After almost one year of using Linux on my ASUS FX504 laptop in dual boot mode with Windows 10, I decided to give Mint 19.2 a try. My experiments with different Linux versions on this laptop have not been much successful. I have tried the following in last 1 year or so: 1. Good Old UBuntu GNOME3 2. PopOS 3. Manjaro Linux 4. ZorinOS 5. Deepin 6. Linux Mint Cinnamon 7. Maybe one or two more, but I forgot😀 In addition I also tried some of the desktop environments like XFCE with XUbuntu, LXDE with LUbuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, KDE with KUBuntu. Each of the linux distribution or desktop environment gave different feeling of stability, ease of use, overall look and feel, convenience etc. But somehow I was not satisfied and always would go back to GNOME3 on UBuntu. Around 1 month back I stumbled upon a news article which mentioned that Linux Mint 19.2 is coming out of Beta and is being released in early August 2019. I quickly read about the re...

In the last week of December 2018 I was sitting idle at home. Had full week of vacation and nothing much to do at home. So I decided to go to Pondicherry from Bangalore for a 2 day trip with family.  The plan got finalized at a short notice and I started looking for some decent hotel. Due to vacation season there was too much rush in Pondicherry and all the hotels were either fully booked for new year or room tariffs were unusually high. Finally got a room for 2 nights in a decent hotel near to promenade at 3 times the usual price 😥. Distance to Pondicherry from Bangalore is around 310 kilometers by road. I had planned to drive.  If you look at Google Maps then it will suggest the shortest route which is : Bangalore->Hosur->Krishnagiri->Chengam->Tiruvannamalai->Gingee->Tindivanam->Pondicherry I decided to trust google maps and took this route. Map showed total 6 hours to reach Pondicherry from Bangalore.  We started early at 6:...

Update November 2019: I have installed Ubuntu 19.10 on the ASUS laptop and with that the Touchpad seems to work fine. I have not observed freezing or mouse pointer jumping issues. The touchpad behaves much better now. I recently purchased new ASUS gaming laptop which came with pre installed Windows 10. Since I cannot stand Windows operating system anymore I immediately decided to install Linux in dual boot mode. Following were the options for installing Linux 1. Ubuntu 18.10 GNOME: This linux distro is the one with which I am most comfortable and familiar with. I have used Ubuntu for last several years on my earlier laptop and before that on my Desktop computer. 2. Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon: I have also used Linux Mint in the past and am familiar with it. It is bit more user friendly for people who are migrating from Windows platform. What I also noticed is that the Mint team has polished the distribution a lot and there are lots of improvements after version 17. A very good dis...

After using a Lenovo G50–70 laptop for 5 years I decided to go for a new one. The Lenovo laptop had become very slow due to i3 processor. Moreover the Toshiba 1TB HDD which came with the laptop had developed a lot of bad sectors over time due to which the laptop was crashing often. There was some sale going on Amazon and Flipkart in India during Diwali and they were giving good discounts. In addition there were some exchange offers available for the old laptops. My main requirements were: i5 or i7 processor At least 8GB of RAM 128 or 256 GB SSD with 1TB HDD Full HD Screen Backlit Keyboard 4–5 hours of Battery Life I was not too keen on having a separate graphics card. I do not play games on laptop and do not do graphics intensive work like photo or video editing. My main use of laptop is general internet browsing, watching videos and movies, blogging and programming. There were a lot of options available on Amazon and Flipkart and I was thoroughly confused. It...

I have been using UBuntu 18.04 for last few months. The default Desktop Environment is GNOME. I have used UBuntu earlier when the desktop environment was Unity. I somehow did not like the GNOME environment. Especially the file manager Nautilus and lack of menu bar. I also noticed that the GNOME desktop environment is heavy on resources. I experimented with KDE and in fact installed complete KUbuntu. But there are some problems with the AMD Radeon graphics card which I have in my Lenovo Laptop. KUbuntu would often just freeze without any warnings. I tried installing Manjaro Linux, but then faced problem with the Bluetooth and wireless functionality. Even though I like Manjaro but working with it was becoming too much. I feel comfortable in Ubuntu space. I am also able to find more information on the internet regarding Ubuntu and its variants then Arch Linux. Two days back then I thought of installing lightweight Xfce4 DE on top of my Ubuntu 18.04. Mind here that I did ...

I have a Lenovo G50–70 laptop which came with a 1TB Toshiba HDD. But unfortunately after 6 years of use the HDD developed a lot of bad sectors. The situation became so bad that the installed operating system Windows10 started to crash. I could not understand the problem first. Tried to repair windows, reinstalled it. But nothing worked. After few days of usage again the OS would crash. Then I noticed in one of the disk checking utilities that there were a lot of bad sectors shown. So I did some search on internet and concluded that there is no way to repair the bad sectors and if the number of bad sectors is growing then ultimately the HDD will die. It was time to invest in a new HDD. But this time I was already thinking of a SSD instead of a mechanical HDD due to great performance benefits which you get from SSD. Additionally SSDs are more reliable. You can move your laptop which the disk is working without any problems. Such an activity in a HDD may result in problem wi...