There are two Linux installations I'm having problems with and Linux isn't what I supported over the last 20 years.
I can get around in Linux installations but when issues arise then I'm back to searching forums for support. If something breaks in Windows installs then I know numerous tricks and tips to fix them since I've been repairing Windows machines since DOS 2.0

A) Threw Linux Mint 19.2 on my old Latitude 54xx series laptop. Mint looks nice and was easy to setup with no need for terminal commands the entire setup; so it was running BOINC in under an hour (the rest of the night was searching, unsuccessfully, for ThrottleStop and TThrotle replacements). The machine ran fine for a month, then power outage, and upon restart was just a BusyBox prompt. Absolutely NO error codes or any indication why the machine would not reboot. Finally I got the machine to tell me there was a corrupt sector and only a manual fsck could be done.

So much for version 19 of a highly promoted Linux distro. Can't auto correct a bad block or even give an error code? I'm as square 1 now and probably easiest to just install fresh.

Question: What Linux distro do you recommend that will give excellent diagnostic messages upon failed restart and makes valiant attempts at corruption repairs?

B) My second issue is with long term (many years) upgrade and maintenance paths. I built an antiX VM which runs on 128MB minimum RAM for BOINC usage.
When I went to shrink the volume last week and clone it; I attempted upgrades and keys were missing and then I find they've moved to Debian 10 with absolutely no upgrade path for my install. I'll have to rebuild from scratch which is a lost 80 hours of work (maybe more).

Question(s): Which minimal RAM Linux distro do you recommend which will be upgradeable over the next 5 years?
Should I just attempt to fix the antiX key errors and stay with antiX 17.2 for the next 5 years?

Question: What Linux distro do you recommend that will give excellent diagnostic messages upon failed restart and makes valiant attempts at corruption repairs?

It is not about distro, it is about initialization system. Almost all of mainstream linux distros adopted systemd as init system, so they all behave almost in the same way now. Mint is not an exception.

TThrotle replacements

There is no such thing for Linux =( So I wrote my own script ;) which reads CPU temperature and dynamically applies cpu quota on boinc-client.service control group.
Btw, you can install thermald if you care about critical overheating.

It is not about distro, it is about initialization system. Almost all of mainstream linux distros adopted systemd as init system, so they all behave almost in the same way now. Mint is not an exception.

So every distro would have ended in a BusyBox prompt with no error code or explanation?

Btw, you can install thermald if you care about critical overheating.

I'll remember that name for the next install. There were several apps that read the temp sensors and displayed in the taskbar (one crashed constantly) but none mentioned an ability to throttle down the cores. I ended up setting CPU usage in BOINC to 95% to keep the RAM and chipset under 48C

About my second point.
I'm not the only person desiring a VM Linux for BOINC running on their Windows machines.

It was brought up over at LHC@Home.
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5586&postid=44167#44167

I already put 60+ hours into the antiX VM for Linux exclusive BOINC apps (which is how all of the Linux only apps, besides CPDN, have gotten into my WuProps hours database).

It's not got an upgrade path to Debian 10 and so I stopped installing the products needed for ATLAS 4-core native (which would only require 2560MB in this VM rather than 3900MB).


BOINCix4Wndows (my 3rd naming attempt) is a project that I would work on together with others if there is no such other product out there.

Someone with better Linux abilites wants to see my antiX install; let me know.