 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 674, 15 August 2016 |
Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Looking at the relationships between Linux distributions is often like looking at a family tree. At the core we find a group of distributions which initially package software and make a solid base. These are projects like Fedora, Debian and Slackware. We then tend to see other projects grow from these core distributions and add their own special software and utilities. This week we turn our attention to Zenwalk, a distribution which takes vanilla Slackware and adds its own special settings, software and approach to make a more user friendly desktop distribution. In our News section we discuss developments happening in the openSUSE community, Lubuntu migrating to LXQt, Steam running on FreeBSD and PC-BSD's Lumina desktop environment reaching its 1.0.0 milestone. In the Questions and Answers column we respond to the many queries we received following the Ubuntu phone review from two weeks ago. Plus, in our Opinion Poll, we talk about the state of Devuan, a systemd-free fork of Debian. We have updated our Slovak translation and our compatible Hardware page. Plus we have added Pearl Linux OS to our database. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (27MB) and MP3 (39MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - A more Zen Slackware
 In July I reviewed the venerable Slackware distribution. Slackware is well known for its conservative nature and dependability, but it requires a few extra steps to get a friendly desktop environment up and running. The Zenwalk Linux distribution is based on Slackware and maintains binary compatibility with its parent. Zenwalk offers two advantages over Slackware, one of them being Zenwalk runs a graphical user interface by default while Slackware boots into a text console following a fresh installation. The second feature Zenwalk offers is a "one-application-per-task" approach to selecting software. Slackware does allow the user to customize installations up front, but fine-grained application selection takes a long time. By default, Slackware will dump large collections of application on the user's hard drive with a full installation taking up over 9GB of disk space. Zenwalk streamlines things a bit, providing a focused set of desktop applications and a full installation of Zenwalk requires approximately 6GB of hard drive space.
The latest release of Zenwalk, version 8.0, ships with LibreOffice 5.1 and version 4.12 of the Xfce desktop. Zenwalk 8.0 is available exclusively for the 64-bit x86 architecture and is available through a 989 MB download.
At first, booting from the Zenwalk media feels a lot like getting started with Slackware. Zenwalk asks us to supply any needed kernel parameters before beginning its boot process. We are then asked to select our keyboard layout or stick with the default "US" layout. Zenwalk then automatically launches the Slackware system installer. Since I talked about setting up Slackware in July I will skip over the details of the installer here. Zenwalk follows the same steps, selecting which partitions to use and which packages to install. I decided to install everything except development tools for my trial. Zenwalk's version of the installer concludes by giving us the chance to set up a user account for ourselves and then asks us to create a password for the root account. Afterwards, we can reboot the computer to start using our new copy of Zenwalk.
The only issue I had with Zenwalk's installer was that I did not have a partition set aside for the distribution before I began the trial. This meant I had to quit the installer, run a command line partition manager (cfdisk in my case) and then re-launch the system installer. Slackware takes a slightly different approach by booting to a command line and getting us to manually run the tools (partition manager or installer) we need.
Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - the application menu
(full image size: 977kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The freshly installed copy of Zenwalk boots to a graphical login screen. Signing into our user account launches the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. At the top of the screen we find an application menu, task switcher, system tray and sign off menu. On the desktop there are icons for launching a file manager and opening the Chromium web browser to show the Zenwalk support forum. At the bottom of the screen we find a quick-launch bar which also features an application menu. The background shows a hot air balloon flying through the sky.
Zenwalk features a fairly dark theme which contrasts nicely with the colourful wallpaper. I found some applications use transparent backgrounds by default. This can work nicely when paired with flat backgrounds, but I found it difficult to read text that was placed over the colourful Zenwalk wallpaper. Fortunately most applications make it easy to disable transparency. Another characteristic I noticed early on was that Zenwalk uses unusually small fonts. The desktop's fonts can be changed with a quick trip into the desktop's control panel under the Appearance settings module.
Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - exploring the settings panel
(full image size: 756kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Speaking of the control panel, the distribution ships with a central control panel for configuring the Xfce desktop and some of the underlying operating system. We can change the look of the desktop, adjust window behaviour and work with user accounts. The available modules generally worked well and I ran into no bugs. I did find the account manager module, which is menu driven, to be a bit cumbersome to work with compared to other account managers, but it does function properly. I also found it strange there are two configuration modules for changing the keyboard layout. I could not find a settings module for setting up printers, but we can access the CUPS printer manager through either of the desktop's two application menus.
Once I got logged in and adjusted the Xfce desktop to look the way I wanted, my next step was to install software updates. There is a Netpkg entry in the distribution's application menu and I started there. Clicking the program's entry did not produce any results. Next, I turned to the command line and ran netpkg. The netpkg command asks us to select a repository mirror from a list and then goes to work updating or installing software from the selected repository. As it turns out the software available through netpkg is somewhat limited and appears to be intended as a compliment to the official Slackware repositories. We can access Slackware's repositories using the slackpkg command line package manager.
Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - installing package upgrades
(full image size: 736kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
At least, we can access Slackware's repositories after we edit the slackpkg repository list in a text editor and select a repository mirror to use. The problem is, this might not be straight forward. I initially tried to use the vi command line text editor to change slackpkg's configuration only to be told the libperl dependency was missing and I could not launch the text editor. Next I tried a few other editors, like nano, but couldn't find any present. Looking through the application menu I found no graphical text editors. The closest thing I could find was the Geany IDE. While Geany is intended for editing source code, it will work on any text file. Of course I had to launch Geany from the command line as root in order to edit the slackpkg configuration file as Geany does not have root access when launched from the Xfce menu. Once I got slackpkg's configuration sorted out with Geany, I was able to use slackpkg to install the vi editor's dependencies, which included the Perl and Python interpreted languages.
It seems as though my trouble with text editors came about because I installed most of Zenwalk's packages, but skipped development software. Sadly, in this case, the vi text editor relies on development packages and refuses to run without them, making the development packages not so much an option as a necessity. As many popular software packages ultimately need to be compiled from source code or found in third-party repositories on Zenwalk, it turns out the user is best off installing everything (including development libraries) in order to achieve a fully functional system, even if the user does not plan to develop any software of their own.
Let's look at the software which ships with Zenwalk. Looking through the Zenwalk application menu I found it was much less cluttered than Slackware's and therefore I found it easier to find what I wanted. The distribution ships with the Chromium web browser (with Flash support), the gFTP file transfer application, the HexChat IRC client and the Transmission bittorrent software. The menu contains an entry called "Gnome Gmail" which simply launches Chromium and brings up the GMail login page. Unlike its parent, Zenwalk supplies us with the LibreOffice productivity suite. The distribution ships with the Orage Calendar software, MPlayer, the Xfburn disc burning software and a full range of media codecs. Developers will find the Glade interface designer and the Geany IDE. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is present. Zenwalk provides us with quite a few other utilities including an archive manager, calculator, the Thunar file manager and the GParted partition manager. One application helps us rename files in batches and another helps us configure which services will run in the background. Cryptkeeper is included for setting up encrypted folders, but it crashed when I tried to set up a new encrypted space. In the background we find the SysV init software (version 2.88) and version 4.4.14 of the Linux kernel.
Zenwalk Linux 8.0 - using Geany to edit text files
(full image size: 315kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
I experimented with Zenwalk in two test environments, using a physical desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. Zenwalk, like its parent, worked well on the physical desktop computer. The system was stable and my hardware was properly detected and utilized out of the box. When running the distribution in VirtualBox, I found Zenwalk was not able to integrate into the virtual environment and use my host computer's full screen resolution. As Zenwalk does not include VirtualBox add-on modules in its repositories, fixing my display resolution required installing a couple of packages from source, using the SlackBuilds recipes. I ran into one further problem with the VirtualBox add-on. Specifically, Zenwalk still uses X configuration files to set screen resolution while most other distributions configure X automatically, without the configuration file. Zenwalk's X configuration file set arbitrary limits on my display settings, preventing me from using higher screen resolutions. Removing the X configuration file and restarting X fixed this issue.
When running in either environment Zenwalk used approximately 200MB of memory when logged into the Xfce desktop. Early on I found the desktop was unusually sluggish (Xfce is usually snappy on my hardware) and my CPU was regularly chugging away at 75% usage. A quick investigation revealed the PulseAudio volume control plugin on the bottom panel was consuming large amounts of CPU cycles. Removing the PulseAudio plugin fixed the issue and my desktop became much more responsive. Of course, this meant I had to find and install an alternative audio volume control.
Conclusions
There were a few things I enjoyed about Zenwalk 8.0 and several I did not. Before getting to those, I want to acknowledge that Zenwalk is, in most ways, very much like Slackware. The two distributions are binary compatible and if you like (or dislike) one, you will probably feel the same way about the other. They're quite closely related with similar benefits and drawbacks.
On the positive side of things, I like that Zenwalk trims down the software installed by default. A full installation of Zenwalk requires about two-thirds of the disk space a full installation of Slackware consumes. This is reflected in Zenwalk's focused "one-app-per-task" approach which I feel makes it easier to find things. Zenwalk requires relatively little memory (a feature it shares with Slackware) and, with PulseAudio's plugin removed, consumes very few CPU cycles. One more feature I like about this distribution is the fact Zenwalk includes LibreOffice, a feature I missed when running pure Slackware.
On the other hand, I ran into a number of problems with Zenwalk. The dependency problems which annoyed me while running Slackware were present in Zenwalk too. To even get a working text editor I needed to have development libraries installed. To make matters worse, the user needs a text editor to enable the package manager to install development libraries. It's one of those circular problems that require the user to think outside the box (or re-install with all software packages selected).
Other issues I had were more personal. For example, I don't like window transparency or small fonts. These are easy to fix, but it got me off on the wrong foot with Zenwalk. I do want to acknowledge that while my first two days with Zenwalk were mostly spent fixing things, hunting down dependencies and tweaking the desktop to suit my tastes, things got quickly better. By the end of the week I was enjoying Zenwalk's performance, its light nature and its clean menus. I may have had more issues with Zenwalk than Slackware in the first day or so, but by the end of the week I was enjoying using Zenwalk more for my desktop computing.
For people running older computers, I feel it is worth noting Zenwalk does not offer 32-bit builds. The distribution has become 64-bit only and people who still run 32-bit machines will need to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Slackware.
In the end, I feel as though Zenwalk is a more focused flavour of Slackware. The Slackware distribution is multi-purpose, at least as suited for servers as desktops. Slackware runs on more processor architectures, has a live edition and can dump a lot of software on our hard disk. Zenwalk is more desktop focused, with fewer packages and perhaps a nicer selection of applications. The two are quite similar, but Slackware has a broader focus while Zenwalk is geared to desktop users who value performance.
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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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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
openSUSE prepares for Leap release, Lubuntu migrating to LXQt, Steam running on FreeBSD, PC-BSD's Lumina desktop reaches 1.0.0 milestone
 There has been a lot of activity in the openSUSE community in the past week. There were three new snapshots of openSUSE's rolling release edition, called Tumbleweed. These snapshots added a number of application updates and removed the LXDM session manager in favour of LightDM. "Snapshot 20160805 brought more package changes and one major uninstall. LXDM was dropped from openSUSE Tumbleweed and uninstalled in this snapshot. LightDM is being used in the environment instead and is auto-installed with a change configuration for those who are using LXDM. This snapshot provided several repository updates, and NetworkManager-gnome, LibreOffice 5.2.0.4 and WireShark 2.0.5 were a few of the many changes found is 20160805." openSUSE's more conservative edition, Leap, is nearing a feature freeze for the upcoming release of openSUSE 42.2 and last minute packages are being added prior to the distribution's beta at the end of August.
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 LXQt is a lightweight desktop environment which has grown out of a merger of the LXDE and Razor-Qt desktop projects. LXQt is based upon the Qt software libraries. The Lubuntu distribution is planning to switch its default desktop environment from LXDE to LXQt in the coming months. Simon Quigley has posted that the migration is underway: "The Lubuntu team is ready to begin the migration process to LXQt, and one of the first parts of the migration is getting an image to move to. We have prepared the lubuntu-qt-desktop metapackage and we are ready for an image. A few weeks ago, I submitted two merge proposals thanks to advice given by Adam Conrad on #ubuntu-release. On several occasions (on IRC), both myself and Walter Lapchynski have asked for feedback on the merge proposals in an effort to get the images spun up so we can take our next step, but have not received any."
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 The Steam marketplace and gaming portal has been available to Linux users for a few years now, but the BSDs (including FreeBSD) have not been able to run a native version of the Steam software. Workarounds generally use WINE to run the Windows version of Steam on the BSDs. One enterprising developer reports it will be possible to run the Linux version of Steam as a native executable on FreeBSD 11.0. The Steam On FreeBSD GitHub project provides scripts and dependencies for running Steam on the development branch of FreeBSD. The page also includes screen shots of Steam running. At this point it looks as though some more work is needed to polish the installation steps and end-user experience, but FreeBSD users may soon be able to run Steam games on their preferred operating system without WINE.
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 After several years in development, the Lumina desktop environment has reached version 1.0.0. Lumina's lead developer, Ken Moore wrote: "After roughly four years of development, I am pleased to announce the first official release of the Lumina desktop environment! This release is an incredible realization of the initial idea of Lumina - a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment meant for users to configure to match their individual needs. I hope you all enjoy it, and I look forward to working with all of you on the next iterations of this desktop!" Lumina began as a lightweight, portable desktop environment with minimal dependencies for the PC-BSD operating system. Lumina's portability and its general lack of platform-specific dependencies have caused the Qt-based desktop environment to be ported to several operating systems other than PC-BSD. To date, Lumina has been ported to Arch Linux, Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Manjaro Linux, OpenBSD, openSUSE, NetBSD, PCLinuxOS, Slackware, SparkyLinux and Ubuntu.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu phone follow-up
Following my review of the Meizu Pro 5 phone running the Ubuntu Touch operating system, many people had questions about the device. Some of these questions were posted and answered in the comments section while others came in from social media or e-mail. In an effort to make the answers public and easily accessible, I decided to collect the questions and answer them all in one place. Here they are, in no particular order.
What are the hardware specifications of the Meizu Pro 5?
For those who missed in the link in the article, information on the Pro 5's hardware can be found here. Hardware specifications for all Ubuntu phones can be found on the Ubuntu Phone lineup page.
Will the phone work on my carrier's network?
I have checked three different North American carriers so far (Telus, T-mobile and Koodo) and they were all compatible with the Pro 5. If you want to be certain, compare the frequencies the phone supports against the network frequencies used by your carrier. The phone's supported frequencies are listed on this page. Click the "Expand" button on the right to see a complete list. Your carrier's network frequencies should be available on their website or through a customer service representative.
What about GPS? The article doesn't mention GPS or navigation.
This was an oversight on my part. The short answer is GPS works and Ubuntu has multiple map apps available to help people navigate. The Pro 5 I used bundled an application called HERE Maps which works a lot like Google Maps. The phone's GPS can target the device's position and the map application can provide directions between two addresses. GPS works and, in my area at least, was accurate. I only tried navigating to two locations using HERE Maps, but both times I received accurate information from the navigation software.
The phone runs Ubuntu 15.04, isn't it past its end of life? How do you upgrade?
The Desktop edition of Ubuntu 15.04 has reached its end of life, but the phone runs the Touch edition of Ubuntu 15.04, which is still supported. The operating system is updated about once every six weeks. Updates can be accessed through the settings panel in the Updates module. The Updates module handles updates to both the operating system and individual applications.
Switching between mobile and wi-fi networks.
In the review I mentioned the Ubuntu phone would continue to use a mobile connection even when a wi-fi network was available. I reported this issue to Canonical and, as it turns out, I was mistaken. The phone's settings panel will sometimes continue to show it is using a mobile network even after the phone has switched back to a wi-fi connection. This makes it look like the phone is using mobile data, but further investigation shows the phone has really switched to the wi-fi network. Given more time, or a display refresh, the phone will properly report it is using the wi-fi network.
The phone allows you to run as root, can the operating system be re-installed if the user damages something?
The phone does allow the user to run as root (via the sudo command) which can be a dangerous tool. However, key components of the phone's operating system are protected by being mounted read-only. This gives the user an extra layer of protection they need to by-pass in order to cause lasting harm. Should you need to re-install, supported images can be found on the Ubuntu website. Installations instructions can be found here.
Where can I buy one of these devices?
Earlier this year JoyBuy was selling the Pro 5, but the phone is currently out of stock. Meizu is planning to launch an upgraded Ubuntu phone later this year. I think it will be called the MX6 and should appear on the Ubuntu mobile devices list when the phone becomes available.
What games does Ubuntu Touch have?
Games and other applications in the Ubuntu Store can be found on the uApp Explorer website.
Is there a free developer SDK for the Ubuntu phone?
Indeed there is, it is the Ubuntu SDK. Right now the SDK appears to be packaged for the Ubuntu Desktop operating system (and its many derivatives) exclusively so you may need to install a member of the Ubuntu family of distributions or set up a virtual machine for development.
Since Ubuntu is Linux, can I install other Linux distributions on the phone?
Not without a lot of work. In this case Linux refers to just the kernel, one component in thousands which make up the operating system. Anyone wanting to port a distribution onto the phone would need to make sure they have the right drivers and cross-compile the distribution to the phone's hardware. It would be a long process.
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Additional Questions and Answers articles can be found in our archive.
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
Bittorrent is a great way to transfer large files, particularly open source operating system images, from one place to another. Most bittorrent clients recover from dropped connections automatically, check the integrity of files and can re-download corrupted bits of data without starting a download over from scratch. These characteristics make bittorrent well suited for distributing open source operating systems, particularly to regions where Internet connections are slow or unstable.
Many Linux and BSD projects offer bittorrent as a download option, partly for the reasons listed above and partly because bittorrent's peer-to-peer nature takes some of the strain off the project's servers. However, some projects do not offer bittorrent as a download option. There can be several reasons for excluding bittorrent as an option. Some projects do not have enough time or volunteers, some may be restricted by their web host provider's terms of service. Whatever the reason, the lack of a bittorrent option puts more strain on a distribution's bandwidth and may prevent some people from downloading their preferred open source operating system.
With this in mind, DistroWatch plans to give back to the open source community by hosting and seeding bittorrent files. For now, we are hosting a small number of distribution torrents, listed below. The list of torrents offered will be updated each week and we invite readers to e-mail us with suggestions as to which distributions we should be hosting. When you message us, please place the word "Torrent" in the subject line, make sure to include a link to the ISO file you want us to seed. To help us maintain and grow this free service, please consider making a donation.
The table below provides a list of torrents we currently host. If you do not currently have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found here. All torrents we make available here are also listed on the very useful Linux Tracker website. Thanks to Linux Tracker we are able to share the following torrent statistics.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 223
- Total data uploaded: 41.7TB
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| Released Last Week |
Univention Corporate Server 4.1-3
The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) team has announced the release of a new update to the distribution's 4.1 series. The new release, Univention Corporate Server 4.1-3, features a number of important security fixes for OpenSSL, QEMU and Samba and also offers some new features. "The App Center has been improved in several areas and further possibilities for the migration of apps to "dockerized" apps have been implemented. The replication of directory service objects has been stabilized in numerous corner cases. The domain join of additional Samba based Active Directory domain controllers is now possible with more than 100,000 directory service objects. The app appliances have been extended further and they now allow app providers to define an own branding as well as to activate a fast demonstration mode. Testers can now evaluate the app in the appliance very fast with pre-defined settings. Configuration settings for the database management system MySQL can now be defined via UCR variables. For example apps can easier alter settings of the database system according to their needs." Additional information can be found in the release announcement and in the release notes.
SELKS 3.0
Eric Leblond has announced the availability of SELKS 3.0. The SELKS distribution is a network security operating system based on Debian. The latest stable release offers a number of performance improvements and package upgrades. "The main change in SELKS 3.0 is the switch to the latest generation of the Elastic stack. On user side this means Kibana 3 has been replaced by Kibana 4. And this really means a lot. Kibana 4 is a complete rewrite of Kibana 3 being non backward compatible on data side. So, our team had to redo from scratch all dashboards and visualizations. The result is a new set of 11 ready-to-use dashboards and a lots of visualizations that you can use to build your own dashboards. On the ruleset management side, SELKS 3.0 comes with Scirius Community Edition 1.1.10 that has support for advanced Suricata feature like xbits." Additional information on SELKS 3.0, along with screen shots, can be found in the project's release announcement.
OpenMandriva Lx 3.0
Kate Lebedeff has announced the launch of OpenMandriva Lx 3.0. The new version features the Calamares system installer, improved boot times and has been compiled using the Clang/LLVM compiler. "OpenMandriva Lx is a cutting edge distribution compiled with LLVM/clang. Combined with the high level of optimization used for both code and linking (by enabling LTO) used in its building, this gives the OpenMandriva desktop an unbelievably crisp response to operations on the KDE Plasma 5 desktop which makes it a pleasure to use. The latest release of all the KDE apps is there to support the desktop and help give you a consistent feel." Additional information on the new OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 release can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes.
OpenMandriva Lx 3.0 - running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 360kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
RancherOS 0.5.0
Josh Curl has announced the release of a new version of RancherOS, a minimal Linux distribution that places most of its functionality in Docker containers. The new release, RancherOS 0.5.0, moves the project out of its alpha status and introduces new features, including an official Raspberry Pi image. "RancherOS, the latest major release since v0.4.0. Since then, we've moved RancherOS out of an alpha state and made many changes to improve both stability and user experience. In addition to various bug fixes and support for Docker 1.11, v0.5.0 includes the following changes: On our releases page you can now find an official Raspberry Pi image which is known to work on both Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. We're especially excited about this since it offers users a cheap method of getting started with Docker and RancherOS. We'd like to thank the Hypriot team for their assistance on this feature..." Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.
Maui Linux 1
The Netrunner project has discontinued its Kubuntu-based edition and replaced it with a new distribution, called Maui Linux, which uses KDE neon as a base. The first release of the new distribution, version 1, is built on a lon-term support (LTS) base, but it is expected to provide cutting edge versions of KDE software in a semi-rolling release model. "Maui will continue as the full desktop version of the previously Kubuntu-based Netrunner line. What basically equals Netrunner+1 is simply released under the new name 'Maui 1'. Being based on KDE neon, Maui also marks the transition to an LTS base, where some parts are receiving regular updates during its life cycle (so called 'partially rolling'). The main parts which will be kept up-to-date are Plasma, Frameworks and KDE Applications, single ones like Firefox and Thunderbird, plus anything that gets updated on Xenial via backporting. This allows us to frequently release updated ISOs shipping the latest KDE software." The release announcement, as well as the project's About page have more information.
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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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| Opinion Poll |
The state of Devuan
The Devuan distribution began its existence as a fork of Debian which would provide alternative init implementations following the Debian team's decision to adopt systemd. Devuan has been maturing and releasing development snapshots slowly with the developers now close to a final, stable release of their Debian fork.
This week we would like to know if our readers have tried Devuan and, if you did, what did you think? Is Devuan a suitable drop-in replacement for Debian or is there still lots more work to do? Please let us know about your experiences in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on the status of gaming on Linux here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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The state of Devuan
| I have tried Devuan and it is ready to use: | 95 (27%) |
| I have tried Devuan and it needs a little more work: | 45 (13%) |
| I have tried Devuan and it needs lots more work: | 19 (5%) |
| I have not yet tried Devuan but plan to later: | 90 (25%) |
| I have not yet tried Devuan and have no plans to try it: | 107 (30%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Updated Slovak translation and updated Hardware page
We would like to thank Dušan Kazik for updating our Slovak translation. Several of our key words were out of date or not yet been translated from English and Kazik was kind enough to send us fresh Slovak translations.
Anyone else who is interested in helping us make DistroWatch better, please visit our Contributing page to get details on translating, submitting stories and auditing our database.
Over the past month we have received notice about additional companies who sell computers which work with (and sometimes ship with) Linux or BSD. The latest company to be added to our Hardware page is a British company called Nimbusoft.
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New distributions added to database
Pearl Linux OS
Pearl Linux OS is a distribution based on Ubuntu. Pearl uses components of the LXDE and Xfce desktop environments to create a desktop experience which looks similar to Apple's OS X desktop environment. The project calls this hybrid desktop PearlDE. Pearl Linux OS is available in several editions, including GNOME, MATE and PearlDE.
Pearl Linux OS 4.0 - running the Pearl desktop environment
(full image size: 1,453kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
Maui Linux
Maui Linux is a desktop Linux distribution based on KDE neon and featuring KDE's Plasma desktop. It was created in August 2016 as a continuation of Netrunner's Kubuntu-based "Desktop" edition, but it was re-based on KDE neon which is a more cutting-edge project with frequent updates and a semi-rolling release model. Besides providing a KDE-centric distribution with many popular KDE packages included on the live DVD, the project also focuses on integrating non-KDE software, such as Firefox, Thunderbird or VLC with the underlying infrastructure of the Plasma desktop.
Maui Linux 1 - running the latest KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 504kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
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Distributions added to waiting list
- Nolubuntu. Nolubuntu is a Fedora-based (previously openSUSE-based) Linux distribution.
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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, 22 August 2016. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Devuan (Opinion Poll) (by Okie_from_Muskogee on 2016-08-15 00:33:17 GMT from North America)
so far Devuan has not kicked a stable release out for the average armchair Linux enthusiast to use so i been using antiX which is another great non_systemD distro that is debian compatible
2 • Re Zenwalk (by EarlyBird on 2016-08-15 00:48:28 GMT from North America)
Re Zenwalk: I run Slackware as my main distro, but have one computer running latest Zenwalk. As mentioned in your review, Zenwalk releases are now 64bit only, eliminating usefulness on older PC's. Since I tend to spend a lot of time at the commandline, and compile my own software, it would never occur to me NOT to install the development tools! So never ran into the installation hassles you mentioned. Didn-t like that only 2 workspaces were enabled by default (instead of the 4 most distros default to), but that is easily fixed by editing one line.
I tend to listen to mp3's in the background while working, and noticed when using mplayer, moving the slidebar forward on a large mp3 had an interesting effect; the sound was distorted, or actually, the playback speed was altered such that it sounded like you were listening at 1/2 speed (kind of the opposite of creating the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" effect). Not being sure if this was a defect in mplayer, a problem with pusleaudio, or something else, I installed xmms. It worked flawlessly, so probably a problem with mplayer rather than a pulseaudio problem?
Another thing to note, Zenwalk uses cdrkit rather than cdrecord, which can introduce problems when compiling against programs that need cdrecord. The symbolic linking of cdrecord back to cdrkit does not resolve the issue.
Finally, while xfburn works ok, NOTHING compares to k3b for fine-grained control over buring optical media. Much as I dislike some aspects of KDE, I miss k3b, Kstars, and konquerer. Will have to check out the minimal requirements witout installing the whole KDE payload. Alternative might be to install xcdroast (if it will still compile), Stellarium, and some PROPER 2-panel file manager (anyone remember xnc, X-Norther Captain?). Considering all the work, maybe faster to just stick to Slackware and slog through to software selection during installation.
Another excellant alternative would be Paul Sherman's Absolute Linux, but last I checked, it was 32bit only (although that is what is desired for older hardware), and possibly not updated to reflect the latest Slackware 14.2. It DOES include full development tools AND checkinstall by default!
Finally, not clear what you meant in your review about the "pulseaudio plugin". I assume you uninstalled the complete binary "package", and enabled Alsa in the init scripts, or did you remove part of pulseaudio (which part?). Would appreciate clarification on the ambiguity. Thanks.
Anyway, these comments aren't meant to be critical; only to reflect my experience over the last week using Zenwalk.
3 • LXQt and Lubuntu (by Andrew on 2016-08-15 02:10:11 GMT from Europe)
I hope that Lubuntu developers will change their minds about switching to LXQt.
The whole point of using Lubuntu and LXDE is that it is very light while LXQt uses more resources than even XFCE so such a change would bring no advantage at all: it would have same features (or maybe less at the beginning) but it would be bloated and have more bugs because it's not mature.
Not to mention that LXQt uses both QT and GTK (for Openbox) so it's a mess.
LXDE is very stable and feature complete, there is no reason to change it just for the sake of change.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
4 • Re; Devuan (by Tom Joad on 2016-08-15 02:36:16 GMT from Europe)
I like @1 have been using MX-15 for quite some time. I usually jump around and would have by now only I seem to like, have gotten attached to MX-15. I can't explain it but I have kept it around.
I do have Mint 18 in stalled and like it but just haven't messed with it much. And lately, in the last week, I went back to Tails which I used for a time, lost interest and ditched.
As for Devuan, I will get around to it, maybe, some time in the future, maybe.
Personally, I think it is over kill to fork a major linux line over Systemd if that is the sole reason that is happening. I know, I know, a lot of folks have pretty strong feelings about Systemd. Maybe they have good reasons too. I don't know but I am not one who does. The whole Systemd thing has been gone over in the recent past. I am not kicking that 'dog' again as it were. I am just making a casual observation. Furthermore, if the development is taking a while maybe there are a lot of folks who feel like me. I am guessing the development crew is not as large as it would be or should be to move the project along faster given other circumstances.
All that said, I do applaud the Devuan developers for taking on what has to be a large task. Bravo and full speed ahead.
5 • Devuan (by M.Z. on 2016-08-15 03:06:59 GMT from North America)
I all ready run PCLinuxOS on my main desktop & it does not have systemd, and I run Mageia & various flavors of Mint on other machines which have or will transition to systemd after I next upgrade that version of Mint. I also have much of the best of Debian & Mint combined in my LMDE installs. I'm a bit agnostic on the systemd thing & really don't see any specific need for Devuan, though I guess others do & I hope they have the option for a good long time to come.
6 • Devuan / systemd (by linuxista on 2016-08-15 03:20:01 GMT from North America)
I actually like systemd, and I consider it a non starter for a distro not to have it. I just installed arch for a friend and didn't use Archbang, but Pacbang as a starter install, because the former uses openrc and the latter systemd. I would have normally used Archbang on my own new laptop, but went with Apricity instead for the same reason.
7 • ZenWalk (by Joe on 2016-08-15 03:58:01 GMT from North America)
Always liked Zenwalk's philosophy. I used it about 10 years ago; AFAIK, it's the last operating system installed on one of my old computers in storage. I really thought the project had died; good to see it is still up and running. Shame it doesn't do full disk encryption by default though.
8 • Re: Installing Devuan (by eco2geek on 2016-08-15 06:11:25 GMT from North America)
I've tried to install Devuan twice to an existing partition (I believe it was Devuan beta 1) and the installer could not get past the "basic system installation" stage. Same as in this comment in their user forum:
https://talk.devuan.org/t/devuan-1-0-jessie-first-impressions/46/41
So I'm waiting for its installer to be a bit more mature.
(Personally I don't have a horse in the "SysV init" vs. systemd" race as long as systemd stays the hell out of my way. For the most part, it has.)
9 • Devuan (by zephyr on 2016-08-15 06:19:01 GMT from North America)
Like to thank DistroWatch for this weeks Opinion Poll of Devuan. Particularly like to thank those who have tried Devuan and found it to be a good replacement as a systemd less distribution.
Devuan iso's and other various other distributions based on Devuan can be found here with other pertinent information concerning the Devuan development.
https://devuan.org/
http://gnuinos.org/index.php/en/
http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nelum-dev1/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linnix/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zephyrlinux/
Currently running Devuan Xfce, upgraded to ascii/testing. Very stable, fast, and error free as a daily driver.
Thanks you!
zephyr aka shortedfuse
10 • Zenwalk and Slackware (by bill on 2016-08-15 06:28:22 GMT from Oceania)
Thanks for another Slackware based review, in this case Zenwalk.
A couple of points:
- When installing Slackware or a derivative you should install everything - you chose to skip development tools which caused one of your problems. Installing all libraries is one of the reasons that the lack of dependency resolution by the standard Slackware package manager is not really an issue. If you skip some you must know exactly what you are doing, and why.
- You could, however, skip KDE when installing Slackware and just use XFCE, which cuts down on the plethora of installed applications. You always use KDE Jessie!
- If you want dependency resolution use sbotools.
A question: is Zenwalk 8.0 based on Slackware 14.2? You don't say and neither does the release announcement.
Bill
11 • Devuan_ISOs_lacking_verification_signatures (by k on 2016-08-15 07:14:26 GMT from Europe)
Perhaps I am missed something from Jesse's excellent postings at:
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20160314#tips
and
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20160328#qa
"The first thing we should do is attempt to verify the checksum file, sha256sum.txt, is valid"
A sha256sum.txt is provided for latest(?) release of Devuan from download link https://files.devuan.org/devuan_jessie_beta/ in comment 9 • Devuan by zephyr,
but "a signature file, sha256sum.txt.gpg" is lacking.
So, not secure in download, installation and testing.
12 • Maui (by Lolix on 2016-08-15 07:18:56 GMT from Europe)
Maui Linux is also a continuation of the already existing Maui OS http://www.maui-project.org/ which is listed in:
"Projects which are ready to be added, pending new release"
From http://www.netrunner.com/netrunner-lts-becomes-maui/
Blue Systems has been involved in the Maui Distro Project for the past 2 years with the goal of bringing development closer to KDE Frameworks and Plasma technology.
The Qt-, but not plasma-based wayland-shell can be found seperately under “HawaiiOS.org”.
13 • For Slackware derivatives, why not try slackel? (by Hoos on 2016-08-15 07:27:29 GMT from Asia)
For starters, you get a real GUI installer with finer control. You can choose:
- whether you want a swap partition or not (the standard CLI Slackware installer doesn't let you say no to swap and if you choose a pre-existing swap partition it reformats it - very unfriendly to multibooters),
- whether or not you want a bootloader, and if yes, lilo or grub2.
- You can choose to install grub2 in the root partition if you want another distro to handle the main bootloader duties.
There is a button to open gparted from within the installer if you need to create or edit some partitions first.
The images (live and installation) come in KDE4 or openbox versions. You get a pretty user friendly distro with graphical package manager from Salix (gslapt) and what you need for all normal tasks and graphical tools.
It's rolling, being a combo of Slackware current and Salix, so you don't have to reinstall in the future.
It has been pretty stable ever since the move to eudev took place end of 2015. I don't read the Slackware current changelogs and I just update using gslapt.
The only exception is once in a while you have to drop into terminal to install certain things like kernel and glibc packages (kind of like Level 5 updates in Linux Mint's Update Manager). For that reason, it's not suitable for total newbies. But for people wanting to get a working slackware-based distro up and running quickly and to learn more about slackware in a less intimidating or overwhelming way, it's ideal.
14 • Devuan (by Rado on 2016-08-15 07:53:28 GMT from North America)
What's the point of forking Debian into yet another distro ?! Just because systemd emerged and was adopted in a world-wide scale ?
Just accept the fact that systemd will remain, get used to it and please STOP mocking Debian and making useless forks.
P.S. That's actually the biggest Linux problem of all - forking, forking and forking.
15 • Ubuntu Phone (by mim yucel on 2016-08-15 08:29:49 GMT from Europe)
I wonder if Ubuntu Phone had "Multy Windows" capability. If not, Ubuntu should get/put this ability on their phones. (as Samsung 's late Galaxy models beginning from S4 and Note 3 onwards).
Why important : When I read some texts and meet any words which are not known by me then I wish to look dictonary etc without loosing eye-contact on previous text's look-point, and so I open an extra (second) windows on my phone's surface and suerge for the solution/answer on internet etc..(Only for this reason I have bought Samsung since it is the only device on the world-mark. I think such a phone-device submitted by Linux Ubuntu would be good prestigeous )
16 • RE: 14 Devuan (by Okie_from_Muskogee on 2016-08-15 08:31:30 GMT from North America)
forking is freedom, if some people dont want to use systemd that is their right not to use it, and it is disagreements that cause forking, if Debian wanted to minimize and prevent forking then they should have made Debian's init system agnostic so during the install the person running the install can choose which init system they wanted to use, i think there is 4 or 5 of them now, my favorite is Slackware's BSD style init system, and i like the old init.d on debian before systemd screwed all that up, i dont like systemd and i refuse to use it
17 • @14 : Looks like you're going to be burn... (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 08:32:29 GMT from Europe)
By "stark raving mad" people yelling "choice, choice, choice !" about init system. The least visible piece of software with kernel or libc.
I don't care which init system is making my distribution running as long as I can manage it easily.
Init wars is a die hard tech-like using linux or any other free software OS. Reminds me in an harder way "emacs vs vi" war. Far harder way :
http://www.zdnet.com/article/lennart-poetterings-linus-torvalds-rant/
"[...]I also have no doubt that Poettering has received such attacks. Unfortunately, that comes with being a public figure on today's Internet. I myself have gotten death threats serious enough that I've turned them over to the FBI, endless hate-mail, and requests that I be fired. The Internet has precious little civility and is all too often filled with hate and trolls.[...]"
This init war is the greatest gift to MS and Apple.
Problem is not forking, but abusive use of forking. We can sum it up this way : "I don't like theme used in this version of my distribution. I have fork it !"
OK, I'm a little extremist here, but the idea is here.
To finish, I will quote a french woman, Manon Roland which was beheaded for political reasons in 1793 during French revolution :
"Ô Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom !"
Just use google translate if you're not reading french.
Have a good day, everyone.
By the way, I have to buy popcorn and soda in order to appreciate comments this week ;)
18 • Devuan (by xcuseme on 2016-08-15 08:38:33 GMT from Europe)
Rado:
> Just because systemd emerged and was adopted in a world-wide scale ?
This never happened. No matter what you think about systemd, you cannot ignore the fact that it has been pushed aggressively with no shortage of strange episodes (the possibly false flag attacks on the Lennart guy, the ridiculous Spotify request to debian to adopt systemd followed by dropping debian entirely). The truth is out there, get documented.
19 • @16 : so what? :) (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 08:40:11 GMT from Europe)
Since systemd was adopted in Debian, we're reading the same things over and over.
"forking is freedom" : I agree. But abusive forking is freedom or destruction ? Do we need to see forks for distribution with a different theme, different end-user software provided ? Don't you think in nearly 300 distributions indexed there is not a lot of copycat, with only a different wallpaper ?
Init systems ? By order of disorder :
* systemd
* openRC (gentoo, funtoo and so on)
* runit (kinda dead)
* s6
* sysVinit
* upstart (kinda dead)
* initng (kinda dead)
* BSD-like
And maybe I forget some of them.
I could be wrong, but focusing on higher level software, like environment, browsers, office software, photoshop-like software is more important if you want to spread free software in the real world.
You know, the one with people who just want to use their computer. No need to ask why after 25 years, linux market share on desktop is something like 2%...
20 • @18 : show us urls, thanks. (by FredBezies on 2016-08-15 08:59:13 GMT from Europe)
Right. Just show us some neutral URLs about your arguments.
Do you think arch maintainers get a gun against their heads to adopt systemd ? The same for Mageia developers ? OpenMandriva ones ?
Again, this init war is the best gift for Apple and Microsoft : they can continue to rule desktop computers, eating popcorn while seeing free software people fighting for this subject.
Systemd is here to stay or not. Only time will tell. Old linux users, I mean one before 2004 will remember a fork of Gnome called GoneMe...
As long as an init system is working correctly on my computer, I will not change it.
If it goes bad, I will change it, without any problems.
I don't think, as a long time linux user - my first taste of linux was back in 1996 even if my first mono-boot only was back in 2004 with mandrake 10.0 Community edition - init system is THE subject to stick on for months and months.
End user software in order to spread free software is the way to go. But wait, I'm living in the real world, the one with people who don't care a s*** what is their OS. They just want to use their computers... It just be better if it is with free software...
What a strange idea :)
21 • Sigh (by a on 2016-08-15 09:25:13 GMT from Europe)
Poettering and his fanboys almost manged to destroy Linux with systemd, and the war isn’t over…
22 • systemd discussion (by bill on 2016-08-15 09:31:29 GMT from Oceania)
It seems that there are three kinds of users when it comes to systemd discussion:
1. People who don't care about the init system used by their computer (happy).
2. People who do care and discuss the pros and cons of various init systems (mostly happy, usually passionate).
3. People who claim not to care but angrily shout when people in group 2 engage in discussion (never happy).
When you drive over a bridge, or fly in a plane, or use proprietary software, you are blissfully ignorant of the discussions the engineers had when building the bridge, plane or software. But if you think about it, you are probably reassured that engineers discussed the various options when building these things. The difference with open source software is that these discussions are held publicly. Like scientific research.
Sorry if it upsets you, but we are not going to stop discussion. Or forking.
Bill
23 • @14 - devuan, systemd - show respect for people's choices (by Hoos on 2016-08-15 09:32:18 GMT from Asia)
I'm init agnostic like Mr Bezies. My favourite distros are Manjaro (systemd) and MX15 (Debian-based, sysvinit). I just gave slackel (slackware-based therefore no systemd) a recommendation in post 13. But I'm also impressed by Korora Gnome (it's Fedora, how much more pro-systemd can a distro get?).
However, I think it's wrong to criticise and mock people for wanting, as a matter of their principles and beliefs, to keep away completely from systemd packages. Others don't agree, fine. But respect their beliefs. No one is asking you to use devuan.
Devuan developers are not mocking Debian; they just didn't agree with the direction. So they wanted debian-based packages but completely systemd free. I can see that for them, MX15 will not be good enough because while its init system is sysvinit, there are still systemd packages that are pulled in even though they don't run the init.
Post 14 is the one mocking them for doing what they set out to do. When they took so long to release a beta of Devuan, people questioned them. Now Devuan beta is out, people are still criticising the fact that they forked Debian rather than assessing, and if need be criticising, HOW WELL they are implementing their fork.
So here's my very short assessment: I tried in virtualbox and on CD to try to install devuan. Both times I couldn't get past installation stage. I also tried Nelum in VB which is an openbox spin based on devuan. The live image ran well (looked like crunchbang/bunsenlabs in its monochrome shades) but install failed again.
So I believe it is not ready.
As for whether I would want to install it on my system even if it worked, I would have to say no, because neither devuan or nelum really offers me more than what I already have with the distros on my computer. It just doesn't stand out.
24 • Devuan (by Voncloft on 2016-08-15 10:05:39 GMT from North America)
I have done a fair bit of distro hopping recently and I have learned one thing - If you wan't it done right ... .do it yourself; that is why I will never leave Gentoo.
Binary Distro's in general will constantly leave something out, have a bug, or just not work the way I want.
25 • @21, @22 and @23 : popcorn :) (by Fredbezies on 2016-08-15 10:13:21 GMT from Europe)
@21 : so you think I'm d**k su**ing Lennart Poettering for telling developers should work on end-user software instead of fighting each other on init system ?
Weird :)
@22 : I'm in group 1.
"Sorry if it upsets you, but we are not going to stop discussion. Or forking."
Forking is a good idea. *Abusive use* of forking is the worst thing for free software. Forking for the pleasure of it, what's the point ?
Again, some free software users are blind that endless forks are just the best gift non-free software makers can get. Sigh...
@23 : "However, I think it's wrong to criticise and mock people for wanting, as a matter of their principles and beliefs, to keep away completely from systemd packages. Others don't agree, fine. But respect their beliefs. No one is asking you to use devuan. "
Beliefs ? Is free software a religion, now ? :)
I saw Devuan from the start as a "We don't want systemd(eath) init". Init freedom choice was for me added right after, in order to give a good looking to this fork.
By the way, forking a monster like Debian is not something you can do in a snap. Just remember how long it takes for Mageia developers to fork Mandriva. Something like 9 months or a year.
You talked about devuan based distributions. I tried half of them. Nelum ? Did not install correctly.
Gnuinos? Did not try it.
Refracta? What's the point with this one. Devuan or Debian and Xfce, you got nearly the same result.
I wonder if devuan team is not too small for such a big project.
"As for whether I would want to install it on my system even if it worked, I would have to say no, because neither devuan or nelum really offers me more than what I already have with the distros on my computer. It just doesn't stand out."
Can't you install Jessie, and apply these instructions instead of grabing a beta1 or beta 2 ISO from devuan ?
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation#Installing_Sysvinit
Just asking of course.
26 • @24 : if gentoo was up to date for Mate... (by Fredbezies on 2016-08-15 10:15:17 GMT from Europe)
I will use it. Until Mate is not up do date, I will stay with my Archlinux ;)
By the way, is building from source still useful with 4 or 8 core CPUs, like it was back in the days for single core CPU ?
Just asking.
27 • systemd discussion (by bill on 2016-08-15 10:28:01 GMT from Oceania)
@25 "Forking for the pleasure of it, what's the point ?"
Pleasure? Education? Choice? Research? Diversity?
I am still not sure what "abusive forking" is...
28 • @8 • Re: Installing Devuan (by Paraquat on 2016-08-15 10:47:27 GMT from Asia)
eco2geek said:
> I've tried to install Devuan twice to an existing partition
> (I believe it was Devuan beta 1) and the installer could
> not get past the "basic system installation" stage...
...So I'm waiting for its installer to be a bit more mature.
Hi eco2geek,
Yes, that problem with the beta1 installer has been mentioned a number of times, and I've encountered it too. Hopefully beta2 will fix that, but in the meantime the workaround is easy enough...
...Ignore the error message, and all similar error messages. Click back and try "basic system installation" again. The installer will actually pick up where it left off. What's happening is that the Devuan installer does a lot of downloading, and often it encounters network latency and fails to download a single file, then reports that the installation "failed" but when you rerun the last action, it downloads the missing file or files, and then completes the task, usually very quickly (a matter of seconds).
As a reward for the rather installation time for Devuan, when you're finished you will have a fully updated system, so no immediate need for "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade."
I've been happily running Devuan about four months now, and have installed it several times on several machines, each time facing the error message. But after installed, it runs rock solid.
cheers,
P.
29 • @25 - some replies (by Hoos on 2016-08-15 10:48:46 GMT from Asia)
"...Beliefs ? Is free software a religion, now ? :) ..."
Free software? Think about Trisquel.
The current discussion topic is people's opinion of systemd specifically. And for some people I believe it is almost at the level, not of religion, but politics, and you know how passionate some people can get over that. We really should just leave them be.
".... You talked about devuan based distributions. I tried half of them. Nelum ? Did not install correctly. "
That is the same as my assessment in my earlier post.
"... "As for whether I would want to install it on my system even if it worked, I would have to say no, because neither devuan or nelum really offers me more than what I already have with the distros on my computer. It just doesn't stand out."
Can't you install Jessie, and apply these instructions instead of grabing a beta1 or beta 2 ISO from devuan ?
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation#Installing_Sysvinit" ..."
Don't need to. I have MX15. :-) I'm all about convenience.
I tried devuan and nelum because I was curious. I wanted to see their progress. Jesse's question in this issue's poll was have we tried it and if so, what did we think. I gave my answer.
As for which group of people I belong to in my attitudes towards systemd, it's 1 but I'm happy to continue reading discussions on systemd even if I don't actually take part myself.
30 • @27 abusive use of fork... Self explaining or not? (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 10:56:20 GMT from Europe)
Abusive use of fork ? Isn't it self explaining?
Why forking when you only change desktop environment, icon theme, or a wallpaper? Why forking if you're using an enhanced software library?
"Pleasure? Education? Choice? Research? Diversity?"
Adding a line in your resume or your CV when looking for a job? :D
Why forking when you can sum up your fork in a page or two of documentation?
Let's fork "for a yes or a no" (don't know the english translation for "pour un oui ou pour un non" french expression). It will be so useful... Or not!
31 • abusive fork (by Bill on 2016-08-15 11:21:10 GMT from Oceania)
@30 I think you are in group 3. Lighten up man, and let people do what they want with FOSS.
32 • Devuan (by cykodrone on 2016-08-15 11:43:18 GMT from North America)
I installed it to a spare HDD to kick the tires, been abusing it for weeks to see if it can take it, there's the odd 'burp' here and there but nothing different than what I've experienced with other distros. I wish they had a forum with a bug reporting thread, or the money to donate to get one going (dang lotteries aren't cooperating, lol). Or is there a forum I haven't found?
Anyway, I want to install it to a dual SSD Raid 0 like I had Debian Wheezy Xfce installed back in the day, up to 1.1GB read/write speeds is a blast. :D My only concern is, will it still be around long enough to bother? Tearing down two other distros on the SSDs (non-Raid) to make room for Devuan is a huge undertaking, and I would most certainly want it to be a long-term install.
33 • Devuan (by scrumtime on 2016-08-15 11:45:12 GMT from North America)
I havent yet tried Devuan I have tried Antix...Manjaro RC and Manjaro systemd, I have Gentoo and Slackware and i have a partition with Void
So i try a few different init systems.....Devuan sort of lost the Non systemd impetus when other distros managed to throw out non systemd distros seemingly quicker and easier..
Personally i don't really notice any difference between the different init systems
as long as it runs when i want it its good by me
@13 I agree with your comments on Slackel always found it to be a very nice stable OS and always up to date..pity it doesntget as much attention as some of the other Slackware based distros
34 • @31 : so let's say good bye to desktop user market. (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 12:08:13 GMT from Europe)
"I think you are in group 3. Lighten up man, and let people do what they want with FOSS."
Well, what about doing a seppuku in front of everybody? Yeah! Let's continue :(
Too many choices and no choices at all are both wrong for everyone in the end.
I think free software developers needs to do some cleaning.
I'm tired of seeing unfinished distributions, or useless one like "Hey, I changed wallpaper and so I've done a brand new distribution. Let's publish it."
I saw so many "dead within a year distribution" since 1996... So many energy and resources spent for nothing in the end, besides making your CV/Resume cooler when you search a job.
Doing what you want? Why not. So, I will develop the worst distribution of the universe, publish it, and let it die slowly. I'm just using my software freedom here.
I'm 42. Been playing with linux since I'm 22. Linux only since I'm 32. And since 1996, I saw every single year : "Next year, Linux will rule the desktop". It won't happen until developers stop on fighting and help end-user software to be better.
My $0.02, from a 20 years long linux user.
PS : please forgive my written english as it is not my mother tongue.
35 • Discussions, discussions (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-15 13:00:03 GMT from Europe)
I made my peace with systemd already. In some cases it's more streamlined, while in others it's intrusive and obfuscates important details. Regardless, its virtues and vices are 100% down to preference. Times have changed and there is a much bigger focus on streamlined, presumably easy-to-use software than on the often hackish solutions of the past. Look up Taco Bell Programming if interested. Maintainability and performance matters naught, because it's a trend [GUI-heavy, streamlined software], and those are against all reason.
Forking as an expression of the evolutionary propensity of the GNU/Linux community is intrinsically beneficial to the community. However, it often gets misused, because people don't properly consider supply and demand within the community. Also, the forks we usually see are quite shallow, as they do not explore the actual potential of open-source software. Efforts get doubled and diluted into infinity. For instance, we have several init systems and a myriad of desktop environments, yet noticeably only a few get promoted (GNOME, Xfce, MATE, etc.). Why not try building a distro with runit, using Debian as a base? How about better integration of WMs like Xmonad, HerbstluftWM, StumpWM, etc.? Because it requires considerably more effort.
A lot of distros get obsessed with the easy-to-use utopia. Not the way to go.
36 • Zenwalk and Slackware and Ubuntu Touch (by Jesse on 2016-08-15 13:09:54 GMT from North America)
>> "When installing Slackware or a derivative you should install everything - you chose to skip development tools which caused one of your problems. "
I know, that is exactly what I wrote in the review. There is no point in giving the user a choice to install only certain packages and then breaking things if they do not install everything.
>> "You could, however, skip KDE when installing Slackware and just use XFCE, which cuts down on the plethora of installed applications. You always use KDE Jessie!"
You just contradicted yourself. First you insist users should install everything, then you say to skip installing KDE. You can't have it both ways.
By the way, I get a lot of comments about me using KDE all the time. This is objectively false. I use the KDE desktop in less than half of my reviews. Usually, I only use it when it's the default desktop, like with Slackware. In fact, with virtually every review I do, I simply take the default desktop environment. If people think KDE is represented more in reviews, it's probably because it's the default for a lot of distros.
>> " is Zenwalk 8.0 based on Slackware 14.2"
Yes.
>> "I wonder if Ubuntu Phone had "Multy Windows" capability."
No, Ubuntu Touch displays one window at a time. You can see previews of multiple windows in the task overview, but just have one focused window.
37 • @35 : ease of use, a bad thing? (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 13:18:33 GMT from Europe)
I agree to most of your comment.
"However, it often gets misused, because people don't properly consider supply and demand within the community. Efforts get doubled and diluted into infinity."
Not too loud... :D
"For instance, we have several init systems and a myriad of desktop environments, yet noticeably only a few get promoted (GNOME, Xfce, MATE, etc.)."
The ones you're listing are the most developers-powered ones. So, the ones which are moving faster than the rest.
"Why not try building a distro with runit, using Debian as a base?"
There is a runit based distribution that is working really good : VoidLinux. But is it written from scratch.
"How about better integration of WMs like Xmonad, HerbstluftWM, StumpWM, etc.? Because it requires considerably more effort."
WMs reminds me old 1990's / early 2000's distributions. Great time :)
"A lot of distros get obsessed with the easy-to-use utopia. Not the way to go."
There is too many "Let's seduce MS-Windows and Apple OS-X users". I agree. Maybe 30 to 50% of them will disappear within a year or two.
There is a need for easy to use distributions, and more ""hardcore"" ones.
38 • devuan (by dogma on 2016-08-15 13:41:57 GMT from North America)
Devuan has been ready for me to use. I haven't run into problems, anyway.
39 • poll/duvuan etc (by Jordan on 2016-08-15 14:18:03 GMT from North America)
Interesting approach to the ongoing systemd discussion; distros that set out from the get go to run without systemd and a distro in this case that stands out from the others not using systemd.
Devuan is a couple of years old and has not yet cracked the dw phr top 100, while PCLinuxOS is up there perrenially around 12 or 15 or so.
Yeah it's two different approaches. But PCLOS has been developed to maturity long since, and hung up systemd a while back.
40 • Devuan (by iamwhatiam on 2016-08-15 14:27:36 GMT from North America)
Been running Devuan with Mate DE for more than a year. The install had minor glitches but the distro is solid and updates are smooth. I am a desktop user coming from Debian Wheezy and grateful for choice in linux.
41 • @34 (by Alex on 2016-08-15 14:45:59 GMT from North America)
>I saw so many "dead within a year distribution" since 1996.<
True, only if you try to block this and that of the mother distro you have created your distro on. Then, you have to keep on making sure your blockades (so called configurations) are always kept up with the mother distro's updates and upgrades. But, as it was a personal project at the beginning that you uploaded the internet, and that you later lost interest in it, those distros sort of die away.
Its all about configurations, and by doing those configurations, trying hard to block the mother distro's upgrades. So, if you create a distro based on the mother distro, and don't try to configure it too much, that distro would work until the EOF of the mother distro.
If Devuan guys would make the base, and that base would move away from Debian completely, then Devuan would succeed. Debian is just a package manager and a massive repo to pull the packages from and for the package manager to package them, place them, link them in your set of folders.
BTW, why not try Nelum-Dev1-XFCE-64-Testing.iso, which is based on Devuan Ascii? It'd install in your harddisk. Nelum has Debian based distros too.
42 • Runit & s6 init systems (by klaatu on 2016-08-15 15:06:05 GMT from North America)
Wonderful:
obarun.org
The place where runit and s6 ISOs can be found...
(Based on arch)
'Nuff said.
43 • @41 : distributions, distributions, distributions :) (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 15:06:29 GMT from Europe)
"True, only if you try to block this and that of the mother distro you have created your distro on."
Too much tweaking leads to products nearly impossible to maintain :(
"Then, you have to keep on making sure your blockades (so called configurations) are always kept up with the mother distro's updates and upgrades."
So you have be to get a lot of spare time to put in your distribution.
"But, as it was a personal project at the beginning that you uploaded the internet, and that you later lost interest in it, those distros sort of die away."
There is lot of them. And also underpowered teams for distributions. I remember great project like Nasgaïa back in 2004 (or so) which suffered from being developped by a too small team.
"So, if you create a distro based on the mother distro, and don't try to configure it too much, that distro would work until the EOF of the mother distro."
The kind of distribution you can reproduce by following a small guide (less than 10 pages) using mother distribution. Not the kind of distributions which will rock the world :)
"If Devuan guys would make the base, and that base would move away from Debian completely, then Devuan would succeed."
Looks like there ""only"" taking Debian, remove systemd, block it, and replace it by sysVinit. Ok, I simplify a lot, but the idea is there.
"BTW, why not try Nelum-Dev1-XFCE-64-Testing.iso, which is based on Devuan Ascii? It'd install in your harddisk. Nelum has Debian based distros too."
Tried it in a VirtualBox session... Well, I was not very lucky when I tried to set my locale in it... And it looks like for me as a Devuan with XFce tweaked to look like MS-Windows with a single bottom taskbar and whisker to copy Start menu.
44 • @43 (by Alex on 2016-08-15 15:17:19 GMT from North America)
> "BTW, why not try Nelum-Dev1-XFCE-64-Testing.iso, which is based on Devuan Ascii? It'd install in your harddisk. Nelum has Debian based distros too."
Tried it in a VirtualBox session... Well, I was not very lucky when I tried to set my locale in it... <
Install on bare metal.
Then, review. You don't have many viewers, do you, Frederic? Only 542!
MS-Windows? What's that?!
45 • Really, Jessie? (by bulbuntu on 2016-08-15 15:57:25 GMT from North America)
Nolubuntu Come on, Jessie and Distrowatch!
46 • process management systems (by Kragle von Schnitzelbank on 2016-08-15 15:59:00 GMT from North America)
(off-topic)
47 • Zenwalk (by Sam on 2016-08-15 16:00:38 GMT from North America)
Zenwalk Linux 8.0. Rocking dependency hell like its 1999.
48 • @14 - Devuan (by anon on 2016-08-15 16:09:22 GMT from South America)
>What's the point of forking Debian into yet another distro ?! Just because >systemd emerged and was adopted in a world-wide scale ?
>Just accept the fact that systemd will remain, get used to it and please STOP >mocking Debian and making useless forks.
>P.S. That's actually the biggest Linux problem of all - forking, forking and forking.
Let me correct you, forking is the biggest virtue of linux. This way people don't have to swallow all the decisions made by a few corporate employees like Poettering (Red Hat).
Bravo Devuan keep on. Bravo also to Slackware and all distros that try to keep linux clean of that crap called systemd.
49 • @43, @45 and @48 (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 16:32:12 GMT from Europe)
@43 : bare metal or not : if an ISO is not well built, it won't work. If a distribution is busted on locales set up, it doesn't matter if it is on bare metal or in a VirtualBox session.
I thought torture was abolished... I was wrong...
"Then, review. You don't have many viewers, do you, Frederic? Only 542!"
542 views on this video, yes.
"MS-Windows? What's that?!" Just something having 90% of desktop computer market.
@45 : you're talking about this thing which ask you to pay $50 to get an ISO with a preinstalled version of Wine or Virtualbox ? :)
@48 : "Let me correct you, forking is the biggest virtue of linux. This way people don't have to swallow all the decisions made by a few corporate employees like Poettering (Red Hat)."
Oh, 48 comments to get to Lennart Poettering bashing. I thought it will be quicker.
"Bravo Devuan keep on. Bravo also to Slackware and all distros that try to keep linux clean of that crap called systemd."
Systemd is crap ? Every single software not following "unix rules" ie "one task, one tool" MUST be called crap too : X11, LibreOffice, web browsers, and so on...
What a great world... If you live back in the 1980s.
50 • Devuan (by Ian Drury on 2016-08-15 16:41:01 GMT from North America)
Installed the 32 bit lxde on an old laptop and it seems pretty stable to me
51 • Devuan and @3 (by Jose on 2016-08-15 16:57:46 GMT from North America)
As others have said PCLOS doesn't use systemd so I am happy staying with them. I'll try Devuan on another PC just to have something to play with.
According to the LXDE Wiki, (http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXDE:Questions) the LXDE developers decided to use QT rather than use GTK3. As the days of GTK2 are supposedly numbered, they had to chose.
Plans to migrate to GTK3+?
There were some plans of migration to GTK3, some components of LXDE were ported. Later (in year 2013) the GTK3 development disappointed all the developers (GTK3 appeared to be much more buggy and bloated than GTK2) therefore another toolkit was chosen for usage after GTK2 lifetime end - Qt
52 • Slackware dependencies (by Bill on 2016-08-15 17:21:50 GMT from Oceania)
@36 Thanks for answering @10, Jessie. Slackware is somewhat like Gentoo in giving the user choices, but those choices can bite. The documentation and forum repeat many times that you should install everything unless you know exactly what you are skipping and the consequences. Omitting KDE is a bit different to omitting development libraries. I usually skip KDE when installing Slackware and do not have dependency issues.
Thank you for all the reviews over 15 years!
Bill
53 • Lubuntu and LXDE (by ZKorvezir on 2016-08-15 17:29:21 GMT from Europe)
It seems the time has come to create a new Ubuntu flavor that will use LXDE.
LXDE requires very little resources and it is the purpose of its use, even with GTK2. It is super fast and consumes so little power even in old laptops.
Beside, the development of LXDE is not stopped.
Even, here is the Arch Linux group for LXDE-GTK3:
https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/lxde-gtk3/
54 • Trolls (by Buntunub on 2016-08-15 18:06:51 GMT from North America)
Yeah. Talking to you Rado, with post #14... Obvious troll bait.
The systemd discussions have and are taking place ad hominem for at least two plus years now. There really and truly is nothing more to be said that has not already been stated and restated countless times on both sides of the argument. At this point, one if either in favor of systemd implementation or not. So ends the argument and this discussion.
55 • @54 : and it will go on (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-15 18:30:51 GMT from Europe)
...endlessly
Both sides will continue to fight each other, forgetting something important : end-user softwares, like desktop environment, windows manager,
Init and kernel are for sure the least visible components on an unix-like system.
Both are tools used by the computer, not by an human... Well, I hope so :)
56 • LXDE and LXQt (by Nathan Zachary on 2016-08-15 19:11:06 GMT from North America)
Ugh, I also feel the same way about LXQt. I had originally used LXDE, and whilst I prefer no DE and instead just using Openbox, for client's machines, I tend to like LXDE. On a recent build, I switched a client to LXQt (under Arch Linux), and it's been a pretty big mess. Besides the points already mentioned here (like it being bloated by using both toolkits), it completely lacks refinement. I had a problem with the menu not displaying properly, and to get it back to normal, had to completely uninstall, find the cache directories and get rid of them, and reinstall.
I really wish that LXDE would continue development, but that seems pretty unlikely at this point. :(
57 • Same old saw again? (by Kragle von Schnitzelbank on 2016-08-15 20:57:17 GMT from North America)
Why should any process management system need quasi-religious support from brats? Or a putsch from corporates?
Why would anyone fear themselves threatened by someone else's free choice?
They aren't that hard to swap. Epoch, for one, is well-documented.
But maybe not shiny or complicated enough to dazzle?
58 • @2 (by J on 2016-08-15 21:09:00 GMT from North America)
For stuff like k3b or other software I want to use but don't want to install a ton of dependencies to get, I use a virtual machine. You can easily pass your CD drive to it and use whatever you want with a Live CD. Before VM days, I used to boot a Knoppix CD for this purpose because XP would totally screw anything I was burning (it would leave me 0 byte files after burning and no data... wtf???).
59 • @53 (by Jose on 2016-08-15 21:57:47 GMT from North America)
No development has not stopped on LXDE, it just slowed down a bunch. With GTK2 approaching end of life, the developers changed over to the QT toolset rather than "upgrading" to GTK3.
Once GTK2 reachs end of life, there will be no further support, unless someone picks up the support for GTK2.
I won't hold my breath as it is a pretty complex toolset!
60 • Devuan & Nelum-Dev1 (by Mon on 2016-08-15 22:01:33 GMT from Europe)
Writing from Nelum-Dev1 Testing, which is based on Devuan Ascii. Very nice distro and installed well. Updates well too.
61 • 58) J re virtual machones and live CD's (by EarlyBird on 2016-08-15 22:06:35 GMT from North America)
58) j - Have not tried virtual machines. Had not considered that approach, because commonly using older hardware that orginally had WinXP on them. Single core P4 with 512 megs RAM. Nowadays, that is hardly adequate to run recent bloated versions of some desktops such as KDE. Guess I should search for virtual machine tutorials and check the memory requirements. I use K3b, Kstars, and Konqueror often enough I'd want installed versions. Anyway, thanks for the suggestion.
62 • LXQt readiness (by mikef90000 on 2016-08-15 23:18:01 GMT from North America)
I've been checking out LXQt development periodically and, IMO, it is not ready for general use. Relative to LXDE there are still many missing and broken functions. I hope that the Lubuntu team doesn't jump in too quickly, or is it 'jump the shark'?
Meanwhile back in GTK land, the MATE devs seem close to eliminating GTK2 from the base DE. IMO this will let them start evolving the DE and the associated apps without having to extend a neglected toolkit.
As open source software GTK2 deosn't have an 'end of life', just that the original dev team stopped development and support in a needlessly disruptive way. It remains to be seen how much GTK3 code can / will be used for a stable classic desktop environment.
63 • Dual pane file manager (by mikef90000 on 2016-08-15 23:42:03 GMT from North America)
@2, Meant to add that pcmanfm has Dual Pane mode that works fine for me when I need it. How is this not Proper? xfe has a nice old school two panel look. If you really want a 1999 look install xfm :-).
Most other file managers have multiple tab support for when you need more compact, multiple views of your file system.
64 • 61 • 58 • DEpendency independence (by Somewhat Reticent on 2016-08-16 00:35:10 GMT from North America)
How would a virtual image compare to a FireJail-ed AppImage?
(a DE or WM is not an app, it's an intermediate layer)
One exercise could be to start with (say) a Devuan base, insert a chosen DE/WM, then add and test a common group of apps vs. firejail'ed AppImages. Should reveal dependency tangle points, yes?
.
On another topic, isn't the LX team just as likely to optimize LxQt over time, just as they optimized LxDE(GTK2)?
.
In the Zenwalk review,
Was that the vi editor, or vim?
What did you use to replace the audio function pulseaudio should have provided? (Why would it take so much cpu? Some mis-config? Would "nice" help? Or re-install?)
65 • роll/duvuаn еtс (by John Hager on 2016-08-16 01:23:39 GMT from Asia)
Іntеrеstіng аррrоасh tо thе оngоіng sуstеmd dіsсussіоn; dіstrоs thаt sеt оut frоm thе gеt gо tо run wіthоut sуstеmd аnd а dіstrо іn thіs саsе thаt stаnds оut frоm thе оthеrs nоt usіng sуstеmd.
Dеvuаn іs а соuрlе оf уеаrs оld аnd hаs nоt уеt сrасkеd thе dw рhr tор 100, whіlе РСLіnuхОЅ іs uр thеrе реrrеnіаllу аrоund 12 оr 15 оr sо.
Yеаh іt's twо dіffеrеnt аррrоасhеs. Вut РСLОЅ hаs bееn dеvеlореd tо mаturіtу lоng sіnсе, аnd hung uр sуstеmd а whіlе bасk.
66 • Devuan, Forking (by 2damncommon on 2016-08-16 07:01:24 GMT from North America)
I have been interested in Devuan since it started. The alpha ran okay but still had systemd stuff. The beta is supposed to be systemd free. I have it installed and sent a donation. Running good but needs a bit of work. People posting stuff about it being a useless waste of time is not going to deter my interest in a no systemd Debian alternative. One thing that I feel skews the poll is asking if all Linux users are trying Devuan rather than Debian users interested in Debian without systemd.
On the subject of forking. I believe a fork of SLS Linux was Slackware. Personally I don't pretend to say what distributions should or should have not been created but rather what distributions are useful for me.
I have now installed PC Linux OS on my newer hard drive to join Slackware 14.2, Devuan Beta, Manjaro OpenRC, Linux Mint 17.x, and PCBSD. It's possible these all have something in common and are running perfectly fine. Go figure.
67 • @66 Slackware Linux is 23 years old... (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-16 07:15:53 GMT from Europe)
"On the subject of forking. I believe a fork of SLS Linux was Slackware. Personally I don't pretend to say what distributions should or should have not been created but rather what distributions are useful for me."
Forking back in 1993 was not as "dangerous" as of today. They were no stable version Debian (1.1 was released in 1995) or RedHat (1.0 was released in 1994).
There were no hundreds of linux distributions.
Linux kernel 1.0 was released in 1994. So, both SLS and Slackware were using 0.something version of Linux back in 1993.
I tested Manjaro OpenRC and it worked great. Only missing point : no graphical installer. Too bad :(
I do not fear CLI installer but as Manjaro Linux can be managed with GUI only tools like Pamac and Manjaro Settings Manager, it is annoying in some ways.
68 • @Jesse Smith : the enigmatic "d" set of packages in Zenwalk / Slackware (by Hyperion on 2016-08-16 08:21:07 GMT from Europe)
In Slackware, the "d" set of packages (aka "development packages") contains not only "build time" libs : it contains languages interpreters as well, and a few "run time" things (don't ask : it's a Slackware tradition :p ).
Not installing these "d" packages will not only cause weird dependency problems : you won't have essential things like perl, python... so you won't have Netpkg which is coded in perl.
In Zenwalk : all of the ISO packages should always be installed, unless you're an experienced Slacker who knows the system better than me ;)
The Pulseaudio plugin CPU hog problem was fixed a few days after Zenwalk 8.0 release. Netpkg would have been helpful to get these post-release fixes nearly "out of the box"
Thanks for the nice review :)
69 • @67 (by Alex on 2016-08-16 10:55:25 GMT from North America)
>I tested Manjaro OpenRC and it worked great. Only missing point : no graphical installer. Too bad :(<
So what?! Don't you know how to install a distro without using a dedicated installer in Linux?
>I do not fear CLI installer but as Manjaro Linux can be managed with GUI only tools like Pamac and Manjaro Settings Manager, it is annoying in some ways.<
So go create your own Arch based distro, rather than shouting like a mad man.
70 • @ 64 DEpendency independence (by Alex on 2016-08-16 10:59:26 GMT from North America)
Self contained apps are always firejailed. They open in its pristine state always, and only look in that distro;s user configs and cache.
71 • @66 (by Scrumtime on 2016-08-16 12:18:33 GMT from North America)
Manjaro can be managed without Pamac I dont even have pamac on my manjaro machine...
you can adjust all settings in the old Arch way if you so wish..I also dont have Manjaro setting manager on my install...
I believe all of the GUI tools were implemented because people said it was too hard using CLI....
72 • @66 @71 (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-16 12:29:27 GMT from Europe)
I think the rationale behind Manjaro was to produce a less bleeding-edge and more user-friendly Arch Linux. While I appreciate the added GUIs and stuff, I too prefer CLI tools and then go with a direct Arch Linux install. It's far easier to manage that way :).
I also agree with Frederic. Since GNU/Linux already managed to establish a good reputation, forking might seem detrimental and cause fragmentation, when it's not entirely necessary. However, outside the GNU/Linux community, people mostly know Ubuntu anyway. Therefore, the amount of forking, experimentation and additional testing has hardly any impact on how GNU/Linux is perceived.
73 • Neon or Netrunner? (by Neo on 2016-08-16 13:59:49 GMT from North America)
KDE Neon has Dolphin, Firefox, Kwrite, VLC and a few apps. You can always install Krita, Karbon, an Office suite, Kdenlive, Karbon, Kate, Synaptic etc from Xenial repos. Neon always would have the latest KDE technologies, so what's the need of a FORK called Netrunner?
74 • @69 Madness, really ? (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-16 14:43:48 GMT from Europe)
"So what?! Don't you know how to install a distro without using a dedicated installer in Linux?"
Well... Just providing every month an archlinux installation guide for french speaking people on my blog...
"So go create your own Arch based distro, rather than shouting like a mad man."
Mad man ? Speaking of a missing GUI installer like Calamares - available for other manjaro flavours - is labelling me as a mad person ? It is just a missing tool on Manjaro OpenRC.
But I think doing these commands can be an answer :
1) sudo pacman-mirrors -g
2) sudo pacman -Syy qt5 calamares
3) sudo calamares
Did not try, but it might work... or not :)
If you want to promote something different than systemd - also called systemdeath - based distributions just provide *easy to install* linux distributions.
I'm telling this, but...
75 • Running Devuan (by BILL S. on 2016-08-16 15:08:02 GMT from North America)
I install Devuan Beta 1 in June and was successful at installing compiz and emerald theme maker. To me it runs smoothly with no bugs. After everything was running including things like adober's version of acoread, pithos for pandora, compiz fusion icon for ccsm, conky-all and cairo dock, I could not tell the difference between Devuan and Debia. Here is what my desktop looks like.
https://personal.filesanywhere.com/FS/M.aspx?v=8a6c6386609c71aab3
Nice work Devuan folks!
76 • 74 Madness, really ? (by Alex on 2016-08-16 15:35:30 GMT from North America)
Read your own post. Doesn't it sound like a mad guy shouting from a window?
If you don't use Manjaro, then leave it to those, who use it. Not your problem.
For those, who need to read about Arch in French, https://wiki.archlinux.fr/Accueil
77 • @76 criticizing == being a mad man ? (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-16 16:00:28 GMT from Europe)
"Read your own post. Doesn't it sound like a mad guy shouting from a window?"
So, criticizing with arguments = shouting like a mad man ? Wow !
"If you don't use Manjaro, then leave it to those, who use it. Not your problem."
Well... I do appreciate Manjaro Linux. I only noticed that its OpenRC version which is really good working doesn't provide either thus or Calamares. Maybe to shrink ISO size ?
"For those, who need to read about Arch in French, https://wiki.archlinux.fr/Accueil"
Here is what I give every single month : it is for french speaking people who doesn't want to spend time reading the french wiki and browsing it for hours.
I will never say it is perfect, but it can help you starting to know how to install Arch either in VirtualBox or on bare metal. It was at the start notes I made for myself. Then I share them.
http://frederic.bezies.free.fr/blog/?page_id=9453
Only a guide in order to help installing Arch with either Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon without having to take painkillers for headaches.
By the way, the mad man you think I am, made Calamares run and install flawlessly Manjaro OpenRC...
78 • Slackware compatible (by David on 2016-08-16 16:19:03 GMT from Europe)
For "lazy Slackers" the answer is Salix. The repository is 100% compatible with Slackware, but with dependency resolution and about 600 extra programs. You know what you're getting, since the version numbering is the same. The installation offers (1) CLI system, (2) GUI without applications, and (3) full install.
79 • Non-systemd Linux Distros (by Bobbie Sellers on 2016-08-16 16:33:25 GMT from North America)
You ask for votes on Devuan but I am using PCLinuxOS 2016.03
and testing PCLinuxOS 2016.07 (a preview with KDE's Plasma 5)
and neither of these use systemd,
PCLOS has a new slogan "Radically Simple." on the latter version
So there are other non-systemd systems to try out.
On Mageia 5 systemd is constantly giving me trouble as
it affects the booting and yesterday when I attempted to boot into
the installed distro on this machine it shut the machine off.
Later today I will try to reboot it using Super Grub2 Disk,
to try to fix it and do some updates.
But systemd and KDE's Plasma 5 are under performing and
making the distros that use systemd less reliable in daily
use as far as i can see. If you compare file trees in systems
using both systemd and SysV you can see that the systemd
trees are more complex.
bliss - (see Forking Around on alt.os.linux.mandriva, a Usenet Newsgroup)
80 • @35 Taco Bell Programming (by Chalupa on 2016-08-16 16:43:33 GMT from North America)
Here is the link for everyone: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html
This is why I love Linux. This is why Windows 10 is building in Ubuntu compatibility. This is why there are a lot of sucky developers out there (I've worked with many) because they just don't get the essence and don't really understand how anything works.
81 • @79 : Plasma is a memory eater... :( (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-16 16:51:57 GMT from Europe)
"But systemd and KDE's Plasma 5 are under performing and
making the distros that use systemd less reliable in daily
use as far as i can see."
It depends also on which distributions. Plasma is becoming a memory eater. Soon, 1 Gb on a fresh start will be the base for it.
"If you compare file trees in systems
using both systemd and SysV you can see that the systemd
trees are more complex."
More complex, sure. As complex as Plasma ? Not sure :)
82 • Devuan (by bolangi on 2016-08-16 17:19:27 GMT from North America)
I upgraded from Debian/Jessie to Devuan/Jessie by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get upgrade. Running for months without a hiccup. Everything is as before, including regular security updates.
Only issues would be related to laptop hardware, such as closing lid not initiating sleep, and some of the top-row keys (such as display dimming). I run a lightweight window manager (i3) and do a lot of work in the terminal, so not really affected by bleeding-edge concerns.
The Devuan community is helpful. The immediate goal of being able to run Debian-packaged software without the dependency graph pulling in the systemd universe has been achieved.
83 • @61, @2 (by J on 2016-08-16 17:19:38 GMT from North America)
With only 512MB RAM, VMs are probably not the way for you. Basically you are loading another copy of an operating system and need to devote your resources to it. You probably want to do the live USB thing if you can (or dual boot). Or stick with your original plan of seeing how many dependencies need to come in.
FYI, doing stuff with virtual machines isn't hard anymore. Basically, you just install VirtualBox. When you create a new machine (computer), you design it in their graphical tool. Then you can attach a live CD ISO image to it and boot. Then everything else pretty much works the same way.
As for memory requirements, it is the same as the requirement on the OS. My guess is, if you have trouble running newer versions because of RAM, a virtual machine isn't going to help. Virtual machines are better for isolating your system and installing temporary junk to keep your system clean.
It's great that you're keeping old machines alive rather than throwing them into the junk pile! However, I hope you'll be able to work with some newer hardware at some point! ;)
84 • Duvian (by chuck on 2016-08-16 17:24:14 GMT from North America)
Install was a hassle, The OS needs serious improvements as it did not work(ie: no add on hardware worked "out of the box". Lots of work need to be done to improve the functionality of this OS.
85 • Multiple Replies (by EarlyBird on 2016-08-16 20:01:14 GMT from North America)
58 and 83 J:
In my reply #61, I explained hadn't used VM's because of memory constraints, so I use the CD/USB boot technique as you described. However your reply in 83 re use of VM's was exactly the info I needed. Greatly appreciated. Thanks Now I just have to find a box with enough RAM....
63 mikef9000
On Zenwalk, it comes with Thunar installed rather than PCmanFM, but from what I recall, they look and perform about the same. They work well, but for keyboard intensive operations, both Konqueror and MC are more efficient.
64 Somewhat Reticent
Re this weeks Zenwalk review and my post no 2, checking the installed packages in Zenwalk (either from pkgtool, or looking at contents of /var/log/packages), no sign of VI or Elvis, but do see VIM-7.4 installed. As for the audio problems, since xmms worked flawlessly, I knew the problem had to be mplayer settings and/or pulseaudio. There is an option in setup/pkgtool to rerun init scripts where there is an option to enable/disable pu;seaudio and alsa. However I simply edited their permissions. Made /etc.rc.d/rc.pulseaudio non-executable, and made the /etc/rc.d/alsa settings executable. Then went back to mplayer audio settings, and toggled to use alsa instead of pulseaudio. Now everything is running flawlessly. Hope that answers your questions.
86 • Devuan Poll (by Ozi on 2016-08-16 21:22:18 GMT from Oceania)
It would be useful to know what distro the people in this group use, as it is the largest proportion of the votes.
(I have not yet tried Devuan and have no plans to try it: 643 (55%))
The poll is meaningless without an understanding of this group.
87 • The state of Devuan (by jonathon on 2016-08-16 22:10:10 GMT from Oceania)
I have been enjoying Devuan derivitives for a while now, mostly Star and Refracta's Devuan based version,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linnix/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/files/unofficial_devuan_live/
I've also found equally as stable and enjoyable, Zephyr and Nelum
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zephyrlinux/?source=directory
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nelumbang.nelum-os.p/?source=directory
The original Devaun has an installer that pulls in live packages so, unfortunately, due to the way I connect ($) and the fact that I am still a "Distrohopper" tragic, I don't use it.
I don't hate SystemD, I'd like both realities to do well, more options build a stronger base (?)
Bye for now, Thank you DistroWatch...
88 • State of Devuan (by B. on 2016-08-16 23:25:07 GMT from Europe)
Last time I checked the devuan repositories[0] the only development I saw was just a bunch of s/--enable-systemd/--disable-systemd/ in the debian/rules file of the packages (and some rebranding).
Claiming that devuan is pro-choice is a non-sense, they are just anti-systemd and they are removing features.
[0]https://git.devuan.org/groups/devuan-packages
89 • Devuan (by argent on 2016-08-17 00:16:06 GMT from North America)
Currently running Devuan Xfce 4.6 ascii/testing. No errors, no problems and at boot to login running 185mb of ram. Very impressed with Devuan, much like running wheezy again.
Also have zephyr openbox installed, upgrade to ascii/testing and flawless, like and appreciate the simplistic approach and minimalist appearance. Very good choices for default apps that I also run in Debian. Zephyr also utilizes a welcome-screen which is very improved, similar to many that I used with other distros like CrunchBang and VSIDO.
Star is another Devuan based distro which has i3 WM, very nice simplistic layout with the current i3 - 4.12 configurations. Particularly enjoy this distro because it is a tiling window manager with custom configs. Anyone who is wanting to try i3 and fully functional OTB, this is it. Star also uses a custom welcome-screen and offers a plethora of addition apps for the users wants and needs. Highly recommend this distro!
Don't believe this is a Debian versus Devuan issue, nor a fight against systemd or as many has posted systemd(eath).
It is about choice folks, and keeping the FOSS ideals, concept of free and open source software. Lets not forget why we all ended up running Linux.
Many thanks to Jessie and DistroWatch for allowing to take a look at the upcoming development of Devuan, especially what the users are saying about it!
90 • Devuan (by Someone on 2016-08-17 06:47:11 GMT from Europe)
@88: I agree: the "pro-choice" self-branding of Devuan came about because they realize that a distribution that just exists for "being against something" instead of "being for something" doesn't look good and isn't motivating.
However if you check their mailing list or IRC channel, one quickly realizes that they are just against systemd, not actually for choice (or anything): it's just endless attacks against systemd and personal comments about its author.
Take a look at https://git.devuan.org/devuan-editors/devuan-art/issues/13 for example: a discussion about a sticker starts with the proposal "keep systemd outside", then it is noted that they are "focusing on user freedom not being anti-systemd" (but still are anti-systemd).
Maybe they are right about a distribution that is just "against" something instead of "for" anything is doomed to fail? Maybe that is why they never seem to be able to gather any developers and actually produce a stable release, despite so many plans to have it done months ago? :)
91 • Ubuntu Phone (by moocan on 2016-08-17 08:30:20 GMT from Europe)
If Ubuntu release a phone with physical keyboard as BlackBerry Classic or BlackBerry Priv .... I will order one !
@Ubuntu please think about people who love real keyboard on phone !!!
Kind Regards
92 • Devuan (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-17 08:45:53 GMT from Europe)
I once talked to some Devuan devs on their IRC channel and as far as I know, they're not anti-systemd anymore as that was only the original drive and shouldn't be treated as a raison d'etre of Devuan. The main goal (per my understanding) is to keep Devuan being Debian the way it used to be pre-systemd. Different other (besides SysVinit) init systems were discussed, but only on purely academic-experimental grounds.
The reason why Devuan is not garnering as many supporters as one might anticipate has not so much to do with being "for" or "against" systemd, but rather sheer pragmatism. Only veteran admins really care what init system is in use, unless a particular one causes headaches. The reason is fluency in Bash scripting and fondness of 'Taco Bell programming' principles. Alas, there are less and less of such people nowadays, because the new ilk usually prefers GUIs as they don't want to spend time understanding the underlying basics of UNIX :).
Ha, this sort of ticks me to give Devuan another chance.
93 • Devuan (by Someone on 2016-08-17 10:14:46 GMT from Europe)
@92: So what else is the reason for Devuan's existence than being "anti-systemd"? Being the "Debian pre-systemd" sounds pretty much like "anti-systemd" ;)
But they certainly shouldn't lack manpower according to their own talks. They claim to have around 500 "active developers" (see the slides at https://youtu.be/uEyUVmdKIEI?t=8m17s). Though that claim probably has about as much credibility as their release schedules (according to which their *next* release should already be out now, see 16:45 in the video above).
That's not the only WTF around the (self-proclaimed) "veteran" movement. Devuan is a whole cluster of WTFs for any experienced sysadmin or developer :) Their month-long misunderstanding of HSTS (which made their download site inaccessible to many users, even when they didn't forget to keep the SSL cert valid) or their misunderstanding how a Debian repository works are somewhat entertaining. Not to mention their "arm-sdk" which apparently never even considered the need to update a kernel (they just include a random version per build and architecture and don't bother with the possibility of having to update the kernel an installed system for, say, security fixes, nor with providing source for the binaries they distribute).
A lot probably can be explained by the fact there is not a single person involved that has previous experience of working on a distribution (and not just a live image which I understand they have some knowledge of).
And that is just the technical side. Their social interactions are also... interesting ;)
94 • Devuan (by slick on 2016-08-17 12:25:34 GMT from North America)
@ someone?: Not surprised that this diatribe of unsupported mentioning (non-factual) is only supported by one You Tube commentary. The rest is just anti-Devuan ramble. Every distribution listed here on DistroWatch has seen and met their growing pains. Devuan is no different.
Devuan offers no threat to anyone not wanting to use it, or participate with it in any sense or form. Do believe the level of excitability in your post is unwarranted and puzzling.
Incidentally the development team numbers are right on and the seasoned, cream of the crop of Debian walked out and began their fork of Devuan. Debian has suffered because of this and has abandoned many development projects such as live-build. Devuan as Debian is a global initiative and collaboration.
The reason for not wanting to develop, maintain, or run on an individuals machine rest with those individuals, their choice. Have noticed with most Devuan based developers that they offer both Debian and Devuan for downloads. Don't believe the anti-systemd paranoia exist, but an occasional remark has been made that there is absolutely no need for systemd other than the obvious!
Believe Andy Mender was sincere and clear that the Devuan project is about being pre-systemd and not anti-systemd. However believe they need to remove all traces of it.
Perhaps you could give Devuan a try, has a simple graphical installer, and if you need help with formatting a drive there are plenty of forums or ask right here. Linux users are always ready to help those who need assistance!
Thank you DW and Jessie!
95 • systemd (by Linux Apocalypsis on 2016-08-17 13:43:13 GMT from Europe)
Quick fact: systemd is not an init system. It is a administrative system layer that includes an init system in addition to an ever-growing number of other functionalities. Its goal is to control in a centralised manner pretty much all the underlying OS processes.
What I would like to see is a systemd-free Ubuntu derivative.
96 • LXDE and Comment 3 (by Willi-amp on 2016-08-17 14:13:45 GMT from Europe)
I do so agree with Andrew, 3. LXDE is very satisfactory and gives me all that I need. Steady as a rock it doesn't bounce, jump, flash or fade away like some others that are described by one reviewer as 'a modern feel'. Andrew is also correct when he says QT is a mess. Designed by a committee it is a camel compared with a racehorse. One trouble is that the new generation of distro compilers follow the trend and copy each other rather that give users like myself what is needed. How many have spent three months using QT and DE daily, before coming to a decision? What do they know about it? It is the same with '64 bit only', they don't think it through. I have to use a two-year-old distro in order to avoid the upgrade which kills it. There is hope, try Sparkey.
97 • Devuan (by Someone on 2016-08-17 16:08:05 GMT from Europe)
@94: I'm sorry that you find a video of a talk by a Devuan developer at a technical conference to be "non-factual" and "diatribe".
But talking of "non-factual": any sources for your claim that "the seasoned, cream of the crop of Debian walked out and began their fork of Devuan"?
Right, there is none as Devuan was started by people *not* involved in Debian, nor is there any involvement in development by (ex-)Debian people.
"Perhaps you could give Devuan a try, has a simple graphical installer, and if you need help with formatting a drive there are plenty of forums or ask right here."
Yes, the installer should be okay: it's the Debian installer after all; just with offline installation not working (planned to be fixed in Beta2 in the next few months as I understand).
98 • Devuan (by minnesotags on 2016-08-17 18:34:59 GMT from North America)
I have run at least 30 hardware server, laptop and VM Devuan machines for two years now. I have never had a Devuan specific problem, aside from a few installer problems. Which is about the same level of success/failure I had with Debian Wheezy and the handful of Debian Jessie installs I had.
Like a couple other folks, I'm typing this from a Devuan i3 WM laptop. An old one, it used to run Vista (ouch!).
The main thing I appreciate about Devuan is not having to learn an entire new set of configuration techniques and software/networking bug hunt issues.
People who hate on Devuan keep saying "if the systemd init system isn't broken, why change it." Well, yeah, exactly, if the init system wasn't broken, why change it? Seems like all it did was make a whole lot of work for people to learn new syntax.
The whole init freedom is exactly that: if you want Debian with systemd, use Debian. Nobody is stopping you or cares. But if you want Debian packages without systemd, use Devuan, because as of Stretch, Debian is dropping support for anything but systemd. So, that is choice, right? Without Devuan, you wouldn't have a clear choice, you wouldn't have freedom.
Regarding forking, good grief, you think if people didn't work on a fork they wanted, that they would work on supporting your specific software for you? Maybe they just wouldn't contribute at all.
99 • @86 - Devuan poll (by far2fish on 2016-08-17 19:20:24 GMT from Europe)
> It would be useful to know what distro the people in this group use, as it is the largest proportion of the votes.
> (I have not yet tried Devuan and have no plans to try it: 643 (55%))
> The poll is meaningless without an understanding of this group.
I think one of the closest answers to your question would be to look at the poll archives. In particular a poll called "Package manager":
APT: 1460 (56%)
DNF/YUM: 198 (8%)
Nix: 18 (1%)
Pacman: 556 (21%)
Portage: 80 (3%)
Urpmi: 39 (1%)
Zypper: 113 (4%)
Other: 156 (6%)
Devuan aside, the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint family is obviously popular, and so is Arch and its descendants.
100 • Devuan (by RJules3 on 2016-08-17 19:35:34 GMT from Europe)
Devuan Jessie is still in Beta status but you can install it without problems on an AMD64 architecture. The xfce desktop environment is fit to support your daily work. After using Devuan Jessie (Mate desktop environment) and Devuan Ascii (xfce desktop environment) for some months I don't see any reason going back to a different operating system.
101 • Devuan (by Mon on 2016-08-17 20:45:29 GMT from Europe)
Devuan Ascii would not be connected to Debian, at least that's what the Devuan devs say. Maybe, Distrowatch should make a review of Devuan or any of the live isos?
102 • Devuan (by slick on 2016-08-17 23:37:08 GMT from North America)
@ 95 Linux Apocalypsis: A systemd-free Ubuntu would be an excellent idea for development. Will not even install Ubuntu in it's present state to a USB drive, but would welcome and test a systemd-free Ubuntu fork.
Devuan has proven to be an exceptional distribution with the best development currently with Linux, dispite what some of the anti-Devuan trolls have claimed with a futile vengeance.
Would certainly welcome and enjoy trying Ubuntu systemd-free without a Gnome DE would be ideal.
Linux is all about choice, think you landed a brilliant suggestion!
103 • Been using it... (by nixer on 2016-08-17 23:59:22 GMT from North America)
I have been using it since April of 2015 when I installed it by way of a bootstrap. I use it installed on a desktop, htpc multimedia, and a laptop. I also use it in server systems, both physical vps, with one being PCI compliant. I have yet to use a linux system that was flawless, but Devuan is more than "usable" in its current "beta" state.
I use it because Devuan is what Debian was.
104 • Devuan (by argent on 2016-08-18 00:12:37 GMT from North America)
Would like to offer some interesting reading, may explain to many the reason behind the forking of Debian, and the existence of Devuan, Openrc and others.
There is a massive and effective exodus from systemd. Please take time and read the articles and emails and understand the ultimatums from the responsible groups that help created the anti-systemd phenomena.
http://systemd-free.org/
There is a good solid reason and initiative for systemd-less development!
Thank you
105 • 99 • package management survey (by far2fish from Europe) (by Kragle on 2016-08-18 00:26:42 GMT from North America)
Oddly, the first thing that comes from memory is using APT in an RPM-based distro ...
106 • Pulse=Systemd (by imnotrich on 2016-08-18 04:11:42 GMT from North America)
Remember that fiasco that was Pulse audio? Forced on us users long before it was ready, with Pulse fanboys trying to claim the myraid of bugs were user error? Pulse still has some major issues/incompatibilities even now many years later.
So now we have systemd, being foisted on us in a similar fashion. Understandably, people who use Linux to get work done are going to be a bit gunshy, we don't have time to experiment, write code, spend thousands of hours with Dr. Google looking for workarounds.
I know it's too late for most folks but if I ran the zoo I would not force people to switch init systems against their will. At minimum, all distros should have systemd and non-d versions for the next 10-15 years, until we have some assurances that systemd actually works as intended. Or more likely fails miserably, in which case we will still have options/choice.
Isn't choice what Linux is about?
107 • @106 and others : choice? How many crimes in your name? (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-18 04:38:43 GMT from Europe)
I've read last comments, and I'm asking myself how many people used linux distributions 10 or 15 years ago?
How many used them before there were Xorg but xfree86, early desktop environment like KDE 1 or 2, Gnome 1.x?
@106 said : "At minimum, all distros should have systemd and non-d versions for the next 10-15 years"
By the way, do you have any page listing pulse audio bug in 2016? I'm using it since it was introduced back in 2008. It was buggy as hell back 8 years ago. But today?
"I know it's too late for most folks but if I ran the zoo I would not force people to switch init systems against their will."
How many users think init system is THE software to choose? How many prefer to choose an environment, an office suite or a browser?
"Or more likely fails miserably, in which case we will still have options/choice."
If you said so. Failed init system ? Upstart for example which was only used by Ubuntu and ubuntu based distribution and RHEL 6.x?
Do you remember state of the art distributions in 2006 ? For example, just download Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, the good old dapper drake release. I wonder if you won't miss some little things like ext4, hardware support and so on.
@104 about systemd-free : Manjaro OpenRC? Why not? Too bad Calamares is not provided in order to help installing in a graphical way this distribution. I'm not afraid of cli installer, but are we not in 2016?
If you want to an easy to use installer offering more control than cli installer? Just type this in Manjaro OpenRC live terminal :
sudo pacman-mirrors -g
sudo pacman -Syy calamares
sudo pacman -S qt5-base qt5-svg
You should have calamares listed in whisker menu. Welcome back in 2016.
Since 1996, I've been using distribution. My computers used sysVinit based init, upstart one and systemd one.
I've played with OpenRC based distribution and see no big differences, besides configuration files tweaking.
Just try this. Install both Manjaro Xfce version (systemd and OpenRC) in VirtualBox. Add missing software in Manjaro OpenRC (like LibreOffice for example or even Steam).
Boot them both in front of an user and tell him / her to launch a browser, install a package, launch a steam game, etc...
Besides artwork and no plymouth for OpenRC version, an user won't see a lot of differences. Both are usable and can be managed using both Pamac and Manjaro Settings Manager.
108 • Lubuntu and LXQt (by MKDBoy on 2016-08-18 06:02:34 GMT from Europe)
Here are some of my comments about LXDE and LXQt:
1. Basically LXDE and LXQT being developed by the same team.
2. LXDE is SUPERIOR in performance and power consumptation.
3. GTK2 will be used for a long time in the Linux world.
4. LXDE is still under active development. Version 0.9 of LXPanel (one of main components of LXDE) is in preparation.
https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/35179918/
5. Currently LXDE-GTK3 is stable for at least as LXQT 0.10. The next versions of LXDE-GTK3 will be even more stable.
6. Because of point 2, LXDE will be used for a long time.
7. There is a lot noise about LXQt. LXDE is quiet because is PROVEN and STABLE.
8. If Ubuntu discontinue support for LXDE, there is a lot of other distributions that will continue to use and support LXDE. My favorite is unofficial Linux Mint 18 LXDE:
http://www.linuxmintusers.de/index.php?topic=35364.0
It is on German, but you can easily switch on English language.
109 • @109 : About Lxde/LXQt (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-18 06:47:52 GMT from Europe)
I agree for nearly all your points, but not on one.
"3. GTK2 will be used for a long time in the Linux world."
Hmm. Besides Gimp, which big software is still based on gtk2?
Mate-Desktop is moving to gtk3, both LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox already moved.
So, gtk2 still here for a long time? It is 14 years old already, gtk 2.0 was released back in 2002.
Also, LXQt is too young to be as usable as Lxde. It is missing some core tools, like a lightweight terminal emulator in QT or a lightweight text editor like Mousepad.
I wonder when LXQt 0.11.0 (or whatever release number) will be released. LXQt 0.10.x is 9 or 10 months old.
110 • LXDE and Devuan (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-18 07:41:33 GMT from Europe)
Just yesterday I installed Devuan on an aging Intel MacBook 2008 laptop. Besides some minor setbacks with sudo and wpa_supplicant, which I solved in minutes, everything worked perfectly fine! It seems more snappy than the former sysVinit Wheezy and I'm not bothered by older software versions at all :). Keyword "stable" here. All for software freedom I'd say :).
I'm not sure what the deal with LXQt, gtk and LXDE really is. As 109 mentioned, many applications and libraries already moved to gtk3 without issues. Why would migrating LXDE to gtk3 prove problematic? Sounds a bit biased.
Also, I think moving Lubuntu to LXQt it not a good idea at all. Due to directory and file naming transitions things already started breaking and I don't see LXQt as stable enough. Not to mention that it's way heavier than LXDE...
111 • @110 lxde-gtk3 issues. (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-18 09:57:09 GMT from Europe)
"I'm not sure what the deal with LXQt, gtk and LXDE really is. As 109 mentioned, many applications and libraries already moved to gtk3 without issues. Why would migrating LXDE to gtk3 prove problematic? Sounds a bit biased."
There are some opened issues related to lxde port to gtk3. Found on archlinux wiki, and still opened :
https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/769/ (gpicview)
https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/768/ (lxapparence-obconf)
https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/803/ (lxlauncher)
https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/773/ (lxpanel)
Mate-Desktop port to gtk3 started around Mate-Desktop 1.10 and is nearly complete in development version of Mate 1.16. I'm using an homemade version of Mate-Desktop 1.15.1 with gtk3 and it runs great on my Archlinux.
It will be great to see a complete port for lxde to gtk3. And also for xfce, which is the last complete environment to be only based on gtk2.
112 • @111 lxde-gtk3 issues (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-18 10:12:55 GMT from Europe)
Thank you kindly for the links. I actually used mate-gtk3 on Arch Linux :).
I think moving LXDE to gtk3 instead of going for the heavier LXQT is problably a less troublesome thing to do. I understand LXQT could be a lighter cousin of KDE, but I escaped from Windows to UNIX explicitly because I wanted to avoid heavy desktop environments.
Looking forward to Xfce migration to gtk3! :).
113 • @107 Pulse Audio Bugs in 2016 (by Freddie on 2016-08-18 13:49:51 GMT from North America)
Um... read this week's review. Jesse ran into a problem with Pulse Audio.
114 • devuan (by c.s. on 2016-08-18 14:41:50 GMT from Europe)
I've been using devuan with i3 for some time now, and I'm no longer looking for another distro. I do a dist-upgrade once in a few months, and I had not a single problem. Everything runs as expected. I like it. I trust it.
115 • @113 : my bad... Did not read the distro review :( (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-18 15:08:43 GMT from Europe)
Oops. Looks like pulse audio volume control was not working very well with Zenwalk.
PulseAudio was added late in Slackware 14.2 developement process. Maybe too late ?
We are far away from what we had back in 2008 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron :)
116 • Ubuntu without systemd and LXQt (by Linux Apocalypsis on 2016-08-18 17:16:19 GMT from Europe)
Ubuntu without systemd cannot be based on Gnome because it depends on systemd. Maybe it is the same for Unity. I do not know about KDE. I guess that the best option right now would be Mate.
Qt5 is heavier than Gtk+2, yes it is, but the question is: is it heavier than Gtk+3? I doubt it. Another advantage of Qt is that, in a way, it was conceived with mobile devices in mind.
117 • @109 : About Lxde/LXQt (by ZKorvezir on 2016-08-18 17:27:01 GMT from Europe)
For GTK2 you are only partly right.
Yes GTK2 is 14 years old, but it is still maintained.
The latest version is 2.24.30 from 05-Mar-2016:
https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/2.24/
And most important GTK2 is PROVEN toolkit which works excellent.
I don't see the point in that how old is this toolkit, when is good designed and is steel mainttained.
So for me LXDE-GTK2 works perfect.
118 • @105 package managers (by far2fish on 2016-08-18 17:43:27 GMT from Europe)
True..I had completely forgotten all about APT-RPM and PCLinuxOS, which is one of the major distros I have never had a change to try,
119 • @115 : ""my bad... Did not read the distro review"" (by Hyperion on 2016-08-18 18:33:43 GMT from Europe)
As I wrote above (@68) : the pulseaudio panel plugin's CPU hog problem (not a pulseaudio daemon problem) was solved a few days after the 8.0 release. It was 100% GTK3 related and had nothing to do with the pulseaudio daemon. I think pulseaudio is a nice addition to Slackware, a "must have" on laptops to switch between internal sound devices and Bluetooth devices (which seems to be a widely practiced sport nowadays).
120 • Devuan (by anonymous on 2016-08-18 19:26:54 GMT from Europe)
Installed Devuan beta on a Raspberry Pi 2 B without any problems and it works flawlessly.
121 • Nolubuntu (by far2fish on 2016-08-18 19:36:28 GMT from Europe)
I wonder if Canonical trademark layers read DW...
In addition to the name, The old nolubuntu logo is a complete ripoff.
The new logo also seems very familiar, but I can't place it.
122 • Poll results (by Jesse on 2016-08-18 20:26:12 GMT from North America)
The database file which stores poll results ran into some corruption today and I had to restore it from backup. That is why the Devuan poll results have been reset to an earlier point in the week. Everything else, I am happy to report, was unaffected.
123 • @116 (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-18 21:52:04 GMT from Europe)
"Qt5 is heavier than Gtk+2, yes it is, but the question is: is it heavier than Gtk+3? I doubt it. Another advantage of Qt is that, in a way, it was conceived with mobile devices in mind."
How efficient and resource-hungry qt5 is in comparison to gtk3 is impossible to test, unfortunately.
Regardless, I don't understand how 'it was conceived with mobile devices in mind' can be treated as an advantage. You mean, it's designed for smart phones or has some additional optimizations for the Intel Atom processor series on lighter notebooks? Otherwise, I see it as just one more GUI-drawing toolkit, full of 'shiny' at that :P.
124 • @117 @119 gtk2 and gtk3... Long story ;) (by Frederic Bezies on 2016-08-19 07:37:39 GMT from Europe)
@117 : I know last point release of gtk2 was made on march 2016. But for how long it will be maintained ? Until The Gimp fully switch to gtk3 ?
It is really old now. I think besides gimp, deadbeef and libcanberra, there is no software on my computer depending on gtk2. Firefox, Mate-Desktop, LibreOffice, Gnome-Mpv ? All are gtk3 based now.
Lxde will in the long run move to gtk3, in order to get a really supported version of gtk.
@119 : thanks for the info. Another "pulseaudio is crap" nail in the coffin, so :D
125 • Devuan (by Paschalis Sposito on 2016-08-19 08:09:58 GMT from Europe)
I had a short testing on Devuan Stable under Virtualbox..
I liked the total feeling of the Desktop (MATE), the latest kernel form Backports, the Firefox-ESR Channel, which reminds me the days of CentOs...
Some more effort should be done in some packets i.e. pk-update-icon & packagekit-updates, in order to become more Desktop oriented.
126 • systemd - Wikipedia is wrong? (by Greg Zeng on 2016-08-19 09:54:09 GMT from Oceania)
Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/systemd
"systemd is an init system used by some Linux distributions to bootstrap the user space and manage all processes subsequently"
... Should now be: "most Linux distributions" ?
"They wanted to improve the software framework for expressing dependencies, to allow more processing to be done concurrently or in parallel during system booting, and to reduce the computational overhead of the shell."
Seems this claim is easily quantified, so tested. Where is the evidence, for and against?
127 • 126 [Wikipedia entry], etc (by Kragle on 2016-08-19 13:36:24 GMT from North America)
Perhaps they should substitute "entwining" for "expressing"?
Wikipedia entries are vulnerable to politics ...
.
Wasn't Slackware driven to PA by bluez's dependency? Would anyone have bothered with pulseaudio if ALSA (or OSS) had been well-documented, up-to-date and easy to use?
.
Is one of gtk3 design goals to drive replacement of older hardware? Audacious and WireShark seem to prefer Qt, their port ambitions are not alone
128 • @127 (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-19 14:07:52 GMT from Europe)
Yes, Slackware switched to pulseaudio for sound governance, because of the hard dependency in bluez v5.
ALSA is relatively well documented and OSS, as its ancestral architecture even more so. FreeBSD uses a modified version of OSS (historically, the first UNIX OS to sport such 'advanced' sound management), making managing sound devices extremely simple. Everything is handled via /boot/device.hints, sysctl and the kernel-space drivers. Hot-plugging and grouping is much more reliable than the way PA does it. The only downside is the necessity to read the documentation and writing scripts for generating initial configs.
129 • @127 • 126 [Wikipedia entry], (by mandog on 2016-08-19 14:24:06 GMT from South America)
s one of gtk3 design goals to drive replacement of older hardware? Audacious and WireShark seem to prefer Qt, their port ambitions are not alone
According to the Wiki audacious is gtk its certainly uses a GTK or winamp interface so is the wiki wrong
130 • pulseaudio & systemd (by Hyperion on 2016-08-20 06:55:06 GMT from Europe)
@127 : bluez dep has been the declic, but anyway it's a useful change imho. As far as I know there's no way to instantly switch, without any configuration, between several new bluetooth devices without PulseAudio (maybe I missed something...)
@systemd and friends : imho, subsystems that have daily interaction with the user need an abstraction layer (ie : remote sound devices). Subsystems that don't have any interaction with the end user : can live without it. Between 2 equivalent solutions : the simplest is usually the best.
131 • Devuan (by nolinuxguru on 2016-08-20 07:32:54 GMT from Europe)
I have been using Devuan as my main Distro ever since "they" sabotaged Debian 7. I no longer have any interest in the systemd-sysvinit debate. Anyway, I don't use sysvinit, having replaced it with the tiny sinit.c [Dimitris Papastamos, sin@2f30.org] and about 120 lines of sh script. I use the Openbox window manager as desktop replacement. The days when I cared about the latest KDE, Gnome, XFCE4 or exen LXDE are long gone.
132 • @131 Sinit (by Alex on 2016-08-20 08:35:35 GMT from North America)
Interesting!
Could you give a how-to uninstall sysvinit in Devuan and install sinit? Much appreciated.
133 • sinit for Devuan (by nolinuxguru on 2016-08-20 10:22:47 GMT from Europe)
@132 I wrote a paper on the Devuan web site [https://talk.devuan.org/t/an-alternative-init-system-for-devuan/205] which explains how to implement sinit for Devuan. The paper contains all the source code for sinit and the associated scripts [you need to cut-and-paste to get it]. I have not packaged this with apt etc - beyond my abilities. If you are not put off by the DIY nature of this and need to ask questions, this can be done by registering for the web site and adding comments on the end of the paper.
134 • sinit for Devuan [i forgot] (by nolinuxguru on 2016-08-20 11:32:20 GMT from Europe)
@132 you do not need to uninstall sysvinit to use Devuan: by adding a clause to /boot/grub/grub.cfg [as described in the paper] and running "grub-install /dev/sda" as root. you can keep the original way of booting as well as the new sinit one. No boats need be burned.
135 • @134 (by Andy Mender on 2016-08-21 07:12:47 GMT from Europe)
I read parts of the sinit article/paper, though I haven't tried substituting sysvinit with a simpler solution, such as your sinit yet. Do you know of any similar works on the s6 supervisor suite? Based on what I read, it might be a very interesting and viable alternative to systemd :).
Maybe if some people (me included) got together and introduced s6 into a distro so that it can actually be tested by a wider audience...
136 • sinit (by nolinuxguru on 2016-08-21 15:44:28 GMT from Europe)
@135 I do not know of anyone using s6. In fact, apart from systemd and sysvinit, I only know that openRC and runit are used by a few distros [alpine, gentoo, void...]. Steve Litt [refs in my paper] talks on a range of init systems. You could tack "process supervisors" like s6 onto init systems such as sinit. However, you would have to add the code to run the [many] daemons [eg ntpd, udevd etc] yourself; established distro+init combinations already have this code.
I think you would need to have a particular distro in mind that would merit an alternative. That is why distros with much available effort can develop and support alternatives to systemd and sysvinit. In the case of systemd, there is the added barrier in that it represents a moving target, as it encompasses more and more functionality.
137 • init stuff (by M.Z. on 2016-08-21 18:11:37 GMT from North America)
@106 & the anti - systemd types
"...not force people to switch init systems against their will. At minimum, all distros should have systemd and non-d versions for the next 10-15 years...Isn't choice what Linux is about?"
What a contradictory mess of sentiments. Linux is free for people too make their own decisions about regardless if it's users choosing their preferred distro or devs choosing their preferred init system. No one if forcing any init system on you, you can install any distro you feel like & if you are pedantic enough to make a choice based on init systems you are free to do so. By the same token distro devs are free to choose to package any init system they want & if it's GPL like systemd then they can even modify it to suit the needs of their users.
Now it might be nice if big community projects like Debian had kept the choice of init more up to users & had a more flexible way to choose a preferred init system; however, that's up to the project and its contributors & you can't take their choice of how to package the system away any more than they can keep you from moving on to the next distro. This is not a bug with freedom it's a feature, & it makes freedom messy & means freedom comes with both disagreements & choices. In a lot of ways this works a bit like an election in a free society & comes with all the same bitter political BS & propaganda from multiple sides.
The big difference with Linux & elections where I'm at is that you don't have to necessarily choose between two major presidential candidates & a bunch of useless third party types that will go nowhere. If your Linux distros disappoints & there are enough users to support a new distro it gets forked & you can end up with another choice that might even be able to sustain itself indefinitely if it's even moderately successful. If you care about systemd then all the proof you need that Linux is still all about choice is the existence of Devuan & the continued existence of PCLinuxOS & many other choices. If these projects get the support they need to sustain themselves from you & enough others then you'll easily get the choice you want for the next 10-15 years & beyond. It doesn't matter that this choice isn't in the exact format you prefer, the fact remains that the choice is there so don't pretend like it's not.
As for me I'm happy with my distros of choice regardless if they use systemd like Mageia, don't use it like PCLinuxOS, or are in transition like Mint. I have very few & fairly minor annoyances with init if I have them at all, so it's a non issue for me & will use any distro I feel like regardless of their init.
(side note: ok so I have seen distros with systemd preform a few more annoying long checks of things during init, but it's very rare & the worst I've had to do is reboot the system once)
Number of Comments: 137
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