Homemade, cheap, plasma CNC

You are wrong about my wifi. My wifi adapter is built in to an industrial PC with two external antennas. 
Its a significant improvement receptionwise on the previous Wifi dongle that worked flawlessly on mint 17.3 for about 5 years. At least it can be used without massive latency like the builtin causes on my Brix J1900.

The reason I turned to mint from the very beginning was that it had driver support for all my hardware when Debian failed miserably. But back then to get preempt_rt we had to compile the kernel which was not a trivial task! And there was no pncconf support for mesa 7i76e so everything I did, I did by hand edits.

Which leads me to the question. If the kernel is the same for all distros, how can it matter which one you use? The OS is the kernel, not the distro.

I don't think Mint makes me feel safe but when you move from Windows, Linux and Chromebook on different PC's just to run his business many times each day, having a similar GUi is a massive advantage and here Debian fails miserably even before I complain about its crappy driver support.
 

rodw wrote:

You are wrong about my wifi. My wifi adapter is built in to an industrial PC with two external antennas. 
Its a significant improvement receptionwise on the previous Wifi dongle that worked flawlessly on mint 17.3 for about 5 years. At least it can be used without massive latency like the builtin causes on my Brix J1900.

My apologies, I couldn't remember what the issue was. I've heard others complain about the brix one as well.

Which leads me to the question. If the kernel is the same for all distros, how can it matter which one you use? The OS is the kernel, not the distro.

From the sounds of it, if you dump a bunch of RAM in the machine, it doesn't.

... having a similar GUi is a massive advantage and here Debian fails miserably even before I complain about its crappy driver support.

I said it tongue-in-cheek, but that was exactly my point, Mint has a similar GUI to Windows, and I think that's a big reason why people choose it. That said, I have my MX Linux set up so it also has a similar feel to windows, which wasn't too difficult

I guess I must be lucky, 2Gb works for me plus my 4Gb Brix has no wifi issues nor does its wifi cause latency problems. 
I don't think I ever had driver issues with Debian either but I always used their non-free images.

The reason I chose mint was it would let me run Linuxcnc becasue of superior driver support and so far that applies when comparing it against MXlinux.

My experience with Linux from 2009 until I started playing with Linuxcnc was all running a LAMP stack to run my website and was strictly command line only via SSH. I'm not really fussed about the GUI

I've found Mint and Windows 10 both run OK with 4 gb RAM on the same class of hardware I'm using for Linuxcnc . (Cos I got the Shits with Windows 10  when it started GPFing whenever I printed! It was pretty hard to ship anything without a label so I blew Windows away and replaced with Mint). 

But QT is not performing the same

phillc54 wrote:

I guess I must be lucky, 2Gb works for me plus my 4Gb Brix has no wifi issues nor does its wifi cause latency problems. 
I don't think I ever had driver issues with Debian either but I always used their non-free images.

Maybe Debian caught up with Wifi support but at the time running USB wifi was the recommended solution.
Back then for my USB dongle, Wheezy required compiling the driver but with Mint it worked out of the box

I had Wheezy on this one, it's an old gb-bxceh-3205