I've reviewed paldo before ("oddball distro for sure"), but I've been playing with it again recently and have discovered that you can use flatpaks for some of the missing software in the ridiculously sparse repo. And since paldo provides no means of connecting to the gnome-shell-extensions site (neither chrome-gnome-shell nor gnome-browser-extension are installed or available as binary packages at least), the Extension Manager flatpak is a godsend, making it possible to install the extensions that make Gnome (for me) slightly less than terrible. I had previously tried compiling, which worked but took some research. Finally a reason not to hate the Software Center!
So, yeah, you can make paldo into something usable for the average human, but it does take some persistence, and comes at the expense of disk space. Normally I don't like or use flatpak or snap, but paldo forces you to try new things. It's actually somewhat impressive how well these things work. I haven't noticed any difference in behavior with the flatpaks I've installed (mainly strawberry music player). They seamlessly integrate with the rest of the apps and are able to access necessary drives, etc. I guess that's the future...
This distro gets the prize for fastest install. I'm integrating m.2 ssd's into my system, and installing to the nvme drive took maybe a minute from last button clicked to finished install. One other tip is to do upkg-upgrade once installed. That apparently installs everything, or close to it. Libreoffice, etc. but no gparted strangely enough, just Gnome Disks, possibly the worst partitioning tool yet invented. No flatpak for gparted either...
Not for everyone, but if you're looking for something weird/challenging paldo is worth a try.
This is an oddball distro for sure... I've tried it a few times, including recently. One oddity is that it demands to format your existing efi partition. I created a new one and it installed but was invisible to grub due to having installed the kernel directly on the efi partition, leaving /boot empty. Even copying the files over didn't work. Maybe chainloading would work but I had to monkey with the bios/setup screen to boot it at all. Once there, it's Gnome, with very few packages available.I had to manually compile mc... Firefox is there, and some of the typical Gnome stuff, but very little else.
Not a daily driver, but intriguing due to the package manager and general weirdness/obscurity factor. If you want bare bones Gnome and booting without grub is your thing, maybe give Paldo a try
During distro-hopping, I came across this distro which was not popular and it's unfair because it's a real gem. His package manager (upkg) is very simple and serves its purpose well : Install binary packages and build from sources. The installer is extremely simple and fast as the distro itself. The only problem I had is that install/build another kernel is quite hard cause some dependencies like fakeroot doesn't exist in repos, so if a drivers is not compatible you're going to be in a mess, and there is not a lot of package in binary (about 2000) but it include flatpak so you can install other packages easily.
Overall this distro is a nice surprise
I've reviewed paldo before ("oddball distro for sure"), but I've been playing with it again recently and have discovered that you can use flatpaks for some of the missing software in the ridiculously sparse repo. And since paldo provides no means of connecting to the gnome-shell-extensions site (neither chrome-gnome-shell nor gnome-browser-extension are installed or available as binary packages at least), the Extension Manager flatpak is a godsend, making it possible to install the extensions that make Gnome (for me) slightly less than terrible. I had previously tried compiling, which worked but took some research. Finally a reason not to hate the Software Center!
So, yeah, you can make paldo into something usable for the average human, but it does take some persistence, and comes at the expense of disk space. Normally I don't like or use flatpak or snap, but paldo forces you to try new things. It's actually somewhat impressive how well these things work. I haven't noticed any difference in behavior with the flatpaks I've installed (mainly strawberry music player). They seamlessly integrate with the rest of the apps and are able to access necessary drives, etc. I guess that's the future...
This distro gets the prize for fastest install. I'm integrating m.2 ssd's into my system, and installing to the nvme drive took maybe a minute from last button clicked to finished install. One other tip is to do upkg-upgrade once installed. That apparently installs everything, or close to it. Libreoffice, etc. but no gparted strangely enough, just Gnome Disks, possibly the worst partitioning tool yet invented. No flatpak for gparted either...
Not for everyone, but if you're looking for something weird/challenging paldo is worth a try.
This is an oddball distro for sure... I've tried it a few times, including recently. One oddity is that it demands to format your existing efi partition. I created a new one and it installed but was invisible to grub due to having installed the kernel directly on the efi partition, leaving /boot empty. Even copying the files over didn't work. Maybe chainloading would work but I had to monkey with the bios/setup screen to boot it at all. Once there, it's Gnome, with very few packages available.I had to manually compile mc... Firefox is there, and some of the typical Gnome stuff, but very little else.
Not a daily driver, but intriguing due to the package manager and general weirdness/obscurity factor. If you want bare bones Gnome and booting without grub is your thing, maybe give Paldo a try
During distro-hopping, I came across this distro which was not popular and it's unfair because it's a real gem. His package manager (upkg) is very simple and serves its purpose well : Install binary packages and build from sources. The installer is extremely simple and fast as the distro itself. The only problem I had is that install/build another kernel is quite hard cause some dependencies like fakeroot doesn't exist in repos, so if a drivers is not compatible you're going to be in a mess, and there is not a lot of package in binary (about 2000) but it include flatpak so you can install other packages easily.
Overall this distro is a nice surprise
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