moem »

daisy42 wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:30 am I don't do any sophisticated editing of photos, but I do want to do some basic stuff - cropping, improving colour values and brightness. I used to be able to do that in Windows. I can do it with Google Photos but I don't want all my photos on there and having to upload them to do it and then download them again to print etc. isn't efficient. I don't need or want the high level of sophistication and complexity of GIMP or Darktable. I installed the simpler Pinta but it just crashes every time I try to use it. Again any suggestions would be welcome.
Pinta can be made stable in two ways:
- by installing a new version of Mono
- by installing it as a Flatpak instead of the standard version

But Pix is already pre-installed on your system and can easily do cropping, scaling, colour adjustments and file conversions.
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essjam
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

daisy42 wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:30 am Interested to see the report of the scanner problem, because I've just hit it too. I have a Canon MG 3650 printer/scanner/copier. It worked fine immediately as a printer, but I've just wanted to scan something and when I go into Simple Scan it says No Scanners Detected. Any guidance would be welcomed.
Hi daisy42, here are the links I used while attempting to fix my scanner.
http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html -- this is the link to the supported scanner list. Choose your manufacturer and then find the model. It will show if it is supported fully, partially or not at all. The table will also show the recommended driver. Sadly my Epson was Not Supported.

viewtopic.php?f=51&t=272238&p=1493317#p1493317 -- this is a link to a good discussion in the forums about trouble shooting scanner issues. It led me to the SANE troubleshooting site.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/sane_Troubleshooting -- this is the main site with things to try. It also has the link to the list of supported scanners.

Obviously proceed with caution, I did not fix my scanner but hopefully yours will be successful.
Last edited by essjam on Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

dorsetUK wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 7:06 am As for your scanner - and bearing in mind that I have no knowledge of such things - have you tried this http://download.ebz.epson.net/dsc/searc ... archModule? Type in V550 and select Linux, hit search - Perfection V550 Scanner Driver 2.30.4 All-in-one package 08-22-2019. Download the .deb.
Hi Jon, sadly I have already tried that download. It came close as it appeared to send a signal to the scanner, but the scanner would freeze without the head moving. I would have to kill the process after 5 minutes. That is when I found the information about my scanner not being supported. I appreciate your effort to provide assistance. Thanks.
Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" - Cinnamon 64bit
(1) Asus K52F Laptop - i5 @ 2.53GHz, 8 GB DDR3 Ram
(2) ASUSTeK: Z97-A-USB31 - i7-4790 @ 4.00GHz, 32 GB DDR3 Ram
Raspberry Pi - Raspian Buster Lite - OpenMediaVault - 4TB NAS server
dorsetUK
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by dorsetUK »

Hi essjam
essjam wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:15 pm Hi Jon, sadly I have already tried that download. It came close as it appeared to send a signal to the scanner, but the scanner would freeze without the head moving. I would have to kill the process after 5 minutes. That is when I found the information about my scanner not being supported. I appreciate your effort to provide assistance. Thanks.
I did wonder if it could be that easy, as things often aren't.

Good luck, Jon.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by Mick-Cork »

Hi Essjam,

There's some good Darktable tutorials on youtube, most notably by Bruce Williams (https://www.youtube.com/user/audio2u/videos).

The DT version in the Software Manager is not the latest, and I installed V3.0 following the instructions here: http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/201 ... -04-19-10/. The article is written for Ubuntu but works equally well on LM.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

Mick-Cork,
Many thanks for the links about Darktable. I will definitely be watching the YouTube video tutorials. It will be interesting to learn what features are similar to Lightroom. One feature I hope exists is how to quickly browse my photos, tagging the best for further processing, and then deleting the untagged ones in a batch. I now have a plan for this evening. Binging tutorials. :D
Cheers!
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

Thanks very much for the various replies and suggestions.

1. Pix - I've now, eventually, found the edit button - a tiny, grey-on-grey pencil symbol at the top right of the screen - when everything else is on the left - not ideal for a 72-year old with deteriorating vision! The functions there are pretty much all I need for now though. So that's good progress.

2. Scanner - I spent some time burrowing through and trying out lots of the recommended stuff, without success. Appears my Canon Pixma MG3650 is fully supported and the driver stuff is there, but still no joy. However I was doing all this with a wireless connection to the printer. I have now connected the cable to a USB socket and have scanning working. Not immediately though - Simple Scan was now showing the device, but said it couldn't connect to it when I pressed scan. I added the printer twice more, in different ways, and found one of them works. Also done on my old laptop too, in that case without any fiddling around concerning drivers. Still can't get scanning to work wirelessly though, as it did with Windows. Not a real problem because the printer/scanner is next to the laptop, but it would be more satisfying.

3. Type and icon size in places not yet resolved.

Thanks again for the advice.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

Oh, sorry, another point! Printing just highlighted and selected text and images from Firefox and Chrome. Is there any way of doing this? Ctrl+shift+P in Firefox opens a private tab, and within Chrome, although the link to this is at the bottom of the printing set up column, under more settings, it just opens the Linux Mint Print panel. Under the General tab, this shows, under Range, options for: All Pages, Current Page, Selection and Pages, but Current Page and Selection are greyed-out. Looks as if the options should be there.

Would be grateful for any advice.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

daisy42 wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2020 11:36 am Oh, sorry, another point! Printing just highlighted and selected text and images from Firefox and Chrome. Is there any way of doing this? Ctrl+shift+P in Firefox opens a private tab, and within Chrome, although the link to this is at the bottom of the printing set up column, under more settings, it just opens the Linux Mint Print panel. Under the General tab, this shows, under Range, options for: All Pages, Current Page, Selection and Pages, but Current Page and Selection are greyed-out. Looks as if the options should be there.

Would be grateful for any advice.
From this article: https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/uncateg ... web-pages/
Try Ctrl+p after the selection. A print dialog will appear with an option to print the selection. Note the default is ALL but the Selection radio button is enabled. I was successful in printing some text and selected image in Firefox. I do not have Chrome installed, so I didn't test that browser.

HTH
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

Thanks, yes ctrl+p in Firefox works and after selecting some text the radio button for Selection is activated (although it doesn't work on this text in this window though, for some reason).

In Chrome, I've just noticed that within Print, More Settings, Options, there is a Selection only option, which appears to work.

There is always the workaround of copying and pasting to a Writer document, but that's rather clumsy.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

Wi-fi scanning success!

From another post on this site:

sudo ufw allow [printer/scanner IP address]

solved it.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by daisy42 »

Sorry, thats sudo ufw allow from [IP address]

It appears in the firewall configuration as rule ANYWHERE ALLOW IN [IP address]

Hope it doesn't compromise security. All devices of this model seem to have the same IP address.

A remaining security improvement I would like to make is to move the printer off WPS to WPA. WPS was the very easy way to set it up. When I disabled WPS as recommended, wi-fi access to the printer was lost. Maybe I can re-set it up for WPA.
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by Grateful4Linux »

essjam wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 2:29 am 1. Scanner does not work. I have a Epson V550 Perfection flatbed scanner. After several hours of trying to make it work, I found a reference on the SANE trouble shooting site. The scanner is currently unsupported by Linux. The decision points are either buy a new scanner or setup Virtual Box with a Windows environment on it. I really want to avoid the V-Box solution. I did not test my scanner adequately before the move.
I have an Epson Perfection V33 scanner that was supposedly not supported, but I was able to get it working. It took me a while to find the answers I needed. My thread documenting my what I tried and what eventually worked is here -- viewtopic.php?f=51&t=304475 -- Since it's a different model, the same solution may not work for you, but I thought I would link it anyway in case there is something useful for you to try. I hope you get yours working! :)
Here is a little synopsis of what I did:

I installed the drivers from the Epson website for the Perfection V33 model.

I used Synaptic Package manager to install libsane-extras which I previously didn't have. I already had the necessary sane, xsane and sane-utils installed.

I turned off the UFW - which made no difference because I connect by USB not Wifi.

I was finally able to get the Epson to scan an image from the terminal and save as an image.pnm file... but only when I used the sudo command.

I still couldn't scan from any of the software programs, apparently because I did not have a file named 79-udev-epson.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d

Here is the post I made when I finally got my Epson scanner to work --
viewtopic.php?p=1707690#p1707690
~Maria
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Re: Impressions - All Linux household after 3 weeks.

Post by essjam »

I have an Epson Perfection V33 scanner that was supposedly not supported, but I was able to get it working. It took me a while to find the answers I needed. My thread documenting my what I tried and what eventually worked is here -- viewtopic.php?f=51&t=304475 -- Since it's a different model, the same solution may not work for you, but I thought I would link it anyway in case there is something useful for you to try. I hope you get yours working! :)
<<snip>>
Here is the post I made when I finally got my Epson scanner to work --
viewtopic.php?p=1707690#p1707690
@Grateful4Linux - Many thanks for this information. I will play with these instructions later on today and I will post here if I was successful or not. I am glad to hear that you got your "Not Supported" scanner working.

Cheers,
Scott
Linux Mint 19.3 "Tricia" - Cinnamon 64bit
(1) Asus K52F Laptop - i5 @ 2.53GHz, 8 GB DDR3 Ram
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Raspberry Pi - Raspian Buster Lite - OpenMediaVault - 4TB NAS server
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