I hacked up this script when I first started using Debian because I was coming from Fedora where a single command would update packages and I was afraid that I'd forget the "update" part. Additionally, I found myself getting into trouble back in the day with plain "upgrade" versus "safe-upgrade". I typically set this up as a Cmnd_Alias^[1] with limited arguments in sudoers with NOPASSWD for my user account so that I can easily sudo dist-upgrade on any (so far) distro to keep the system up-to-date.

Caveat: I'm not 100% sure that aptitude or even yum^[2] cannot fork an interactive shell session or arbitrary command given these commands. I gather that aptitude has a robust interactive mode, and even normal operations can prompt the user for confirmation. I'm not sure if the user is able to do something to spawn a process from that, which would allow somebody to easily compromise any of my systems by compromising my personal account... And now I've revealed this weakness to the Internetz.

The need arose because I usually run distros without the full desktop experience of Gnome/KDE/etc so I didn't have a GUI program prompting me regularly to update packages. That is, until I discovered MATE, a fork of the old Gnome 2 project. I've been trying that out for the last few weeks and am relieved that people took the time to salvage this system.

As a rule you have to know what you want from a desktop in Linux because there are many flavors and often many are supported on each distro (and you can always roll your own if you aren't satisfied with that and have the skill). I don't prefer any of the default desktop environments these days because distros usually prefer Gnome 3, which I hate, or KDE which I've never had good experiences with and seems like an extra resource hog. I am currently running Ubuntu Mate at home.

I hate Ubuntu on principle, but it's a compromise between being able to play games decently without having to return back to Windows... I hope it's temporary. I avoided the default Ubuntu release because I don't like Unity, plus I gather many or most of the spying facilities in Ubuntu are built into Unity (I haven't really done my homework yet to see if any remain in Ubuntu Mate).

Prior to Ubuntu I've been running Debian for several years, both on the server and desktop. I rather like Debian, but due to the community split of ffmpeg it has left the stable version of Debian without many codecs and multimedia software... Which isn't entirely bad, but I stupidly have been keeping my music in a proprietary format instead of converting to a free one. But also most media acquired online requires proprietary codecs so you either don't watch or you need them... Another feature I lost in Debian jessie was the ability to stream movies to my PS3. It would be nice to get that back.

I like Debian. It more or less respects my freedoms and choices, is stable, and does most things you could ask for. The only reason I have shied away from it on my desktop at home is because I was getting poor performance in Counter-Strike: Source which had me at a disadvantage against other players and I was hoping that Ubuntu would resolve that. I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect or not yet, but it does seem to have helped. At least, the one night I played so far in Ubuntu.

I managed to play through Firewatcher the last couple of days too, but I had to turn the graphic qualities all to "low" to get a semi-reliable 15 fps... Barely enough to play through it, but it sufficed. I gather it's a Unity3D game so I think the Unity project just doesn't spend enough money optimizing the Linux side of things.. I also get a terrible fps in Interstellar Marines (like 2 fps).

I have run LXDE and Xfce for several months each and an more or less satisfied. LXDE is a little bit too bare-bones. Presumably you can include pieces of Xfce to gain a few features (one in particular that I like and depend on is manually rearranging the task bar of running applications). That is more or less happy, but it still is a bit bare.

I don't think that Steam tries overly hard to cooperate with an Xfce setup, and visa-versa. That's not to say that you can't get it working, but I had more trouble than I wanted. Otherwise, I was satisfied.

MATE is essentially Gnome 2, which I think most Linux users enjoyed. It's a bit heavier weight than Xfce for sure, but then my desktop isn't all that limited for resources either so I can probably afford to burn a few on a nicer user experience.

I'd honestly probably prefer a tiled window manager. I have used raw Xmonad for long periods of time on my EeePC and in Windows-hosted VMs and more or less love it. I should probably try dwm too. In any case, I'm currently begrudgingly settling for MATE because I want to give things like "Steam"a chance to Just Work(tm) for a while. I've actually run Steam on a raw Xorg server launched from within xmonad. I don't know enough about what is missing with that setup, but it lead to very poor user experience. IIRC, Counter-Strike would completely fuck up Xorg's screen resolution, would occasionally hang, etc. I think I had various assortments of other issues too. This was back in Debian wheezy, the previous release, with Steam forced with a patched installer containing Ubuntu binaries... No telling which things were the culprit, but I digress. I only have so much energy to fight with gaming platforms before I just want to start playing the damn games. Little bit at a time...

Alas, it seems as things get better they keep getting worse. I remember years ago (like college, so probably 9 or 10 years ago) installing Compiz on Fedora with Gnome 2 and getting a hardware accelerated 3D cube full of desktops. That was some flashy shit, and pretty damn cool. It also supported fancy (albeit, useless) effects such as raindrops on the screen. Pretty cool stuff to see. I imagine that still exists somewhere in the Linux sphere, but I'm sad to see that nothing practical seems to have spawned from it [yet]...

Okay, I can't be the only one who sees the irony in a post complaining about tracking linking a Forbes article, which I can't read unless I disable Adblock. Not going to happen. I'll turn off Adblock for sites I like and trust, but generally not for big commercial entities and definitely not when they try to coerce me into doing so.

That said, I'm running Windows 10 on my machines and love it, it's much more responsive than even Win8 (which is itself blazing even compared to 7). Then again I don't much care for wearing a tinfoil hat (I find them to be crippling), so there's that. I respect those that do, of course, so don't take that as me being condescending.

edit: Anyway, getting away from the politics of it all (which is about as likely to generate light as the religious thread, and I'd hate to see this thread descend to that level), I can understand why everyone hates GNOME 3, having seen it firsthand in Fedora, but what I don't understand is the collective hard-on for GNOME 2. Back when that was the norm for most Linux distros, it was the biggest thing that kept me from using Linux as an everyday OS. To me it felt like a bastard child of Windows 98 and pre-OSX Mac, taking the worst of both. Given the choice between GNOME 2 and KDE 3, I'd pick the latter every time.

Granted though, KDE 4 is even worse than any version of GNOME will ever be. I like to pretend it doesn't exist.