 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 569, 28 July 2014 |
Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! We want a lot of things from our operating systems. A good operating system should be fast, reliable, secure and easy to use. One project which attempts to embody all these operating system virtues is Deepin, an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a custom desktop environment and several unique applications. Read our feature review below to find out how well Deepin performs. In the News section this week we discuss the Fedora team's push to help users find answers to their technical questions and the interesting parts of FreeBSD's quarterly report. We also talk about using LibreSSL as a drop-in replacement to OpenSSL and the potential security risks involved with downloading packages over an unencrypted connection. Plus we cover the distribution releases of the past week and look ahead to fun, new developments to come. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (34MB) and MP3 (40MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
First impressions of Deepin 2014
 The Deepin Linux distribution is based on the Ubuntu operating system and features several unique features and additions. The project's website states: "Deepin is a Linux distribution that aims to provide an elegant, user-friendly, safe and stable operating system for global users. Based on HTML5 technologies, [the] Deepin team has developed a series of new special software, such as Deepin Desktop Environment, Deepin Music Player, DPlayer, Deepin Software Center."
The distribution's latest release, version 2014, ships with some intriguing features, including a custom system installer, friendly software centre, custom control centre, UEFI support and the Deepin Desktop Environment (version 2.0). The project's release notes also mention that running Deepin in a virtual machine is not recommended: "Since Compiz is used as the window manager in Deepin 2014 and its performance is poor in a virtual machine, Deepin 2014 is strongly recommended to be installed directly in the real machine, so that the gorgeous effect of which can be truly experienced. To completely solve this problem, we have planned to develop a new window manager to replace Compiz in the future releases."
Deepin 2014 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. The download image for the distribution is approximately 1.5 GB in size. Booting from the project's live media brings up a menu we can navigate with either the keyboard or the mouse pointer. The menu asks us to select our preferred language from a list. Once our language has been selected the system boots to a desktop interface with a starry sky in the background. On the desktop we find an icon for launching the project's system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find a quick-launch bar filled with icons for commonly accessed applications. There are also buttons for bringing up the distribution's application menu and settings panel on this launch bar.
Deepin 2014 - application menu
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The Deepin system installer is one of the fastest and most simple to use installers I have encountered. When it starts up we are presented with a screen which asks us to create a user name and password for ourselves. We can also create a name for our computer on this screen. In the upper-right corner of this first screen is an icon for changing our keyboard's layout (my keyboard was properly set up without my help) and a second icon brings up a map of the world where we can set our time zone. Again, my time zone was properly detected so many users can probably ignore these two optional steps. The second screen of the installer asks where we would like to install Deepin and allows us to select a region of our hard disk. Should we wish to customize our installation there is an "Expert" button on this page which opens a partition manager which resembles the partition manager featured in Ubuntu's system installer. The Deepin installer supports Btrfs, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS and the ext2/3/4 file systems. The Expert screen further allows us to choose where to install Deepin's boot loader, the default location being the first hard drive. After these steps are completed the system installer copies its files to our local hard drive and, when it is finished, we are prompted to reboot the computer.
When Deepin boots we are shown an animated boot screen where the word "Deepin" fills with waves of water. Then we are brought to a login screen where the background is an animated star field. The first time we login we are greeted by a welcome screen which offers to show us some of the features of the Deepin Desktop Environment. The interactive tutorial walks us through how to access the desktop's full screen application menu, how to move icons around the menu and add program launchers to the desktop. We are also shown the interface's "hot corner" shortcuts and the distribution's control panel. I'll talk about these features more shortly, for now I just want to acknowledge the distribution's friendly tutorial - it's a nice introduction to a desktop environment I was not familiar with prior to this review.
As I mentioned above, the Deepin Desktop Environment features a full screen application menu. This menu contains a grid of icons we can scroll through. The icons are divided into categories of software rather than being placed in alphabetical order and navigation buttons on the left side of the menu let us jump to any software category. We can type search terms to help us find items faster. One aspect of the menu I appreciated was that we can move items we use frequently to the top of the menu (the Favourites area). We can also right-click on an application's icon and place it on our desktop. Having too many icons on the desktop can make for a cluttered work environment and Deepin allows us to group multiple icons into desktop containers, similar to the way the Android operating system lets users group app launchers. The desktop features hot corners and moving our mouse pointer to the corners of the desktop enables us to bring up the application menu, minimize all open windows and bring up the distribution's settings panel.
Deepin 2014 - settings panel
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The settings panel I feel deserves special mention. While most Linux distributions feature a control centre that can be opened in its own window, Deepin features a control panel that acts like a widget, growing out of the right side of the screen. All desktop settings can be accessed via this panel without opening new windows, the settings we are interested in simply expand and other categories of settings minimize. This makes navigating the system settings very quick and fluid.
I tried running Deepin on a desktop computer and, despite the warnings against virtual machines, I installed Deepin inside VirtualBox. On physical hardware the distribution performed very well. It booted quickly, the desktop was responsive and the system was stable. I found networking and sound worked out of the box and my screen was automatically set to its maximum resolution. When running in VirtualBox the experience was as the project's team warned. Deepin runs slowly in the virtual environment. The distribution does work inside VirtualBox and can be used, but the desktop is slow to respond. In both environments I found Deepin required approximately 400 MB of memory.
Deepin 2014 - the Deepin Store package manager
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The Deepin distribution has a multiple purpose package manager which has a similar look and feel to Ubuntu's Software Centre, though Deepin's graphical software manager seems to have a less cluttered interface. The package manager is divided into tabs which let us search for software, view installed items, see and install available package upgrades and watch actions in progress. While browsing for new software we can look through desktop applications that are arranged by category or we can search for items using key words. I used the package manager, called Deepin Store, to locate a few items and install them. I also used Deepin Store to download and install 25 software updates (totalling 64MB in size). These actions were all handled quickly and without any problems.
The distribution features a second application which acts a bit like a package manager. This second program, called Deepin Games, works in a similar fashion to Valve's Steam gaming portal. It allows us to browse and search for games. Clicking on a game's title causes the game to download and launch on our machine. So far as I can tell, the games are not installed locally the same way packages are installed (games do not appear in our application menu). Once we close a game we are returned to the Deepin Games application. Should we wish to return to games we have played before, Deepin Games keeps track of items we have launched before and these previously played games can be quickly located in a tab called "My Games". Though I did not spend much time with Deepin Games, the items I did play worked well and the games I tried were free to play. I feel Deepin Games is more or less equivalent to Steam or PlayOnLinux, though Deepin Games ran faster on my test machine.
Deepin ships with a useful collection of desktop software, much of it custom made for the distribution. We are given the Google Chrome web browser, the HexChat IRC client, the Pidgin instant messenger software and the Skype voice-over-IP client. Thunderbird is available for working with e-mail and a remote desktop client is included for us. The LibreOffice productivity suite is available along with an image viewer and PDF document viewer. Deepin ships with popular multimedia codecs and media players, specifically Deepin Movie for watching videos and Deepin Music for playing audio files. Flash is also available by default. The distribution provides the Brasero disc burning software, the ChmSee document viewer, a printer management app and a system process monitor.
Deepin provides an application for utilizing wireless drivers built for Windows, an archive manager, a text editor and a virtual calculator. We also find a program in the application menu called Deepin Translator which I assume translates lines of text. However, whenever I tried to launch Deepin Translator the program crashed and displayed an error regarding the D-Bus service. While using Deepin I found some additional features, such as pressing the F4 key would open a full screen terminal window. Pressing F4 again dismissed the terminal. The distribution ships with the GNU Compiler Collection and the Linux kernel, version 3.13. I found that trying to run an application in a virtual terminal when the application was not installed would cause a message to be displayed letting us know how to install the missing program.
Deepin 2014 - various desktop applications
(full image size: 321kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Conclusions
After a few days of using Deepin what really made an impression on me was how natural the experience felt. Going into this review I was not familiar with the Deepin Desktop Environment and, while I had briefly used Deepin in the past, it was long ago. I was not familiar with Deepin's current package manager, multimedia utilities, system installer, settings panel or other components. Yet, despite my ignorance concerning Deepin going into this review, there was virtually no learning curve. The Deepin utilities and desktop environment are very polished, stable and surprisingly intuitive.
I suspect I felt so immediately at home with Deepin because the distribution's interface appears to have taken the best aspects of other systems and improved upon them. For example, the application menu feels more responsive and has a nicer layout than ROSA's application menu or the GNOME Activities screen. The Deepin Desktop Environment carries some of the same features as Unity, yet feels more responsive and (during my time) was more stable than early releases of the Unity desktop. Deepin nicely combines the better aspects of the traditional desktop design (desktop icons, launch bar and window management) with mobile-style features such as the full screen launch menu and desktop icon containers.
Another aspect of Deepin I enjoyed was the way the distribution tended to keep things out of the way without restricting the user. For example, we can get through the system installer in just two screens, providing four pieces of information (user name, computer name, password and disk region we want to hand over to Deepin). That brevity is quite nice. At the same time, the system installer allows us to adjust settings and customize our installation in the same way Linux Mint or Mageia might, but we need only see those options if we want to access them. In a similar vein, the Deepin Store and settings panel are very nicely trimmed down and easy to navigate. Yet, while these components have been streamlined, they are not lacking any significant features so far as I can see. Likewise, not many desktop applications are installed for us by default, but there is a good deal of functionality present. Deepin's core theme appears to be giving us power without giving us clutter.
One further characteristic of Deepin I appreciated was that the distribution has some flare and eye candy when the user is idle, but the distribution is not distracting while we are using it. For instance, while booting, shutting down and waiting for a user to login, Deepin shows simple animations. It is a way to entertain the user while we sit and wait. However, once we get logged into our account, the pretty animations stop and Deepin removes distractions, giving us a clean work space. There are no wobbly icons in the launch tray, no flashy animations as windows close or slow fade-outs when we switch between tasks.
Finally, I want to acknowledge that I was worried going into this review that there might be a language barrier. Deepin, while based on Ubuntu, is developed in China and I had concerns that some Deepin-specific components might not display clear English. As it turns out, almost all of the English text I saw during my time with Deepin was clear and without error. Deepin may be native to China, but care has been taken to make the translations fluent. I think during my week with Deepin I saw only one line of text which did not appear to be written by a native English speaker and, even then, the meaning was quite clear.
What I took away from my time with Deepin is the distribution runs well, is stable, offers a good deal of functionality out of the box and is very user friendly. The developers have done a great job of mixing concepts from various desktop and mobile operating systems to create something which is paradoxically both unique and familiar. The Deepin Desktop Environment is quite stable and, on physical hardware, responsive. Deepin is easy to set up, easy to use, features a great deal of software through its repositories and, thanks to its Ubuntu base, should be able to run most third-party Linux software. I am impressed with what Deepin has to offer and recommend giving it a try.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8 GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500 GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6 GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Related story: Interview with Deepin project leader Wang Yong (DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 556, April 2014)
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith and Ladislav Bodnar) |
Fedora Magazine encourages people to join Ask Fedora, Gentoo developer weighs in on using LibreSSL, FreeBSD team issues quarterly report, Ubuntu launches 8th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book
 Many people, not just software developers, want to contribute to open source projects. However, for someone who does not code or have system administration skills it can be hard to know how to assist the larger community. The Fedora project is encouraging people of all skill sets and levels of ability to get involved on the Ask Fedora website. Ask Fedora functions in a similar manner to user discussion forums, but with a particular focus on asking questions and getting assistance. The Fedora Magazine has a post explaining how Ask Fedora works: "Ask Fedora is an instance of the Askbot Q&A website. It's similar to Stack Exchange if you've used it. The idea is for people to ask questions and for any one that can help to answer these questions. While asking and answering questions, you earn karma and badges, you vote on these questions and answers and as more and more people use the site and learn in the process, it becomes a self sustaining knowledge base -- new folks can look through existing questions for information." Voting on posts helps people find useful information as helpful posts gain more points and more attention.
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 Following the fork of the OpenSSL encryption library and the creation of the LibreSSL project, many people in the open source community have been talking about migrating to the new (and potentially more secure) LibreSSL software. This raises a number of questions such as whether LibreSSL can serve as a drop-in replacement to OpenSSL, whether the two libraries can co-exist and whether people should be switching to LibreSSL right away. One Gentoo developer, Diego Elio Pettenò, addressed some of these questions in a blog post in which he discusses using LibreSSL as a drop-in replacement to OpenSSL. He gets right to the point, declaring: "Let me state this here, boldly: you should never, ever, for no reason, use shared objects from different major/minor OpenSSL versions or implementations (such as LibreSSL) as a drop-in replacement for one another." Most people will probably be best off waiting until distributions adopt and package LibreSSL before trying to use the new library.
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 The FreeBSD project released its most recent quarterly report last week. Among the updated projects, Summer of Code reports and updates on the new PKG package manager were two pieces of especially good news for FreeBSD fans. The first is that FreeBSD releases will have an officially supported life cycle of five years: "In May, a new release policy was published and presented at the BSDCan developer conference by John Baldwin. The idea is that each major release branch (for example, 10.X) is guaranteed to be supported for at least five years, but individual point releases on each branch, like 10.0-RELEASE, will be issued at regular intervals and only the latest point release will be supported." The second bit of news is that FreeBSD is improving support for embedded devices and ARM boards such as the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone. The FreeBSD developers are also working on cloud images that will be compatible with Amazon's EC2, Compute Engine and Azure. This will make it easier to set up cloud instances of FreeBSD on popular hosts.
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  Besides providing a popular operating system for desktops and servers, the Ubuntu project has always been very keen on delivering great documentation - be it an online Wiki system or a regularly updated manual. The Official Ubuntu Book, now in its 8th edition and covering the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, was released last week. One of the authors, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, blogs about the event: "I had the great opportunity to work with Matthew Helmke, José Antonio Rey and Debra Williams of Pearson on the 8th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. In addition to the obvious task of updating content, one of our most important tasks was working to 'future-proof' the book more by doing rewrites in a way that would make sure the content of the book was going to be useful until the next long-term support release, in 2016. This meant a fair amount of content refactoring, less specifics when it came to members of teams and lots of goodies for folks looking to become power users of Unity." The Official Ubuntu Book, 8th Edition is available from InformIT (US$31.99), Amazon (US$28.51, C$26.45, £23.54, €27.57) and other bookstores.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Encrypted package downloads
Not-tipping-my-hand asks: When I download packages in Ubuntu it shows that the connection is made over plain HTTP. Isn't it possible for people to snoop on my connection and see what packages I am installing? Could someone even alter a package I am installing, compromising my system? Why aren't packages installed over HTTPS? Are there any distributions which do use a secure connection?
DistroWatch answers: First, let us take a look at whether it is possible for someone to monitor your connection to your distribution's software repository. In theory, yes it is possible for someone to listen in and monitor HTTP connections, including those to your distribution's software repository. This means someone could potentially learn what software you are installing on your computer. As to whether someone could alter a package as you are downloading it, that is less likely. Most distributions digitally sign their packages. This means the package manager on your computer will examine the software you are downloading and check to see if it has been altered since it left the repository. The digital signature check means it is highly unlikely someone could substitute their own, compromised package for a legitimate package. However, it is, in theory, possible an attacker could cause you to download and install an older version of a legitimate package, one with known security problems. It would still, technically, be a package from your distribution, but one which was out of date and vulnerable to attack.
Knowing monitoring your connection is possible and some attacks are, in theory, possible, why do distributions offer plain HTTP connections instead of the more secure HTTPS variety? I suspect the answer basically boils down to three things. First, it is slightly faster to establish insecure connections. When you are rapidly connecting to multiple mirrors and downloading dozens of packages, making a speedy connection is a nice feature. Second, setting up security takes more time and resources and the package manager should have some way of identifying whether a server's security certificate can be trusted. All of this is more work for the repository maintainers and distribution developers. Finally, package signing prevents most attacks against packages in transit. The likelihood of someone attacking you with older versions of software are relatively low as there are many other, easier and faster methods of attack.
All that being said, package managers can typically make use of HTTPS connections so long as the package repository mirror it is connecting to also supports HTTPS connections. The popular APT and YUM package managers can connect to software repositories which feature HTTPS support. I tried enabling HTTPS connections in my package manager recently and quickly found that repository mirrors generally do not enable HTTPS support which means that while the package managers support HTTPS connections, the servers holding the packages do not. Most are unlikely to add support for HTTPS given the trade-off between the work required to enable this feature and the potential benefits.
Still, if you would like to push for more secure connections, you can get in contact with your distribution's mirror maintainers. Distributions often have a mailing list or IRC channel where you can get in touch with mirror administrators and the idea of improving HTTPS support can be discussed there.
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| Released Last Week |
Kali Linux 1.0.8
Mati Aharoni has announced the release of Kali Linux 1.0.8, a minor update of the project's Debian-based distribution with specialist tools for penetration testing and forensic analysis: "The long awaited Kali Linux USB EFI boot support feature has been added to our binary ISO builds, which has prompted this early Kali Linux 1.0.8 release. This new feature simplifies getting Kali installed and running on more recent hardware which requires EFI as well as various Apple MacBook Air and Retina models. Besides the addition of EFI support, there is a whole array of tool updates and fixes that have accumulated over the past couple of months. As this new release focuses almost entirely on the EFI capable ISO image, Offensive Security won't be releasing additional ARM or VMWare images with 1.0.8. As usual, you don't need to re-download Kali if you've got it installed, and apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the job." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information.
Tails 1.1
An updated version of Tails, a Debian-based distribution known for its strong privacy features and pre-configured for anonymous web browsing, has been released: "Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.1, is out. All users must upgrade as soon as possible - this release fixes numerous security issues. Notable user-visible changes include: re-base on Debian 7.0 'Wheezy'; upgrade thousands of packages; migrate to GNOME 3 'fallback' mode; install LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org; UEFI boot support, which should make it possible to boot Tails on modern hardware and Apple computers; replace the Windows XP camouflage with a Windows 8 camouflage; bring back VirtualBox guest modules, installed from Wheezy backports, full functionality is only available when using the 32-bit kernel. Fix write access to boot medium via udisks; upgrade the web browser to 24.7.0esr...." Here is the full release announcement with a list of known issues.br/>
Tails 1.1 - default desktop and Getting Started guide
(full image size: 167kB, screen resolution 1280x960 pixels)
Oracle Linux 7.0
Oracle has announced the release of Oracle Linux 7.0, a distribution rebuilt from source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, but featuring a custom "unbreakable" kernel: "Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 7. Oracle Linux 7 offers the latest innovations and improvements to support customers and partners in developing and deploying business critical applications across the data center and into the cloud. Features include: Btrfs Oracle Linux 7; XFS; Linux Containers (LXC); DTrace; Ksplice for zero-downtime kernel security updates and bug fixes; Xen enhancements; Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) 3; systemd, a new service and system manager; GRUB 2 as the default bootloader with support for additional firmware types, such as UEFI; support for in-place upgrades from Oracle Linux 6.5 to Oracle Linux 7." Read the release announcement, the official press release and the detailed release notes for further information.
Ubuntu 14.04.1
Adam Conrad has announced the release of Ubuntu 14.04.1, the first maintenance update of the popular distribution's current stable release: "The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (long-term support) for its Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support. As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Kubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, Edubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, Xubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, Mythbuntu 14.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.1 LTS, Lubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu Kylin 14.04.1 LTS, and Ubuntu Studio 14.04.1 LTS are also now available." Read the release announcement for more details.
CoreOS 367.1.0
Alex Polvi has announced the release of CoreOS 367.1.0, the first stable release of the specialist Linux distribution for servers and clusters: "First off, happy sysadmin day. We think we have a pretty good sysadmin surprise in store for you today as we are announcing the CoreOS stable release channel. Starting today, you can begin running CoreOS in production. This version is the most tested, secure and reliable version available for users wanting to run CoreOS. This is a huge milestone for us. Since our first alpha release in August 2013: 191 releases have been tagged; tested on hundreds of thousands of servers on the alpha and beta channels; supported on 10+ platforms, ranging from bare metal to being primary images on Rackspace and Google. CoreOS 367.1.0 includes the following: Linux kernel 3.15.2; Docker 1.0.1; support on all major cloud providers, including Rackspace Cloud...." Read the release announcement and the quick start guide to learn more.
Salix 14.1 "Openbox"
George Vlahavas has announced the release of Salix 14.1 "Openbox" edition, a lightweight Slackware-based distribution featuring with Openbox as the default window manager: "Salix Openbox 14.1 brings the Openbox window manager, teamed with fbpanel and SpaceFM to create a fast and flexible desktop environment. This is the most lightweight edition we have so far among our 14.1 releases and everything has been tweaked to provide a desktop experience comparable to other Salix editions. The development of this edition involved a long and rigorous period of testing and the final release has evolved a lot since the first beta. This release comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours, with both fitting comfortably within the size of a single CD. The 32-bit flavour is also our first 14.1 release that supports i486, non-PAE capable systems by using the respective kernel, although the default is still the i686 PAE SMP kernel." Here is the full release announcement.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
DistroWatch.com visitor platform and browsers statistics
A couple of months ago the OSNews.com website published their most recent platform and browser statistics. I thought it would be interesting to compare their figures with those of DistroWatch.com. OSNews is, of course, a more general technology news site than DistroWatch, covering all operating systems rather than focusing only on the free and open-source ones as we do. Nevertheless, it is likely visited by technical users interested in new technologies. The statistics at OSNews do indeed reflect this as more than 21% of the website's visitors use Linux to access it while only 47% of all visitors come with Windows. On DistroWatch.com, these figures are even more biased towards free and open-source operating systems, with Linux having over 46% and Windows less than 43%. This is a fairly recent change; up until 2013 the Windows-using visitors clearly topped the statistics.
Even more remarkable are this site's browsers statistics. When I started DistroWatch.com back in 2001, the MSIE-using visitors, who had a 92% market share, shunned any competing browsers. Today, the percentage of users who visit this website with Microsoft's flagship web browser stands at a whopping 2.7%! Yes, fewer than three of every 100 visitors of DistroWatch.com are here with MSIE! Mozilla's Firefox has a 55% share, with Google Chrome a distant second at just under 29%. This, again, is more dramatic than the OSNews figures where Firefox and Chrome run neck and neck at around 38% each and where Internet Explorer has a 5.5% market share.
Naturally, a widely-visited general website, such as Wikipedia, will have much more "correct" figures of OS and browser usage as it is visited by all interest groups. Here, the popular encyclopedia's visitor statistics for June 2014 show Windows user at just over 40% of the total, while those using Linux (including Android) had a 13% market share. When it comes to browsers, Chrome visitors dominate with nearly 25%. Those using Microsoft's browser were noticeably more prominent at Wikipedia than either at OSNews or DistroWatch - they had a market share of just over 9%.
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New distributions added to database
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New distributions added to waiting list
- DSLR. DSLR is a small, 64-bit "libre" Linux distribution in the spirit of Damn Small Linux, targeted at advanced users. It's a lightweight operating system that comes pre-loaded with many useful applications.
- Peach OSI. Peach OSI is an Ubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution with an OS X-like user interface.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 4 August 2014. To contact the authors please send email to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, suggestions and corrections: news, donations, distribution submissions, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (feedback and suggestions: podcast edition)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • GOG.com Now Supports Linux! (by Matti on 2014-07-28 09:26:57 GMT from Finland)
You missed one important news from last week. GOG.com now officially supports Linux. Rather than wait until they had 100 games on launch day they decided to launch early with just 50 games. You can now get DRM-free games in either distro-independent tar.gz archives or DEB files for Ubuntu and Mint LTS. Don't want to spend a dime to try them out? There are two free games you can try out just by registering. Dragonsphere and Stargunner, both first time on Linux!
DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with GOG.com. Just an eager fan.
2 • (by dbrion1 on 2014-07-28 09:21:39 GMT from France)
Browser figures and links are interestiong, but wikipedia's audience are students, sometimes teachers (to know how their students cheat?) other profession use it less routinely. This is consisten with the great rank of "smart" "phone"-derived (a young audience) ..
. I noticed that, in an assistance site http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=index (like stackexchange or, maybe, Fedora Ask) people were often encouraged to have a look at wikipedia before asking questions (would find more elaborated answers on trival? questions) . From my estimations, in periods where trivial questions were asked (exams?) wikipedia was recommended with the same frequency than Reading The Holy Manual or asking one's teacher...
Most cybercafés, in France, ban MSIE (as a web browser) in favor of chrome or FF (it takes time -> money to live with MSIE malfunctions) though they keep XP/7...
3 • BlachArch (by steph on 2014-07-28 12:11:02 GMT from France)
Does BlachArch live DVD runs on Virtualbox ?
I tried to use it through Yumi & Vmware Workstation with no success ..
4 • GOG Linux games (by Jesse on 2014-07-28 13:45:29 GMT from Canada)
@1: It wasn't so much that we missed GOG.com's debut of Linux games, but that I felt it wasn't ready to announce yet. I tried to sign up and download a couple of Linux titles and ran into multiple problems (with purchasing, with downloading, with getting support). GOG may officially support Linux, but their site still lacks some support and documentation and not all of their supported titles work yet.
I personally think GOG is moving in the right direction with wanting to support Linux, but they have a ways to go before I will direct people to their offerings.
5 • Deepin review (by Garon on 2014-07-28 14:20:36 GMT from United States)
Well Jessie, Your review of Deepin has been one of the nicest ones so far. I've read several others that have so been so nice to Deepin. I was wondering if you hold off reading other reviews of a distro that you are going to review just so you won't have a tainted opinion? It seems that way to me. Anyway I've downloaded Deepin and when trying it out I didn't really have any problems at all. Seems to be a very nice distro. Nice review also.
6 • Re: Encrypted package downloads... (by Vukota on 2014-07-28 14:27:50 GMT from United States)
Interesting reasons, but I am not convinced correct ones. Usually your network will be bottleneck, not your CPU power to decrypt packages. Its like saying we are not going to use HTTPS sites, because they are very slow. You did not mention cost and hassle to setup HTTPS. Usually it requires SSL certificate which you have to purchase and renew yearly. It also requires (not on modern browsers, but because of it it still does) dedicated IP usually v4, which will cost you additional money (monthly or yearly) and their price is going up, since there are no more v4 available IPs (ISPs have limited number of them and that is it). Who is willing to pay and manually maintain on ongoing base something that is supposed to be free and maintenance free at the first place?
Now, if distributions are willing to use none standard ports and/or protocols with SSL (and self signed certificates), that would be a different story,
7 • Deepin (by mike on 2014-07-28 14:31:13 GMT from Canada)
Hi
I'm a distro hopper, lol, so am constantly trying new ones. I had used Deepin 2013 and at the time had no issues with it.
I tried Deepin 2014 this past weekend and it wasn't for me.
I love the eye candy. All the icons, user interface etc. Its great to look at. But I found it a bit laggy and hesitant at times. I also had difficulty connecting to the internet for some reason and couldn't download anything.
Maybe it was just my settings, I don't know.
8 • Browser stats... (by Vukota on 2014-07-28 14:37:39 GMT from United States)
Interesting observation, but back in a day, I was hiding my real OS/browser with browser extensions that were faking signature as IE. With latest IE version, can your statistical software tell the difference? Nowadays roles changed and IE is faking signature and hiding as "other" browsers.
9 • Deepin (by vaithy on 2014-07-28 14:40:29 GMT from India)
I am one of the early bird that enjoy Deepin 12 but afterwards, it seems, deepin developers are trying more focused to UI instead of functionality...Deepin,in my opinion is,'a Princes with such beauty' , but cann't anyone touch her! what a pity!
10 • Deepin LibreOffice or Kingsoft? (by Jason on 2014-07-28 15:05:47 GMT from United States)
Your review mentioned the included office suite as LibreOffice, but what is listed on the distro info page is Kingsoft, is that just LibreOffice repackaged?
11 • Deepin Review (by DavidEF on 2014-07-28 15:10:34 GMT from United States)
I don't think I've ever read such a glowing review of an OS! If I have, I didn't notice, or at least don't remember. I used to distro hop, but always ended up back at Ubuntu again. Finally, I decided I was just going to stick around Ubuntu and occasionally try out a new Mint release for kicks and giggles. But this review makes me REALLY want to try out Deepin for myself. I like Ubuntu. I like Unity. But, there are a few things that bother me. If Deepin can win me over, it will be the first OS to actually de-seat Ubuntu at my house since 2005, when Ubuntu was the first Linux OS to successfully install on my computer.
12 • Reviews, Deepin and Office suite (by Jesse on 2014-07-28 15:43:11 GMT from Canada)
>> " I was wondering if you hold off reading other reviews of a distro that you are going to review just so you won't have a tainted opinion?"
I almost never read reviews of distributions I plan to review myself. Most times I will avoid visiting a project's forum too as people will flood a forum with first impressions following a release. There have been a few, rare exceptions, but I try to review distributions in an information bubble to avoid tainting the experience.
The exception to this bubble comes from people writing to me to ask me to review a distribution. People will often praise (or complain) about a project they want to see reviewed and this can cause me to look at specific features or problems I might not otherwise find.
>> "Your review mentioned the included office suite as LibreOffice, but what is listed on the distro info page is Kingsoft, is that just LibreOffice repackaged?"
No, Kingsoft and LibreOffice are completely different productivity suites. Kingsoft is closed-source, cross-platform and deals almost exclusively in Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It is very good at maintaining MS-Office compatiblity, but lacks many of the applications and file formats LibreOffice supports.
13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-28 17:40:42 GMT from Belgium)
I have an old notebook equipped with an 1.8 GHz AMD Sempron (therefore 32-bit), 1024 MB of RAM and a deprecated ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics card.
This thing is barely able to run Windows XP SP3. For the last few years it has been running Debian Squeeze (old stable) 32-bits with Gnome2 and it works fine.
Now I am considering upgrading to a more current system. It should be extremely light-weight, very stable and have a solid and reliable package manager with packages aplenty. Nice looks and ease-of-use are also important criteria (the laptop is not for me).
I was considering Debian (but it needs some configuration and I am short of time), Crunchbang (but I would need to add desktop icons and a main menu) and Peppermint (most likely the first thing I will try). Also LXLE looks good but they say is heavier than Peppermint or Crunchbang.
I would be glad to hear other suggestions.
14 • Deepin (by Somo on 2014-07-28 18:39:57 GMT from United States)
It's odd how people can see things so differently. I wanted to like Deepin but I found it unusable. The interface, rather than taking the best of other window managers, is an odd conglomeration of confusing patchwork. It's like a Frankenstein. Somehow, everything does manage to look nice though. Not for me but maybe for someone.
15 • @6: encrypted package downloads (by Pearson on 2014-07-28 18:48:38 GMT from United States)
> Usually your network will be bottleneck
I think the encryption overhead is on the server side. I've read that servers incur a fairly small overhead per encrypted connection, but that overhead multiplied by hundreds/thousands of connections per minute (second?) starts becoming noticeable to the clients.
16 • Re: visitor platform and browsers statistics (by cykodrone on 2014-07-28 19:26:42 GMT from Canada)
This "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20140429 Firefox/24.0 Iceweasel/24.5.0" from here: https://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel means what? The browser identifiers are listed in preferred order?
Regardless, it was interesting reading, some of us love stats. :D
17 • @13 (by kc1di on 2014-07-28 19:37:58 GMT from United States)
I would give Lubuntu or LXLE a try
18 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by pep on 2014-07-28 19:39:36 GMT from United States)
From your comment, you seem quite familiar with Debian, I therefore recommend AntiX. It is VERY light weight (50-80MB logged in, depending on graphics drivers, and very responsive), but all of Debian's goodness is there along with a very reasonable selection of OTB packages. It will run very well on your hardware.
LXLE, although heavier (~100MB, quite responsive) is more polished and strikes an excellent balance between usefulness and resource usage. Great OTB package selection. It will also run quite well on your hardware.
Hope it helps.
19 • @13 - Distro recommendation (by Uncle Slacky on 2014-07-28 20:08:37 GMT from France)
Following on from @18's suggestion of AntiX, its stablemate MX-14 is very nice too (I'm using it at the moment).
20 • Good distro for old laptop (by fernbap on 2014-07-28 20:15:52 GMT from Portugal)
Try Point Linux first. If it gets too slow, there is always crunchbang.
21 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-28 20:31:30 GMT from Belgium)
Thank you for all the answers. I have been considering all of them plus a few others (such as Puppy derivatives).
I have discarded LXLE because the latest version does not have a 32-bit edition (and it seems it is not going to have it).
I have also discarded MX-14 because the recommended system specs are a bit too high.
I have discarded Lubuntu because Peppermint is a Lubuntu derivative that offers more stuff out of the box at a relatively small cost in terms of RAM footprint.
I have also discarded DPup derivatives because there are poorly documented and therefore it is hard to know what to expect.
This leaves me with AntiX and Peppermint. The first seems more light-weight and the second more polished. I will be trying both in a couple of days.
22 • @13: distro for old laptop (by Jason Hsu on 2014-07-28 21:08:53 GMT from United States)
Out of all of the distros you and others have mentioned, I recommend CrunchBang Linux the most. Providing a desktop is easy. Just install LXDE and follow the procedure at http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/howto/add_desktop_icons . The Debian Stable base is why I prefer CrunchBang Linux over antiX Linux and Linux Mint Debian Edition (both of which are based on Debian Testing).
Linux Mint Debian Edition, antiX Linux, and Puppy Linux are also good. If you use LMDE, use the MATE edition, because MATE is lighter than Cinnamon.
If your computer is that slow with Windows XP (and not just because of Windows rot), then the Ubuntu derivatives are probably too slow for your computer as well. Ubuntu has a heavy overhead and has grown to be just as heavy as Windows Vista/7/8. The difference between a Debian base and a Ubuntu base is far greater than the difference between LXDE and Xfce, MATE, etc.
23 • Re: Good distro for old laptop? (by cykodrone on 2014-07-28 21:41:12 GMT from Canada)
wattOS, based on Debian, lots of pre-configuration, lightweight. I would never suggest anything based on Canonical's bloat for old hardware, regardless of their Amazon data mining partnership.
24 • old laptop ideas (by M.Z. on 2014-07-28 22:07:16 GMT from United States)
@13
I think XFCE offerers a decent looking desktop that isn't too heavy. You might consider the XFCE version of Mint, or perhaps you could install the XFCE version of Magia via their main install disc. Both are available in 32 bit and seemed very user friendly to me, and according to the Mint folks 1 GB is a good amount to run their XFCE desktop. I think either would be worth checking out.
25 • @13, Distro for Old Laptops (by Rev_Don on 2014-07-28 22:57:28 GMT from United States)
Aside from some of the other recommendations, Linux Lite would be a good choice as I've run it on a similar specced system.
Just about anything with the XFCE or LXDE desktop should work quite well. But personally my choice for a laptop (or desktop) with those specs would be Point Linux based on Debian with the Mate desktop (Mate is essentially updated Gnome 2). I've been successfully running Point on systems with even lower specs than your laptop with good performance. Fairly easy to install with good hardware support out of the box.
26 • Deepin (by vaithy on 2014-07-28 23:20:17 GMT from India)
Hi, If any of Deepin user that suffering from "disappearing 'Control Center' after updates, open the Terminal and past the following lines,
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y && sudo apt-get --reinstall install dde-meta-en && sudo reboot
Thanks for Deepin English forum
with regards,
vaithy
27 • AMD notes (by Somewhat Reticent on 2014-07-29 01:23:27 GMT from United States)
Depending on model, Sempron could be 32-bit or 64-bit. (Booting Radeon Xpress 200M may want nomodeset or radeon.modeset=0 .-)
Itchy errs in claiming LXLE has no 32-bit version - they're using the 12.04.# series, since it's "more compatible with vintage hardware".
28 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by jurassic_ on 2014-07-29 01:46:43 GMT from Brazil)
@13 • Good distro for old laptop? I sugest my current machine setup: Slackware 14.1 plus kde-3.10 from Slackware 13.xx. Yes it works out of the box! Just install packages A AP L N X XAP from Slack 14.1 and KDE 3.10 from Slack 13.xx. Minor tweaks here and there, but all works nicely. It will make your friends think you have a modern OS installed jus because KDE 3.10 is fully configurable! KDE 4 (and 5) plus gnome 3 are bloated and unusable and a shot in the foot of the FreeSoftware enforce. Please pass this forward.
29 • Good distro for old laptop? (by jeferson on 2014-07-29 02:59:23 GMT from Brazil)
@13 Try out Legacy OS.
30 • @27 - AMD Notes (by Rev_Don on 2014-07-29 03:23:56 GMT from United States)
>>> Depending on model, Sempron could be 32-bit or 64-bit.<<<
I'm sure that anyone who has had that notebook for as long as he has would know if it's 32 or 64bit. Stating that it doesn't run XP well would lead me to believe that it's one of the early single core socket 754 models which would definitely be 32bit.
Plus, with only 1gig of ram there would be absolutely no benefit in running a 64bit OS anyway. 32bit would be a much better option.
31 • @15 encrypted package downloads (by Vukota on 2014-07-29 03:48:28 GMT from United States)
> but that overhead multiplied by hundreds/thousands of connections per minute (second?) starts becoming noticeable to the clients
It all depends where do you host. Cloud processing power (like AWS or Azure) becomes cheaper by a day and you can scale very well as needed, when needed.
32 • @ 30 (by RJA on 2014-07-29 04:07:28 GMT from United States)
That Sempron sounds like it's socket 462, a rebadged Athlon XP.
33 • @13 Good Distro for old laptop (by 5000YearLeap on 2014-07-29 04:58:51 GMT from United States)
Well Arch based distros do have low "overhead". Manjaro is a Arch based distro made easy to install. Manjaro have LXDE, Xfce, Openbox, LXQT, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, MATE (GNOME 2 based) and others.
Bodhi Linux based on Ubuntu base, with the Enlightenment DE. If you are still up for Lubuntu, LXDE they do have a 32bit ISO for the 14.04/14.04.1 releases https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/GetLubuntu http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/14.04.1/release/
As someone else mentioned there is Linux Mint Xfce and MATE editions, 32bit. In my experiences with Linux Mint, they have better hardware support than Ubuntu.
Crunchbang is a good Debian based distro. A bunch of others, too. As always YMMV.
Cheers
34 • @13 Good Distro for old laptop (by Hoos on 2014-07-29 05:36:50 GMT from Singapore)
I second post @23 - WattOS is now based on Debian Stable. They have different versions with Openbox, LXDE and Mate.
Go for WattOS LXDE if Openbox is too minimalist for you. You'll get LXDE out of the box
Another Debian stable alternative I recommend is Kanotix LXDE (latest Debian stable version is "Dragonfire"). I'm using this on an old machine, same RAM as you, ATI Radeon X300 graphics. Wiki says your graphics card is based on mine. Kanotix LXDE comes out of the box with their modified Compiz. It runs effortlessly on my system complete with minor desktop effects for the min/max/opening and closing of windows.
Ignore the wallpaper which is unfortunately not the nicest looking. You can always change that later.
35 • Re: Old laptop (by eco2geek on 2014-07-29 07:03:16 GMT from United States)
I've also got an old laptop, with a 1.8 GHz Mobile Sempron 3000+ CPU. (For those who like specs, it's socket 754, codename "Albany".) It's also got an AMD Radeon XPress 200M graphics chipset. Neither the CPU nor the graphics chipset are replaceable. It's got 1GB RAM.
(I remember when the proprietary ATI drivers for Linux were current for that chipset, and it ran Xgl on SuSE, and then, later, Beryl with Cgwd -- precursor to Emerald -- on Kanotix. Fun stuff.)
I currently run Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on it. It uses ~200MB of RAM.
The laptop's slow whenever it performs a CPU-intensive task or a disk-intensive task (or both). The point being, I don't spend time trying to chase down that perfect distro for an old laptop. I just accept that there are times it's going to be slow, which is what I would expect from a laptop from 2005. Really, it's not that bad.
36 • @13 - Specs for MX-14 (by Uncle Slacky on 2014-07-29 07:28:37 GMT from France)
I'm not sure what the recommended specs are for MX-14, but it runs well on my 2007-era Asus eeePC 701 4G (900 MHz Celeron) with 1Gb RAM. It's a little slow to generate the desktop on login, but that's only because I have the compositor turned on. Once booted, it's faster than the Bodhi install I used previously (no doubt due to the difference in bloat between the Debian and Ubuntu code bases).
37 • @13 - Distro for old laptop (by Chris Whelan on 2014-07-29 07:46:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
In a very minor way, I helped out with MX-14 during development as a tester. I can state categorically that it is the lightest Xfce distro of the dozen or so main-stream ones I compared it with.
It will run on a Pentium 3 machine if you have an absolute minimum of 256MB RAM; with 348MB it's usable for basic tasks. On a Pentium M laptop, with 512MB RAM it makes a brilliant every-day machine.
It will run very well on your Celeron, especially with all that RAM!
38 • Deepin: No Way to Configure Fonts? (by Joncr on 2014-07-29 12:05:04 GMT from United States)
I couldn't find anything in Deepin's settings to adjust fonts other than change the size of an unidentified default font.
No way to change font family, change DPI, adjust hinting, etc.
Makes it a no-go for me.
39 • OS for old machines. (by Garon on 2014-07-29 12:25:12 GMT from United States)
There are many options. A lot of good ones have been named already. Usually a person should stay away from the one man distros, I've seen too many come and go, but with the age of the laptop I really wouldn't worry about that. WattOS would be a good choice along with Lubuntu. Another good choice would be an Ubuntu alternative install, a pick only what you need install. I wouldn't worry too much about bloat as that term just boils down to personal opinion as to what bloat is, and also unless you use Tails you will be data mined if you go online and people are foolish to think otherwise. Crunchbang is also a very good option.
40 • re 4 GOG by Jesse (by corneliu on 2014-07-29 12:38:39 GMT from Canada)
Just curious. Did you try to install the games on Ubuntu? i am not sure but I think they said they support only Ubuntu for the moment.
41 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-29 12:43:26 GMT from Belgium)
I am glad to learn that two of the most respected distros from the rare old times are still alive and kicking. I did not know about the Mepis/AntiX collaboration in MX-14 and I did not know that Kanotix was still around, let alone that it had an LXDE version. Both definitively deserve a try. WattOS also sounds interesting, namely now that it has migrated to a pure Debian base.
42 • @42 • Deepin's Origin (by Koro on 2014-07-29 13:17:24 GMT from Belgium)
"You know, the same country that has been hacking Western corporations, governments and private citizens."
Exactly the same as the USA... In fact, everything you said about China is correct for 90 % of the Word's governments. And the bigger, the worse. Indeed, China, USA and Russia are among the worst in terms of spying on us with malevolent purposed. So, according to your reasoning, we should not trust any distro coming from any country, except maybe Norway?
43 • Correction ... (by Kroy on 2014-07-29 13:32:37 GMT from Canada)
"that should be there in the first place."
-> "that shouldn't be there in the first place."
44 • Deeping and Nvidia Propietary Drivers (by Alecaldi on 2014-07-29 13:33:41 GMT from Argentina)
I've tested the RC two month ago, I guess, and privative drivers made Control Center to crash with no solution in sight (documentation was scarce, to begin with, and I lack knowledge about Gnome 3 (and this derivative in particular). That was enough to hop to something else.
I've read that by final release the bug was still there and. And without propietary drivers I found performance significantly damaged.
Have they fix it by now?
45 • Good Distro for Old Laptop (by Somo on 2014-07-29 14:26:50 GMT from United States)
You might want to try GALPon MiniNo.
46 • Point Linux as a light weight solution.. (by Az4x4 on 2014-07-29 16:09:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
Lots of great suggestions already made for running light weight distros on older laptops. Want to add my voice to others who've mentioned Point Linux as a top notch choice. Based on Debian Stable, and running the light weight MATE desktop with full out of the box capabilities built in, either the 32 or 64 bit versions provide amazing new life for older laptops.
47 • Good Distro for Old Laptop (by The Shadow on 2014-07-29 16:14:58 GMT from Nicaragua)
I can concur with many of the above with Antix, Mx-14, Peppermint, being great on older less well endowed lappys,
I would add that Watt OS would have been on the list, even when it was Umbongo based..It has changed to Debian which has caused a few teething problems i believe regarding repos. But i am sure Biff Baxter will sort it out.. I tried to access the Watt OS website but it seems to be down quoting a DNS issue. ???
Kanotix i havent used recently though it was good in the past. I thought it had expired. but i notice it has regular nightly builds and ISOs to download..
I would also say have a look at Salix, or any of the Slackware based distros..they used to be light on resoucres, I havent tried them for a while as i can't get them to install, It always comes to a standstill on "making file system usable"
Manjaro with Openbox, fluxbox, PekWM could work, as could the Netbook edition which would probably be the better choice.
48 • Good Distro for Old Laptop @13 (by Huge Mess on 2014-07-29 16:51:21 GMT from Brazil)
Koro:
If you want to stick around in Debian, Sparky is based on Testing and offers a number of lightweight DEs. Pavroo, the man behind it, just published statistics about how much RAM and CPU they use, and the ISO come very well equipped.
My two cents. Nice distrohopping ;) !
49 • Deepin Review (by Mac on 2014-07-29 18:20:54 GMT from United States)
I am a kde fan and now I have got to try Deepin. Jesse next time find something bad. Have fun Mack
50 • Old Laptops or computers (by wolf on 2014-07-29 18:46:31 GMT from Germany)
For a friend I had to find a distro which would run on a laptop from 2002/2003, needless to say it wouldn't boot from USB so I had to burn many Images what a waste....
First place much to my surpise did go to Simplicity everything worked out of the box and fast as hell (use of Ramdisk cause the laptop had enough RAM)
Second place the aforementioned Point Linux
I think they are both supposed to work from Usb Stick and so they use RamDisk a lot which worked really fine for my friend even after Installation
Try Simplicity from a stick you'll see what I mean
51 • @13 @50 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-29 19:26:50 GMT from Belgium)
Does Simplicity have an installer? Is it using slapt-get as a package manager? With Slackware repos?
After many years without distro-hopping, my first attempt was wattOS R8 Microwatt. It runs nicely from an USB key. The problem is that the installer does not understand encrypted LVM2.
52 • Deepin (by Platypus on 2014-07-29 21:55:14 GMT from Australia)
I whole heartedly agree that Deepin is one of the most thoughtful and innovative distros I have ever used. Unfortunately, I can't use it on my work box because there are far too many little things that either I can't configure or fix. For example my bluetooth headset can't connect with pulse audio and there is no way (other than good knowledge of the command line) to fix the problem. I can't remove a connection a device either. Nor can I use my nvidia card which is a real pain because I use it for photography and image work. My daughter complains that Minecraft is too slow as well. Lack of dock configuration is another issue. There are other packages and configs that I like to use but Deepin locks you out. However, I love some of the other features like the boot manager, the desktop wallpaper changer. So at the moment I am using and xfce desktop and will wait another year or so for Deepin to mature before I switch back. It is well worth a try for kids just wanting internet and social media though.
53 • @50: waste of ISO burns (by Kazlu on 2014-07-30 08:40:40 GMT from France)
@50 Wolf: "it wouldn't boot from USB so I had to burn many Images what a waste...."
I use CD-RW or DVD-RW without any problems for years, no waste (except of time maybe...). But recently I discovered something that might please you if you face another situation like this: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html
That little thing boots on anything and allows you to then boot on a DVD, USB or whatever. It even fits on... a floppy disk. I hadn't been using floppy disks for years, I found it fun to use them again for a real purpose :D Thanks to my new floppy disk, my old Pentium III powered machine can now boot on DVD and USB, which is necessary today for a majority of live systems if you want to test drive live.
54 • Good Distro for Old Laptop @13 (by CedarCreek on 2014-07-30 09:00:55 GMT from United States)
If you are trying lightweight distros but aren't going minimalist, you really should try Linux Lite 2.0 before you make a final decision. I have a laptop with similar specs and another that is older, and Linux Lite 2.0 seems to just install and work without a lot of the oddball issues I have encountered with some other distros aimed at low resource computers. It has an XFCE desktop and seems very polished to me.
If you're trying several, try this one.
55 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-30 10:08:18 GMT from Belgium)
Thanks to all for your suggestions. I have learned a few interesting things. After trying three distros, I have ended up installing Debian "Jessie" with LXDE. It feels more responsive a needs less memory than Squeeze with Gnome2. It needs some configuration to make it pretty and usable but not too much. I just wonder when and how will happen the transition from LXDE to LXQt, if it happens....
56 • @48 (by Mac on 2014-07-30 11:49:36 GMT from United States)
If you like debain, you can order the hold set form OSDisc.com on home page and chose the desktop you would like to try.That is what I do and 7.6 I realy like. Have no idea abt low specs. But those 10 disk are fun. Have fun Mack
57 • GOG and Linux support (by Jesse on 2014-07-30 14:42:43 GMT from Canada)
>> "Just curious. Did you try to install the games on Ubuntu? i am not sure but I think they said they support only Ubuntu for the moment."
According to the GOG website, they support the most recent LTS releases of both Ubuntu and Mint. I was testing the games on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit, one of the supported distributions.
58 • @13 • Good distro for old laptop? (by Koro on 2014-07-30 19:51:38 GMT from Belgium)
OK, the system is fully configured and working well. Most often, the bottleneck is the CPU, but as far as you do not multitask a lot is quite alright. The graphics card is also showing its age. All in all, the laptop is more powerful than most netbooks and has plenty of ports and connectors that most netbooks lack. I think it was worth recovering it.
The main problem I see with Debian right now is that one needs to use the --no-install-recommends flag very often. Otherwise you end up with the whole Gnome3 (or KDE) nonsense installed. However, it is not convenient to set this as the default apt-get behavior.
In my opinion most of the recommended packages should be just suggested (such as the entire Gnome documentation when you install Cheese).
59 • @52: Deepin with proprietary nvidia drivers (by eco2geek on 2014-07-31 03:51:59 GMT from United States)
> Nor can I use my nvidia card which is a real pain because I
> use it for photography and image work. My daughter
> complains that Minecraft is too slow as well.
By that, I take it you mean that you can't use the proprietary nvidia drivers from their repositories with Deepin (?).
What you can do is download the latest proprietary driver from nvidia's web site and install it manually. I've tried that with 64-bit Deepin and version 340.24 of the nvidia driver, and it works fine.
(Doing it by hand may require that you set up a custom "xorg.conf," and it may require you to edit /etc/default/grub. It'll definitely require you to blacklist the nouveau driver.)
60 • Third impressions of Deepin 2014 (by RollMeAway on 2014-07-31 04:42:19 GMT from United States)
My install was at the other end of the users experience spectrum from Jesse's.
Computer is a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4, 2 GB ram, nvidia 6200 video (uses nvidia-304 driver).
Boot up was very slow due to nouveau driver from the live DVD, but it did work.
I started the installer, got to the screen asking which partition to install to, I chose sdb4.
I clicked the button, expecting more questions, but to my surprise it simply installed from there!
No other questions about other partitions, a boot loader, or ANYTHING else.
Results were it did install to the chosen partition but grub2 was installed to the MBR of the second hard drive. This wiped my partition table and provided no means of booting the new install.
Fortunately this was not my first dance. I restored the partition table OK from a backup.
I then used a PMagic rescue CD, and chroot enviornment to get into deepin, and installed grub2
to sdb4 OK.
I booted into deepin successfully and installed 'nvidia-304-update' from a terminal.
Upon rebooting I now have a functioning system.
Not exactly the joy ride others claim.
Now to see if I can tweak the interface enough to satisfy my needs.
61 • @58 --no-install-recommends (by Kazlu on 2014-07-31 08:34:35 GMT from France)
"The main problem I see with Debian right now is that one needs to use the --no-install-recommends flag very often. Otherwise you end up with the whole Gnome3 (or KDE) nonsense installed. However, it is not convenient to set this as the default apt-get behavior. "
Could you give more details about that? You need some GNOME/KDE packages but don't want some of their recommanded dependancies, is that it? Is that the case with every GNOME/KDE package? Can't you find what you need then with alternatives drawing less dependancies, like packages one can often find in LXDE or Xfce desktops? The first example that comes to my mind is Xfburn instead of Brasero. I would like to know more about this.
Also, you say in #13: "Nice looks and ease-of-use are also important criteria (the laptop is not for me)." Isn't that a problem, if that person wish to install some packages and then draws a lot of GNOME unnecessary packages?
I would like to suggest some distros for you but a lot of wise suggestions have already been made :) I would avoid Mageia though, it's nice but not really adapted to low power machines. I tried the LXDE edition on an old Pentium III with 512MB of RAM, it uses 150MB of it when just logged in...
Have fun :)
62 • @60 (by jaws222 on 2014-07-31 11:32:03 GMT from United States)
"Not exactly the joy ride others claim."
That's why I always try new distros out in virtualbox first. I do not like these types of surprises.
63 • @61 • @58 --no-install-recommends (by KI on 2014-07-31 12:37:20 GMT from Belgium)
Well this is a problem with all Debian-based distros, including Ubuntu and derivatives.
The first problem is that often a program is split in several packages and, unless you install all packages, you will not have the full spectrum of functionality. In some cases this makes sense, because the split package can be a library or a plug-in that is shared with other programs. But sometimes it is hard to understand why certain functionality which is intrinsic and exclusive of a given package is offered as a separate package. This is one of the reasons why recommended packages are installed by default in most Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu).
In my ignorant opinion, it would be a lot better not to split a package unless it is strictly required or very convenient so doing. If the current policy is maintained, it would be very convenient, instead, creating meta-packages gathering all the possible functionality of a given application or suite. This would allow users to disable installing recommends globally.
The second problem is indeed desktop environment integration. It is true that for certain applications desktop integration is important. However this is not the case for most packages. For instance, I may want to profit from the power of Gedit while using LXDE without the need of pulling the entire Gnome desktop because, even if Gedit is a "Gnome application" it does not need Gnome to function.
The problem with the current situation is that if I disable install recommends globally I loose functionality in certain applications (unless if I pull all the modules separately, but, in order to do that, I need to know they actually exist); if, on the contrary, I let the configuration as it is, I will be downloading an installing numerous unnecessary packages (which is a problem if you have a slow internet connection, or a small hard-drive or a slow computer).
The solution is checking in a case per case basis whether or not installing a given packages will pull unnecessary bloat into the system and, if so, use the --no-install-recommends flag.
Finally, this is a rather arbitrary thing that often depends on packager's particular taste. For instance, in the past Gedit will pull a lot of Gnome stuff whereas Cheese will not. Now it seems to be the other way around. Less often it is the developers who decide, for instance, Kdenlive needs the whole KDE bloat even to compile it from source.
64 • Avoiding bloat-creep (DebIan-based) (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2014-07-31 15:38:11 GMT from United States)
"... recommended packages are installed by default ..."
"The solution is checking in a case per case basis ..."
Or tell Synaptic Preferences not to add "recommended" packages, then ask Synaptic which "recommends" aren't installed.
Isn't there a simple (script-able) command-line version of this simple protocol?
65 • @ 64 • Avoiding bloat-creep (Debian-based) (by Koro on 2014-07-31 19:38:20 GMT from Belgium)
Yes, of course, you can set it system-wide as explained here:
http://superuser.com/questions/615565/can-i-make-apt-get-always-use-no-install-recommends
But, as explained in my previous post, if you do that, some packages will lack certain functionality.
So essentially you have the following options:
1.- Do nothing and live with the bloat.
2.- Set the No-Install-Recommends flag system-wide and install necessary recommended packages one by one.
3.- Use the --no-install-recommends flag in as per package basis.
66 • Lubuntu 14.04 not too functional (by Ben Myers on 2014-07-31 20:28:57 GMT from United States)
Downloaded Lubuntu 14.04 and gave it a run. Why, oh why, oh why, pick anything instead of LibreOffice and Firefox for pre-installed software, a so-called out-of-the-ISO experience?
67 • Granular bloat\\\\\non-core-packaging control (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2014-07-31 21:00:24 GMT from United States)
Using only global preferences, "some packages will lack certain functionality".
In Synaptic, would granular controls be best placed under "Advanced Options"? Sounds like a reasonable improvement proposal. It would be nice to tag certain packages with 'no-recommends' or 'all-recommends'. How about a way to tag by functionality!?
And perhaps there's a method via apt configuration file(s)?
(How does DebIan/die.net documentation compare to Ubuntu in this area? etc/apt/preferences etc/apt/preferences.d/ apt-config apt.conf ... hmm...)
68 • Good distro for OLD computers (by TuxTest on 2014-07-31 21:44:47 GMT from Canada)
A miracle today at my job
I have a very old desktop and after tested many many Distro like this: Manjaro XFCE, Manjaro Openbox, Voyageur, Xubuntu, LXLE, Lubuntu and other small distro... The best is the last 14.1 Salix Openbox. Now this old desktop is really fast, I am a big surprise by boot, launch software, firefox is really fast too. The only problen is my old XP 2400 AMD sempron cpu is not supported by last flash Player. Just need to download and install old version of flashplayer on adobe web site.
Step:
After in root just replace the file *libflashplayer.so* by old version in /usr/lib/flashplugin
reboot and bingo you can see on firefox your tv or youtube video or radio station...
Config of my old Desktop:
CPU AMD Sempron XP2400
1024 mo ram
80 go hard drive
Graphic card old 2004 Geforge 6000 serie
1 DVD and 1 CD player.
Good luck
69 • 39 • OS for old machines. (by Garon on 2014-07-29 12:25:12 GMT from United State (by jurassic on 2014-08-01 01:24:02 GMT from Brazil)
Garon says: "Usually a person should stay away from the one man distros, I've seen too many come and go," Yes, some come and go, but the good ones stay. And big people bloated (too many "collaborators") dont make they secure. Last week I have teste two of those big ones. Fedora 20 installer is crude and insecure, one foul step and you get your dual boot system destroyed! It's instable. KDE and LXD are buged and crash all time. I dont recomend it to my enemies. Debian 7.5 the installer is buged or saboted because if you let it to make alterations to the computers mbr it you destroy it (I took it twice!!!), and, the worst, it consumed two ( I say two) hours to complete a simple desktop install. Slackware takes 15 minutes and you get a full system! Knoppix 7.2 make it all in 20 minutes. Windows 7 gets 30 minutes! There is something going wrongly into these big distros. I think it is time to instrospection and fixing!
70 • @66 - Re: Lubuntu 14.04 not too functional (by Rev_Don on 2014-08-01 01:54:50 GMT from United States)
>>> Downloaded Lubuntu 14.04 and gave it a run. Why, oh why, oh why, pick anything instead of LibreOffice and Firefox for pre-installed software, a so-called out-of-the-ISO experience?<<<
That's something that most distros with lightweight DE's suffer from. For some reason the developers are under the mistaken impression that anyone using a light weight desktop like XFCE, LXDE, etc. don't want or need a full featured office suite or browser (among other things). I don't know how they became so delusional,
I have an i7-3770k, an i7-2700k, and an i5-2500 with 8 or 16 gigs of ram but I prefer to use Mate or XFCE as I can't stand the abomination of Unity, Gnome 3, and KDE 4. I want a fairly simple desktop that does what is needed and gets out of my way. LXDE is okay, but is just a bit to limited for my tastes. It's annoying (and a waste of time and bandwidth) to have to either install a distro with the Desktop I can use only to have to uninstall all of the overly limiting and feature lacking applications then install real Big Boy apps or install a distro that has the full featured apps I need then replace the horribly bloated and performance draining desktop with something that allows me to get some serious work done.
LinuxLite gets it right and so does Point Linux so why can't others? I know that there others that do, but I can't think of them at the moment. SolydX gets it wrong as do most of the other XFCE distros. If it wasn't for Point and LinuxLite I would probably do a net-install of Debian, but I would rather USE my system to get some work done than waste a bunch of time playing around with it.
71 • @69 and 70; @66 (by Hoos on 2014-08-01 07:04:48 GMT from Singapore)
One man shows: Kano of Kanotix is still around and his venerable distro is still alive and working well. From what I can see, it's currently not a solo project as the developer of the acritox installer used in Kanotix is also involved. The latter is hosting the Kanotix nightly builds and preview (Debian 'Jessie') images of the next version of Kanotix on his own website. It may not be the most glamorous and trendy distro, but it works.
Of course, for those who mind these things, Kanotix LXDE version does not have Libreoffice out of the box, so you'll have to install it separately. :-D I honestly don't think it's a big issue.
@Koro, since you did not mind installing Debian Jessie+LXDE (net install?), you might want to give Kanotix's Jessie preview images a try. As usual, it's in KDE and LXDE versions. Even the KDE version ran quite well live on my old machine. Might save you the trouble of getting everything configured and set up properly yourself.
Other lightweight distros with a full complement of "Big Boy" apps? MX14.2 is lightweight XFCE but it does come with Libreoffice and Iceweasel out of the box. And everything still fits on a CD. Like Kanotix, not very glamorous, wallpaper not the prettiest, but it works well.
72 • @71 Kanotix Jessie (by Koro on 2014-08-01 08:00:47 GMT from Belgium)
Which one is the Jessie one?
http://debian.tu-bs.de/kanotix/KANOTIX-LinuxTag2014/
Dragonfire or Spitfire?
73 • @72 (by Hoos on 2014-08-01 08:18:09 GMT from Singapore)
Debian Jessie preview image is Spitfire.
Current stable Wheezy version is Dragonfire, which I'm using.
I tried Spitfire KDE live on USB, seemed quite good even on my old machine.
74 • Old PCs for Koro Number 13 (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2014-08-01 10:44:28 GMT from United States)
Koro, I'm a Debian refugee who fled to Arch. It's night and day. Debian was a nightmare by comparison. I cannot believe the years I wasted with it. Arch is in fact more stable, against Debian's FUD propaganda. If I'm opinionated it's only experience speaking!
I make Arch run 32-bit CPUs with low RAM amzingly fast. If your CPU is pre-i686 class then use another distro for these methods (Gentoo?). If they're not for you, give SliTaz.org a whirl. It's made for speed.
Anyway the key Arch tuning moves are
(1) SSD system disk
(2) busy mounts in tmpfs
(1) IDE/PATA mobos lacking SATA are easy to fix. Get cheap SATA to IDE adapter. The usual SSD tuning like TRIM will apply. I use ext4 without a journal. If your SSD has a SandForce controller, then drop TRIM along with ext4 journals. Trust me, I've never found any help from ext4 journals, just bugs and slowdowns.
The nice part? Old boxes can max out cheaply with whatever top-end video they can handle, etc. All the upgrades are cheaper now than back in the day. A laptop not so much, but you can do the SSD. Technically, even IDE SSDs exist if an adapter won't fit. Worst case: USB2 flash stick.
(2) I run old boxes with /tmp and $HOME and /var/cache junk-o-ramas in tmpfs inside 2 GB RAM on a typical 32-bit mobo. Technically /var/tmp is nonvolatile, but I run it from tmpfs and don't give a rip. No problems at all.
If you go my route, read /etc/tmpfiles.d man page. You can also put pacman's package cache in tmpfs and it will just need cleaning after each upgrade to clear the RAM.
OpenBox works well, but even fat KDE works in an old 2 GB PC. The trick with KDE is moving its infernal kudzu-growth of temp files to RAM and keeping a handle on them there. Yes, they disappear upon reboot, and good riddance, I say.
A script in /etc/profile.d will do:
unset KDEVARTMP
export KDEVARTMP="/tmp/KDEVARTMP_$USER"
mkdir "${KDEVARTMP}" 2> /dev/null
unset KDETMP
export KDETMP="/tmp/KDETMP_$USER"
mkdir "${KDETMP}" 2> /dev/null
Naturally KDE also has fancy-pants graphics effects that may or may not fly with an old video card. Just figure out what works and what doesn't by hand. I get pretty decent aesthetics and window animations from old AGP video cards.
Good luck, Koro!
75 • Distro quality. (by Garon on 2014-08-01 12:18:29 GMT from United States)
@69, "I dont recomend it to my enemies." Thanks for saying that. It made my day. You are right that there are some really good one man distros but a lot of the one man projects fades away after a while. Then there are some that you think will stay around forever but then fizzle out. One of my favorites was Mepis. I loved that distro and the Mepis community but Warren had to make a living. Yes I did enjoy the good old days. The cassettes, the punch cards, the 8 inch floppies, and it's sad that a lot of your so called computer experts today had never had any experience with the old school stuff. Maybe that is why most have such a tendency to complain and whine all the time. Instead of appreciating what they have now, the choice they have now, they cry why isn't it better and why isn't it what "I" want, and why do I have to do anything except turn it on. A sad state of affairs.
76 • One man distros (by fernbap on 2014-08-01 17:11:08 GMT from Portugal)
As someone already said here, he strated with a Debian netinstall and built up from there, struggling all the way not to include useless baggage presented as dependencies for apps he wanted to install,
That is where the "one man distro" comes to the rescue. He already did all the work you are struggling with, doing probably a better job that you would manage to.
Oh, no! The distro ended. What exactly ended? Debian? certainly not. The apps? neither. The DE? Not at all.
All you would have to to to keep your system working would be some clever management of repositories in order to keep your install working exatly as it had been working.
No big deal, is it?
Much worse would be for a large distro to move in a direction you don't agree with or adopt solutions that you can't stand on a personal level.
77 • @74 Arch for old PCs (by Koro on 2014-08-01 17:22:43 GMT from Belgium)
Wow, the notion of disabling journal is very tempting. At least for laptops, for the machine should keep running and eventually be more or less gracefully shut down in case of a power failure. However, I will not try that in a workstation.
In the current scenario, that would obviously involve buying a new battery for the old one is completely kaput.
Regarding Arch and the other stuff. I am not going to use a bloated DE such as KDE or, worse, one that is not only bloated but it is becoming increasingly rigid, such as Gnome3 and Unity, as long as there are more sensible options to fulfil my needs. Happily, there are aplenty: Xfce, LXDE, Mate and, in the near future, LXQt.
Regarding rolling distros, typically they require more maintenance. This is something unavoidable and I do not have too much time for that (well, I am currently on holidays). Besides, I am not an computer-literate fellow and therefore I do not have an intrinsic interest on the matter. That said, I tried Arch long ago and, each times the upgrades broke something, I have able to solve it, but, again, I prefer to to spend time solving avoidable issues. The same goes for Sid derivatives. I have tried many to reach to the very same conclusions. Debian Testing is kind of OK, namely its stabilised derivatives. Well, now with the migration to systemd and libc the Testing experience will be more similar to that of Arch or Sid (and, yes, I am aware that Arch is much more stable than Sid).
I was a Gentoo user for half a year and a Funtoo user for over a year. I remember those days as being spending far too much time in front of a computer.
Debian is just fine. Stable is rock solid and Testing tends to require less tweaking than Arch and, of course, Sid. That is at least my experience. But, then, I do not know, maybe Arch is more stable now than it was the last time I tried.
78 • @69 Debian (by Mac on 2014-08-01 20:09:38 GMT from United States)
I have installed Debian 7.5 and 7.6 somewhere 10 to 15 times in the last 2 months with out any problems. And 7.6 is a snap.
Have fun Mack
79 • Browser & OS stability (by linuxista on 2014-08-01 20:20:01 GMT from United States)
Is wikipedia really mainstream? I wonder what browser market share stats are at Fox News, BBC or Yahoo news are.
I just had a poor experience with Ubuntu 12.04 that shook my distro paradigm. I friend was having trouble updating for a while. He's the type that does NO maintenance whatsoever outside of automatic updates. Never opens a terminal. Happy as a clam running Gnome3 on 12.04 LTS. He was complaining of an error msg saying something about "lock". Okay, easy enough. I removed the lock file but 4 other issues surfaced. One a broken dependency. Solved. But the last 3 when updating package lists were 1) bad gpg keys for updates and backports 2) one of the translation archives wouldn't unzip and 3) if you tried to dist-upgrade anyway there were bad header errors for certain packages. I spent about 45 min. trying various things, incl. apt-get clean and replacing /var/lib/apt/lists & lists/partial, requested new keys, tried a few different repos. Nothing worked. My friend just wants to do a clean install with 14.04 UbuGnome. I don't blame him, and if he had any inclination to do a little bit of maintenance, I'd install Manjaro on his machine. I've always thought Ubuntu derivs were the most stable and best for beginners, but I'm reevaluating that now.
80 • @69 ubuntu (by Mac on 2014-08-01 20:44:05 GMT from United States)
May want to go with 14.04,1 it has been real good for me no longer that is has been out time will tell. But I use Kubuntu on desktop and Debian on laptop. As my go to systems for years and try nearly everything and nothing has replaced them yet. But not everybody likes the same thing and that is what makes the world go round.
Have fun Mack
81 • Debian one-man shows (by RichJack on 2014-08-01 20:52:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have been building a one-man show distro/re-spin recently (not yet in Distrowatch though) for the last 2 months and I have mostly been basing on Debian Testing. The switch to Systemd took me by surprise (should have seen it coming and kept an eye on the Debian announcements). Now I need to roll a new ISO, but it'll have to wait until after the summer holidays! Much change in Jessie land at the moment though - packages being dropped left,right and centre - now where did alsa disappear to?
Debian is a beast to deal with. You've got LTS in the stable branch, but for anything up to date, you need testing or sid. Anything that I've found interesting isn't packaged in the Debian repos, but there are often Ubuntu ppas. Not recommend to "mix your sources" but sometimes needs must!
Long and short though, if I stop developing and you have installed my distro/re-spin based on Debian, you can keep rolling with Debian indefinitely unless upstream breaks something for good.
On a different note, LibreOffice is just too big to fit on most distros. I am trying to keep mine to CD size. I don't bother including Abiword though as that certainly doesn't cut the mustard. It's good old Ted RTF editor as a stop gap, Google Docs or install LibreOffice from Synaptic. You've not lost any bandwidth or time really anyway! The trend to DVD sized ISOs is disturbing as even in a UK major city, that's a good 1-2 hour download over the old copper pipes. It has to be Firefox though, not Iceweasel.
Regards and feel free to check out my Xubuntu clone on Debian Jessie (beta release only, some bugs, final will come when Jessie becomes stable: http://sourceforge.net/projects/theme-ix/)
82 • Debian v Arch v Think-4-Self re Koro Number 77 (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2014-08-02 00:41:44 GMT from United States)
Debian's PR kool-aid tastes good, so good luck with that. I'll just speak to your remarks for the record. Use what you love if it kills you; but for everyone else...
I'm with Koro about KDE and mentioned it only to say tuning matters. Think outside lines drawn by distros, DE nerds, and kernel hackers, and "conventional wisdom."
Debian is not stable. Arch is. That is my summary experience after many years in both. Debian is good at FUD.
Debian re-engineers upstream source, while leaving bugs already fixed upstream still unpatched, often for months or years. I KNOW because I sat waiting for fixes to hit Debian stable or sid. That's what drove me to Arch! Debian's endless crashes from bugs with KNOWN fixes.
The con of Debian is that most upstream changes are dangerous new features. False: most upstream commits are bug fixes. I view Debian's FUD about stability as a flimsy cover story for an ill-designed distro that cannot uptake bug fixes well. I tried hard to love Debian. It has so many branches that you never know what's conflicting with what, and nothing corresponds exactly to upstream code.
Arch is simpler. It does not reengineer. It ships vanilla upstream. And Arch does have a testing branch (little known fact!) which each package passes on its way to main repos. Manjaro gives still more QA.
Virtually all problems blamed on rolling methods are upstream goofs THAT YOU HIT IN DEBIAN ANYWAY -- BUT DEBIAN PR WON'T TELL YOU SO. Especially video drivers and/or kernel. So? Boot Arch's linux-lts kernel package instead. Voila, half vanish.
Besides all that, there exists another way to think outside the lines with rolling distros. I never do it but...here it is...
Nothing requires you, personally, to roll. Stop upgrading any time you like. Or just install and stop. Let your distro do the rolling.
So e.g. install Bridge Linux XFCE, but never do pacman upgrades. Tweak the DE as you please, install extra apps (keep a list), and stuff your confs in etckeeper or git on some external disk.
When Bridge ships fresh ISOs, just wipe your disk and reinstall the fresh release, then overlay confs and apps. The reinstall would take one hour. The list of apps is just a long one-line pacman command you can script. It would be a 6-9 month upgrade cycle, I'd guess. I'm not recommending the idea, just saying it's possible, if Debian PR keeps you worried sleepless over rolling.
Yes Gentoo is pain. And a problem for Gentoo on slower PCs is compile time. I might prefer FreeBSD with its new binary packaging for old PCs. But don't forget SliTaz. It uses OpenBox.
I have used XFCE. Anything related to GNOME is bloatware, and XFCE is a lot slower than even our KDE running in tmpfs. If you like XFCE then try some of the tmpfs concepts with it. And RazorQt might be nice.
We get plenty of power crashes in our area, especially in monsoon season. Even light winds knock out power. We lose it suddenly 3-4 times a year, with many brown-outs as well. We consider our PCs immune. We love them!
We DESIGNED these boxes for crash immunity; tmpfs means no disk activity happens in general. We only save to platter/SSD when we sync $HOME to disk. Otherwise we work from RAM. The most we lose in a crash is a half-hour of work. Apps even load faster because $XDG_CONFIG_HOME lives in RAM.
Granted, the layout is unconventional, but it works and very well. Maybe as RAM gets cheaper, it will evolve into "conventional wisdom" that everybody knows. And while we here use our own techniques, Arch does offer anything-sync-daemon and profile-sync-daemon for consideration.
83 • PS (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2014-08-02 00:58:58 GMT from United States)
On the concept of reinstalling not rolling, you could vector from stock Arch ISOs too. You'd just have a longer pacman command line to run at upgrade time. Arch ships a fresh install ISO each month.
84 • Stability (by linuxista on 2014-08-02 02:42:22 GMT from United States)
I have to agree: My experience also is that Arch is stable and Debian is not. Over the last 5 years my hdd has been a darwinian clash of 3 or 4 distros at any given time. After having tried almost everything what remains is Arch, Manjaro and Mint. I'm not looking for a hard time; I'm looking for something that gives me what I want without presenting unresolveable problems. And I'm thinking of dumping Mint. I've only ever kept an Ubuntu deriv. for insurance purposes, but despite the FUD the fact is that Arch almost never breaks, and on the rare occasion when it does it's never catastrophic, it's never unique or opaque, and there are always clear fixes in the forums and in the wiki. I'm still waiting for most of the PPAs I use to be updated to Trusty. In the meantime, I'm giving up caring. I never though Arch would be the mainstay, but there it is. It just keeps going.
85 • #! (by linuxista on 2014-08-02 02:47:06 GMT from United States)
If Phillip moved Crunchbang from Debian to Arch it would be the ultimate.
86 • @74 Arch for old PCs (by Koro on 2014-08-02 10:19:57 GMT from Belgium)
Ok, I am giving Manjaro LXQt a try. First I tried it in VB and now I am installing in real hardware. It seems good. Too much stuff in it. The only other issue I have found is that if you choose English as your installation language you can only choose your country among English-speaking ones (well, kind off, because they include Denmark but not other Scandinavian countries or The Netherlands...). There are no other options.
87 • lxqt (by justsayin on 2014-08-02 14:47:05 GMT from United States)
You know of course that LXQt is brand spanking new and probably incomplete and unstable in a number of ways. As long as you don't expect a seamless experience, go for it.
88 • @87 • lxqt (by Koro on 2014-08-02 20:17:40 GMT from Belgium)
Yes, I knew and I know better now. After trying Manjaro LXQt and finding a few issues here and there, I moved to Manjaro Openbox, but responsiveness was not great (same goes for Semplice and Archbang).
I had read in several places that Peppermint (a Lubuntu derivative) provided one of the most responsive desktops among the distros with full DEs. To my delight and surprise, this seems to be the case. The LiveUSB was a bit disappointing, but after installing it to the hard drive, deactivating the desktop effects, removing some useless bloat and applying some of the performance tweaks (primarily from the Arch Wiki but also from other sources such this very forum), Peppermint happens to be the most responsive thing that have ever run on this laptop (apart from the Linux console).
It seems like a keep and I might even consider making a respin of my skimmed-down optimised version...
89 • lxqt (by justsayin on 2014-08-03 01:32:48 GMT from United States)
I'm surprised that Openbox on Manjaro was not a responsive desktop. I wonder what exactly you mean? RAM usage? Read times for opening apps? Recently I've gotten into i3wm. I don't know how much faster you can get, and I've been enjoying it a lot.
90 • Debian being "unstable" (by solt87 on 2014-08-03 07:01:46 GMT from United States)
I'm surprised that several people have found Debian stable to be unstable.... I use Wheezy with only two non-Debian repos (one for libdvdcss2 and another for steam), and the only stuff that ever hung up was Steam games and some 3rd party appllications. And there was less than five cases where I had to restart the whole sytem because of a crash (which again was caused by 3rd party programs).... Just last week I tried Chromium on *buntu (~Debian testing), and it was useless; whereas Wheezy'sChromium is just fine. I never really used any Arch dstro, so I can't comment on their stability, but Debian (stable) is as stable for me as it gets.
Also, why would you need the so called "recent" packages? Unless you are a developer or otherwise *really* need the newest version of a particular program, the stable repo is prefectly fine (security fixes and important features are backported.). Many everyday users couldn't even determine the version of the software they use; I doubt they need anything from the "bleeding edge".
91 • @85 (by jaws222 on 2014-08-03 07:03:30 GMT from United States)
"If Phillip moved Crunchbang from Debian to Arch it would be the ultimate."
Hmmmm. Interesting, although I can't see #! getting better, it's nearly perfect.
92 • @89 • lxqt (by Koro on 2014-08-03 07:30:19 GMT from Belgium)
Obviously, the RAM footprint of OB is much lower than that of LXDE. Now, one of the problems with this old computer was the time that the applications needed to start up. For instance, Firefox could take over 10 seconds with almost any distro (and twice that with the preinstalled Windows XP).
I tried several distros and the differences were relatively small, if sometimes noticeable. But, to my huge surprise, Peppermint is the clear winner in this department. Starting times are only slightly worse than Funtoo (a Gentoo derivative) both with default and with carefully chosen compiler flags. Also, when watching videos online, the performance was rather deficient with most distros. Peppermint is also the winner here. And this is quite remarkable considering that it provides a pretty decent out-of-the box experience (even if I have seen better).
@90 Yes everybody knows that Debian Stable is one of the most stable operating systems out there, right behind RHEL and derivatives.
93 • Debian being "unstable" (by grepnix on 2014-08-03 13:09:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
I run everything on Debian Wheezy. Desktop, Laptops and plug computer servers, I do not understand these people who claim its unstable?? Its extremely rare that I have problems. What are you people doing to make it unstable is my question?
I have used practically everything as a long term distro hopper (Yes even Slackware and Arch) and am pleased now to have found my home with Debian stable. Each to there own I guess...
94 • debian stability (by linuxista on 2014-08-03 15:10:44 GMT from United States)
Sorry, I should clarify that I was talking about Debian testing and unstable, not Debian stable, with which I've never had any stability issues. I do however, find the need for updated apps, which never fails to be problematic with Debian. For example when making ebooks I need a newer version of Calibre with certain bug fixes. I have a friend with Crunchbang Waldorf installed, and Geany only goes fullscreen and it's the old version of Thunar that doesn't allow hidden drives (and maybe tabbed browsing I can't remember). So he's stuck for a couple of years with glitches. Try to get it from testing and you need to upgrade gcc which will break the rest of the system. That's why the only Debian I use is Knoppix on a USB with permanence. Works beautifully as long as you don't try to update it.
95 • @94 • debian stability (by Koro on 2014-08-03 16:01:57 GMT from Belgium)
Adding backports to Stable is relatively safe (namely if you skip system core-related packages, such as the kernel, which in fact is normally the only tricky package in the backported repos).
If the packages you need to update have not been backported then you can mix Stable and Testing. This is a bit trickier. You need some knowledge and prudence. But many people have been doing it successfully for years. I myself had some problems with one of my graphics cards not being supported by the combination of recent Nvidia proprietary drivers and recent versions of the X server. So I updated the whole stable to Testing while keeping the X server from Stable. I used that laptop with that configuration for over two years without a problem.
Another option is building newer versions of the packages you need from source. I have also done that many times and it usually works well. Should you need a newer version of GCC to do the compilation, you can also manage that with update-alternatives.
Of course, this implies a learning curve, but it is possible.
Another option is using a Testing-based re-spin with point releases and avoiding dist-upgrading between releases...
That said, the big difference between Arch as a rolling rdistro and Testing or Sid as rolling distro is that in Arch the rolling distro is the main distro and in Debian neither Testing nor Sid are the main distros. So it is quite normal that Arch should be more polished and Testing or Sid.
96 • @91 Moving CrunchBang to Arch-base (by Somewhat Reticent on 2014-08-03 17:16:43 GMT from United States)
Sounds like ArchBang project at SourceForge ...
97 • debian stability (by linuxista on 2014-08-03 20:07:57 GMT from United States)
I have no problem with apt-pinning, it's just there always seem to be dependency issues. The one requiring a new version of gcc an wanting to uninstall the rest of my system being a show stopper. I didn't realize one could compile with a standalone version of gcc, but on the other hand, at what point is it worth the trouble when you could just install Ubuntu or Manjaro?
Re Archbang: Yes, it's just a bit less polished and tasteful, and with a much smaller community, than #!. Manjaro Openbox is the best solution right now. They should bring Phillip Newburgh on as a guest desktop configurer/designer.
98 • #! guy (by Notso Reticent on 2014-08-03 21:33:12 GMT from United States)
Philip Newborough (aka corenominal)
(Sorry, I'm a bit O-C about spelling/grammar.)
99 • @97 • debian stability (by Koro on 2014-08-03 21:47:29 GMT from Belgium)
Well, the nice thing about the free software ecosystem right now is that it covers the full spectrum between professional-grade stability and cutting-edginess.
If you need something stable for mission critical operation you have RHEL, Debian, FreeBSD (without X), OpenBSD and some of their derivatives.
If you want the latest possible version of every package and do not mind fixing one or two breakages from time to time you have Sid, Arch, Gentoo and their derivatives.
And also you have everything in between.
In the current state of things you cannot have both at 100%, but you have reasonable approximations.
The same applies to "lightweightness", versatility, etc.
100 • @93 Ditto (by cykodrone on 2014-08-04 03:19:16 GMT from Canada)
I totally agree, I've distro hoPed for years, once people are done with the other 'training wheels' distros and have a relatively good understanding of Linux, apt, etc, then Debian Xfce stable is the distro for them (and me). I don't have dependency problems like other people do. I have contrib, non-free, STABLE bpo and STABLE dmo enabled but NOT pinned, not one problem yet. I even broke down and installed the proprietary video driver blob the other day, it installs easily following instructions and it's working good (noveau was causing newly typed text to disappear from comment boxes, like on this site for example, and in forums, it was getting annoying). Other than the tiny disappearing text nouveau bug, no problems, nada, solid as a rock and totally dependable. I can do whatever I did with my old proprietary OS and more, much more. I've mixed repo 'levels' in the past, eventually the install turns in to a mess full of headaches. To the repo mixers, if constant troubleshooting is your thing, then go for it, when you get sick of it, try my setup, it's the best of all worlds, it's not so 'yesterday' but functional and stable. My computer is fast, pretty (I installed the elementary-Xfce-dark icons from github/shimmerproject), totally functional, bug and virus free, it doesn't get any better than this.
I keep the "wheezy" designation (as opposed to replacing "wheezy" with "stable" in the lines below) for more control for when Jessie goes stable;
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main non-free contrib
deb http:///debian/ wheezy main non-free contrib
deb http:///debian/ wheezy-updates main non-free contrib
deb http:///debian/ wheezy-backports main non-free contrib
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org/ wheezy main non-free
(There is no 'contrib' section in the deb-multimedia.org repo, NOTE: this is NOT an officially Debian supported repo, all of the others are)
FYI n00bs, DO NOT select 'prefer backports' in Synaptic, it's only there to resolve higher version dependency issues.
Happy computing. (:
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