After ongoing problem with Ubuntu 19.10, I decided to switch back to Absolute Linux to see if my problems are hardware related.
I do not appear to be having any problems after the switch, so my suspicions are pointing firmly at kernel bug.
Having saved some builds and source files from my previous attempt at using Absolute, getting my machine into a more usuable state wasn’t so bad. I’m using keepassx from alien builds, claws-mail from sbopkg, midnight commanded, tmux and vim from source, and binaries of firefox and thunderbird from their respective websites. There are some miscellaneous packages that I didn’t keep a note of.
IceWm has a few niggles that I would have like to have seen work out of the box, but I am still finding it quite productive. I switched the “Green” theme, and I must say, IceWm actually looks quite tasteful! It’s not sugary, nor does it particularly look like 1995 called wanting their desktop back.
I also managed to get rid of the annoyance about launching some applications.
Memory usage by the system is low, and it seems snappy. I don’t think swap has ever been used.
I am certainly gaining admiration for the distro. Let’s see how it goes.
I have since heard of Salix, which is apparently quite a good distro based on Slackware. I may check it out on a spare machine.
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