 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 678, 12 September 2016 |
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Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
One pleasant feature of open source software is it allows for the mingling and cross-pollination of technologies. When one developer comes up with a good idea, it can be shared, improved upon and spread around the community. This week, in our News section, we look at three projects sharing and improving technologies. We begin with Mageia which is adopting Fedora's DNF package manager. We also talk about KDE neon testing Wayland and FreeBSD updating its Linux compatibility software. Plus we report on Adobe updating the Linux version of Flash. In our Feature Story this week we cover Apricity OS, an Arch Linux based distribution. Additionally, in our Questions and Answers column we talk about scheduling automated tasks using a tool called cron. We also share the distribution releases of the past week and provide a list of torrents we are seeding. In our Opinion Poll we talk about preferred web browsers and ask what our readers are using. We wish you all a great week and happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (30MB) and MP3 (43MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Apricity OS 07.2016
Apricity OS was added to the DistroWatch database earlier this year and the project launched its first stable release, Apricity OS 07.2016, at the beginning of August. Apricity is based on Arch Linux and features a rolling release model of software updates. The distribution is currently available in two editions, Cinnamon and GNOME, and is available for the 64-bit x86 architecture exclusively. Apart from up to date software, Apricity offers users the ICE site specific browser which makes accessing web apps more like working with locally installed applications.
I decided to download the distribution's Cinnamon edition, which is available as a 1.9GB ISO. Booting from the downloaded media brings up the Cinnamon desktop environment. The wallpaper features a bright landscape image. The desktop's application menu, task switcher and system tray sit at the bottom of the display. There are no icons on the live desktop. We can access the distribution's system installer through a quick-launch icon next to the application menu. We can also launch the system installer through the application menu.
Apricity 07.2016 -- The Cinnamon application menu
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Apricity uses the Calamares graphical installer, which is becoming increasingly popular as a distribution-neutral installation method. Calamares offers a nice, streamlined series of steps. We begin by selecting our preferred language and choosing our time zone from a map of the world. Calamares then gets us to select our keyboard's layout. When it comes to partitioning, the installer will let us either wipe the hard drive and use a default partition layout or we can manually divide up our disk. The manual partitioning method is fairly simple and supports lots of options. We can work with GPT and MBR disk layouts. Apricity can be set up on the ext2/3/4, JFS, XFS or Reiser file systems and the installer supports working with LVM volumes. The next screen gets us to create a user account for ourselves and we can optionally set up our account to automatically login. From there, Calamares shows us a summary of the actions it plans to take and waits for us to confirm its settings are correct. The installer then copies its files to our hard drive and offers to either return us to the live desktop environment or reboot the computer.
My new copy of Apricity booted to a graphical login screen. Attempting to sign into my account caused the screen to go blank for a second before returning me to the login screen. I found I was unable to login using either my normal user account or the root user account. Both the Cinnamon and GNOME desktop environments were listed as possible session options and neither of these worked for me, both returning me immediately to the login screen.
I found it was possible to switch to a text console and sign in from there, accessing both the root account and my regular user account. While the text session worked, the terminal font in the command prompt did not display properly, showing little blocks in place of letters. I could navigate the file system and use command line tools, but I could not launch new graphical desktop sessions from the command line, nor could I find any obvious reason for the lack of a working desktop session. The X server was running and file permissions were correct. The X logs gave no useful clue as to why connections to the display server were not working.
I next decided to install available software updates to see if that would fix the missing desktop issue. Apricity, like its parent distribution, uses the pacman command line package manager. Using pacman, I installed many new packages, totalling 446MB in size. Following a successful update, I rebooted the computer and discovered I was right where I had left off, with a working text console, a graphical login screen and no functional desktop session.
As it seemed I was stuck without a functional desktop on my locally installed copy of Apricity, I decided to shift gears and spend some time using the live desktop on the installation media. The live desktop was surprisingly responsive and the distribution was quick to boot and run applications in the live environment. While a live session does not give a complete picture of how a distribution will run, it can give us clues and what follows are some observations I made while using the live disc.
Apricity 07.2016 -- Running desktop applications
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I mostly enjoyed Apricity's default desktop theme. I found the icons and desktop to be easy on the eyes. My one complaint with the default theme was that windows tended not to have distinct borders. This made windows, with their white and grey colours, blend into each other. Sometimes I wasn't sure which window's menu I was looking at since two or three windows open at the same time all looked like one big blob.
While most Linux distributions use bash as the default command line shell, Apricity uses zsh. The two shells are similar enough to make the transition fairly easy and I tended to only notice differences when using the Tab key to complete file names.
The distribution uses pacman as the command line package manager and Pamac for its graphical front-end. Pamac presents us with a simple text-based list of package names. Each package is listed with its size and version. There are filters for narrowing down the list of packages, but there are so many software categories the categories could use their own filter. I found Pacman could enable/disable available repositories and there is a Pamac-updater application which will list and install available software updates.
Apricity 07.2016 -- The Pamac software manager
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On the subject of software, Apricity ships with many useful desktop applications. Looking through the live disc's application menu I found the Chrome web browser, the FileZilla file transfer program, the Transmission bittorrent software and the Syncthing file sync application. I don't usually see Syncthing installed by default, but I like the concept of having an easy way to sync and share files. Sharing large files between geographically separate people is still often a non-trivial process and I like that Apricity is offering a solution which does not involve signing up for a third-party cloud service. The distribution further includes the Steam gaming software, PlayOnLinux for people who wish to install Windows software, a document viewer and the LibreOffice productivity suite. Inkscape and the GNU Image Manipulation Program are included along with the Cheese webcam manager.
Apricity ships with a full range of media codecs along with the Rhythmbox audio player and the Totem video player. We also find an archive manager, calculator, text editor and two file managers. There are utilities for setting up printers, monitoring system processes and creating user accounts. In the background I found the GNU Compiler Collection was installed as was Java. Apricity includes systemd 231 and Linux 4.6.4, though since the distribution uses a rolling release model these version numbers will gradually rise over time.
The distribution ships with a useful control panel. Most of the featured configuration modules deal with the look and feel of the Cinnamon desktop. Some deal with extensions and preferred applications. There are modules for managing system settings too. For example, the control panel features modules for configuring the operating system's firewall, creating user accounts and managing printers. I found these worked well, even in the live environment.
Apricity 07.2016 -- The settings panel
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Conclusions
I hesitate to make any sweeping statements about Apricity, its strengths and it weaknesses as I only got to use my installed copy of the operating system in a limited capacity. Almost all of my brief time with the distribution was spent running it from a live disc. That being said, despite my installed copy of Apricity failing to give me a desktop session, most of what I experienced this week I liked.
Apricity had some features I didn't care for. The indistinct window borders weren't ideal, but it's possible to change the theme and experiment with different desktop styles. I don't like using the Totem media player, but there are plenty others to choose from in the repositories.
Apricity 07.2016 -- Running the Syncthing application
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I do like that Apricity ships with a lot of software without much duplication. There tends to be one program per task available and the distribution covers a lot of tasks. Everything from gaming with Steam to a productivity suite to multimedia codecs is included. A new user can jump into just about anything other than video editing with the default applications available. I especially liked that Syncthing was installed as it is a tool I hope sees more wide-spread use, both for setting up backups and for sharing files.
All in all, I like what Apricity is trying to do. The project is relatively new and off to a good start. There are some rough edges, but not many and I think the distribution will appeal to a lot of people, especially those who want to run a rolling release operating system with a very easy initial set up.
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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 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Mageia adopts DNF, KDE neon to use Wayland, FreeBSD updates Linux compatibility, Adobe to update Linux Flash player
The Mageia distribution has decided to include the Dandified Yum (DNF) high-level package manager, starting with the upcoming release of Mageia 6. For people who already like and prefer Mageia's urpmi command line package manager, it will remain as part of the distribution. "Among the many less-than-visible improvements across the board is a brand new dependency resolver: DNF. DNF (Dandified Yum) is a next generation dependency resolver and high-level package management tool with an interesting history. DNF traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora's Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE's SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF was forked from Yum several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the SAT Solver library from openSUSE (which is used in their own tool, Zypper). Another goal of the fork was to massively restructure the code base so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF (via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as graphical front-ends and system life-cycle automation frameworks). DNF will be available for those willing to use it, however, urpmi and the current familiar Mageia software management tools will remain as the default in Mageia for the foreseeable future." More information on package management and how Mageia is making it easier to build .rpm packages for the distribution can be down in the full blog post.
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A few weeks ago we reported the Workstation edition of the Fedora distribution will soon switch to GNOME on Wayland as the project's default desktop environment. Wayland is designed to replace the classic X display software which is currently used by most Linux distributions and other Unix-like operating systems. Fedora is not the only project adopting Wayland. The KDE neon project, which combines a stable base built on Ubuntu with cutting edge KDE packages, has announced it will be switching to Wayland too. "During this year's Akademy we had a few discussions about Wayland, and the Plasma and Neon teams decided to switch Neon developer unstable edition to Wayland by default soonish. There are still a few things in the stack which need to be shaken out - we need a newer Xwayland in Neon, we want to wait for Plasma 5.8 to be released, we need to get the latest QtWayland 5.7 build, etc."
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The FreeBSD operating system maintains a compatibility layer which allows FreeBSD users to run some Linux programs. FreeBSD previously maintained a port of CentOS 6 software. However, CentOS 6 is several years old now and Linux compatibility is being updated. A new port, introduced on September 5, 2016, offers compatibility with CentOS 7 packages. This should allow FreeBSD users to run more modern Linux software, for which source code is not available. "This port contains packages from a near-minimal installation of CentOS 7 Linux. These packages, in conjunction with the Linux kernel module, form the basis of the Linux compatibility environment. It is designed to provide a nice user experience by using the FreeBSD configuration for corresponding Linux stuff where possible."
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A few years ago Adobe announced the company would no longer actively develop its traditional NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux. At the time, the NPAPI plugin was scheduled to receive security updates only on Linux through until the year 2017. People who wanted to use more modern versions of Flash, versions newer than 11.2, would need to run a web browser which supported the PPAPI Flash plugin. This was a problem for some users as the PPAPI plugin was supported by a limited number of browsers on Linux. Adobe has changed its mind and the NPAPI Flash plugin will move forward, receiving most of the same features as the PPAPI version of the plugin. The Adobe blog has more information: "Today we are updating the beta channel with Linux NPAPI Flash Player by moving it forward and in sync with the modern release branch (currently version 23). We have done this significant change to improve security and provide additional mitigation to the Linux community. In the past, we communicated that NPAPI Linux releases would stop in 2017. This is no longer the case and once we have performed sufficient testing and received community feedback, we will release both NPAPI and PPAPI Linux builds with their major version numbers in sync and on a regular basis."
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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) |
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All about cron jobs
Always-on-time asks: I keep hearing that backups and file clean-ups should be done through something called a cron job. How does this work and what are some best practices for creating cron jobs?
DistroWatch answers: A cron job is a task or process that is run at a specified time. On almost all GNU/Linux and BSD systems there is a background service (or daemon) called cron. The cron daemon runs in the background and runs tasks or commands at a given time. The cron daemon is often used to check for software updates, delete old files, create backups or do any other task which needs to happen periodically without user intervention.
The cron service maintains a list of commands to run in a series of text files. These text files, which list the jobs to be run and at what times, are called crontabs. There are two types of crontab files. There is a system-wide crontab file which can be edited by the system administrator. This file is almost always located at /etc/crontab. On most systems, each user has their own crontab where they can set up scheduled jobs to be run under their own user account.
A crontab is organized with one schedule job per line. Each line contains at least two fields: the time when the task should be performed and the command to be run. The system-wide crontab contains a third field: the user the task will be run as. This allows the administrator to set up tasks to be run as a specific (usually less privileged) user.
The first field in a crontab, the time when the job will be run, is further broken down into five smaller fields. These indicate the minute, hour, day, month and day-of-the-week when the task should be performed. This might be easiest to understand with an example. In the following example we have a one-line crontab file which will run every day at 12:15pm. The job will be run as the root user and will remove (rm) all the files in the /tmp directory.
15 12 * * * root rm /tmp/*
The stars in the day, month and day-of-the-week fields indicate that any time will match. This means the job will run every day, once a day, at 12:15. In this next example, we use the rsync command to run a backup at 9:00am every Sunday. The rsync command will backup our files to a remote host, called example.com. Sunday, for most implementations of cron, can be considered either day zero (0) or day seven (7). This job is run as the user "jesse".
0 9 * * 7 jesse rsync -a /home/jesse/Documents/ example.com:Backups/
This next job will create a text file called holiday.txt at 3:02am on January 1st of every year, regardless of what day of the week it is. January is considered month number one (1).
2 3 1 1 * jesse echo "Happy new year!" > /home/jesse/holiday.txt
There are more complex examples we could explore. Some implementations of cron will allow us to specify ranges or increments of time. I will not go into using those here, but if you want to experiment with more advanced time settings, check your operating system's crontab manual page.
The system administrator can create new scheduled jobs by adding them to the bottom of the /etc/crontab file. Regular users can create their own scheduled jobs by running the crontab edit command:
crontab -e
We can confirm a job has been added to our crontab file by listing all scheduled jobs:
crontab -l
One of the most common questions asked about cron is why a command does not run as expected. Often times a person will (wisely) test a new script by running it from the command line. The script will complete successfully when run manually, but fails when the same script is run as a cron job. The reason is almost always an issue with path names. User accounts are typically set up to look in a variety of places for commands to run. When we run the command rsync, our command line shell looks in the directories /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /usr/bin, /bin, /sbin and maybe a few other locations. The cron command is usually less flexible and will look in just one or two places for executable files. This means jobs run from crontabs will often fail to find a command unless its full path is provided. For this reason, I recommend people get in the habit of writing /usr/bin/rsync rather than just rsync or /bin/rm instead of plain rm. It may look more cumbersome, but it can save a lot of time trouble-shooting cron issues.
When in doubt as to where a command is located, the which command line tool will tell you. Running the following displays "/usr/bin/scp":
which scp
I can offer a few other quick tips that have helped me over the years. For example, do not schedule a job to run more frequently than the time it takes to complete the job. For instance, if you have a backup script which takes two hours to run, scheduling it to run every hour will soon cause problems.
By default, most operating systems tend to schedule jobs to happen in the middle of the night (between 2:00am and 4:00am). This is fine for servers as usage will probably be low in the night, but it might not suit desktop and laptop users. Try to schedule jobs when the computer will likely be turned on, but not in heavy use. For example, a small office might set their desktop machines to backup files at lunch time.
Do not put passwords in your crontab file. The system wide crontab can be read by anyone and, when a job runs, its parameters appear on the command line. This information can be observed by other users.
Finally, I find it helpful to remember that people do not like it when their computers suddenly start running slower. Whenever possible, I recommend running cron jobs with a lowered priority via the nice command. This avoids stealing CPU cycles and disk access time from other applications the user has running. As an example, this cronjob runs with a low priority as the root user and cleans up the /tmp directory, removing files which have not been modified in the past week. The job runs on the first day of every month at noon.
0 12 1 * * root /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/find /tmp -mtime 7 -exec rm {} \;
Cron is a very powerful tool and, when set up correctly, can automate many routine tasks.
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For more questions and answers, visit our Questions and Answers 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: 235
- Total data uploaded: 44.0TB
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| Released Last Week |
Porteus Kiosk 4.1.0
Tomasz Jokiel has announced the release of Porteus Kiosk 4.1.0, a new version of the project's Gentoo-based distribution for web kiosks: "I'm pleased to announce that Porteus Kiosk 4.1.0 is now available for download. Linux kernel has been updated to version 4.4.19, Mozilla Firefox to version 45.3.0ESR and Google Chrome to version 52.0.2743.116. Packages from the userland are upgraded to the Portage snapshot tagged on 2016-09-03. The new release brings two new spins of Porteus Kiosk system - a Cloud variant and a ThinClient variant. The Cloud variant provides an easy access to the web applications and services, such as Google Apps for Education, Jolicloud, OwnCloud or Dropbox. It is less restrictive than the Kiosk variant as it offers functionality which cannot be easily implemented in the standard Kiosk image." See the release announcement and changelog for more details.
Frugalware 2.1
The Frugalware development team has announced the availability of a new version of the Frugalware distribution. Frugalware is an independent distribution which follows a "keep it simple" style of design and features the pacman package manager. With the release of Frugalware 2.1, the team has announced it is dropping the project's stable branch in favour of maintaining a single, "-current" development branch. "The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 2.1, our twenty-first stable release. Important notice: Frugalware provided a -stable and -current tree in the past. As our team shrinked quite a bit lately we lack the manpower to continue providing a, secure and stable tree while providing bleeding edge and latest package in another. Therefore we decided to move all users to the -current tree. For users not wanting that we will provide a static, not updated snapshot of the -current tree each time we do a release. We also plan to release more often so this snapshots get updated faster." This release also drops 32-bit installation media, though 32-bit packages are still provided. Additional information and a list of changes in Frugalware 2.1 can be found in the release announcement.
Frugalware Linux 2.1 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 535kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixles)
Emmabuntu 1.01 "Debian"
The Emmabuntus project, which creates a desktop operating system designed to be run primarily on older computers, has announced an update to the distribution's Debian Edition. The new version, Emmabuntus 1.01 "Debian", is based on Debian 8.5 and introduces support for the 64-bit x86 architecture. "This 1.01 version includes the following updates, fixes and improvements: Based on Debian 8.5. Implementation of the 64-bit version (Thanks to the HandyLinux project). Added the improved management of the Recovery Utility. Added installation management utility for proprietary drivers from the distribution SolydXK. Added the default re-install utility of Emmabuntüs Cairo-Dock (Thanks to Robert). Added mechanism for locking or not the Emmabuntüs Cairo-Dock. Added the full screen management in VirtualBox. Added quick search in Synaptic. Added Xfce4-screenshooter configuration file to avoid having ":" in the default file name. Added utility KeepassX. Added integration Wine shortcuts in XFCE and link to the installation (Thanks to Bernard). Added the list of users at the login window..." Additional changes and features are listed in the release announcement.
Solus 1.2.0.5
Joshua Strobl has announced the release of Solus 1.2.0.5, the latest stable version of the desktop-oriented Linux distribution with the home-built Budgie as the preferred desktop user interface. Despite the tiny increment in the version number, the new release is packed with fresh software updates, including the latest stable kernel, as well as bug fixes. "Solus 1.2.0.5 released. Today we are providing a minor update to Solus 1.2 in the form of Solus 1.2.0.5. This release enables us to address a multitude of issues that have since been resolved after the release of Solus 1.2. Budgie: battery icon refresh issues were solved; we resolved an issue where the keyboard layout would revert to the default guessed layout for the locale on login; we switched to GNOME Screensaver for screen locking and power management. Installation: issues using Solus and the installation media on some hardware configurations, such as NVIDIA Maxwell cards and Intel Skylake processors; we solved an issue whereby the installer might hang scanning disks. We have delivered an updated GNOME 3.20 Stack, PulseAudio 9, as well as Mesa 12." Read the rest of the release announcement for full details and screenshots.
AV Linux 2016.8.30
The AV Linux distribution is a Debian-based project which features many applications to assist the user in working with audio and video formats. The project has released a new version, AV Linux 2016.8.30, with a long list of changes: "Fixed UID/GID issue and restored Live and installed UID/GID to '1000'. Updated to 4.4.6-RT Kernel with fixed 32-bit app support and VBox module building support. Enabled running shell scripts by clicking in Thunar to ease installing Ardour and Mixbus bundles. Fixed WinFF presets for aac encoding. Added some module configs for AMD Video cards and modesetting. Complete new 'Zukitre' based theme necessitated by GTK3 3.20 changing it's API and breaking older GTK3 themes intentionally. Complete new 'Hooli' theme for AVL 32bit (note 'resize' is in the Hooli window manager titlebar options). Complete Removal of Kdenlive and KDE5 runtime components, Kdenlive is simply not in a good place right now to feature on a LiveISO. As always you can install it later if you want it. Removed Openshot for same reason as Kdenlive, it has great potential but just isn't there yet.. Complete removal of LibreOffice it updates far too often and wastes huge amounts of time and bandwidth to keep current in my development builds..." A complete list of changes and a screen shot can be found in the release announcement.
AryaLinux 2016.08
Chandrakant Singh has announced a new release of AryaLinux, a cutting-edge distribution based on Linux From Scratch. The new release of AryaLinux, version 2016.08, features MATE 1.15, support for KDE and LXQt desktop envrionments and Qt4 has been dropped in favour of Qt 5. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been updated to version 6. "Building upon the stability of AryaLinux 2016.04, this release focuses on bringing about standardization by solidifying the already established method of building AryaLinux and provides support for additional Desktop Environments - KDE and LXQt. Here are some of the features that come as a part of this release of AryaLinux: Latest kernel - 4.7. This kernel release supports a lot of new hardware. GCC upgraded to gcc6. The entire system is built using gcc6. MATE Desktop Environment upgraded from 1.12 to 1.15. Support for KDE and LXQt desktop environment. Please find documents to install them in the documentation/help section. Qt 4 dropped. Qt 5 is the default Qt version. VLC Media player upgraded to 3.x version..." Further details can be found in the project's release announcement. Download (MD5): aryalinux-mate-2016.08-x86_64-r2.iso (2,219MB).
AryaLinux 2016.08 -- Running the MATE desktop
(full image size: 592kB, resolution: 960x539 pixels)
Linux From Stratch 7.10
Bruce Dubbs has announced the release of Linux From Scratch (LFS) 7.10, the latest version of the project's electronic book of step-by-step instructions on how to build a base Linux system from scratch. A separate book, Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS), which extends the base system with additional desktop and server applications, has also been released: "The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS 7.10, LFS 7.10 (systemd), BLFS 7.10 and BLFS 7.10 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to glibc 2.24, Binutils 2.27 and GCC 6.2.0. In total, 29 packages were updated, fixes made to bootscripts and changes to text have been made throughout the book. The BLFS version includes approximately 800 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch 7.9 book. This release has over 810 updates from the previous version including numerous text and formatting changes." Here is the brief release announcement. The books are available in both standard (SysVInit) and systemd editions.
Linux Mint 18 "KDE"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 18 "KDE", an edition of the Mint family featuring the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' KDE edition. Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. This edition of Linux Mint features the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. The default display manager is SDDM. The APT sources include the Kubuntu backports PPA, which provides updates to newer versions of the Plasma desktop. The update manager received many improvements, both visual and under the hood. The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations, and better support was given to alternative themes." Here is the brief release announcement, with further details, screenshots and videos provided in the new features page as well as the release notes.
elementary OS 0.4
The elementary OS team has announced the launch of elementary OS 0.4, code name "Loki". The new version includes many new features, such as a new software manager called AppCenter. New natural language processing has been added to the calendar application and the distribution now ships with the Epiphany web browser. Desktop notifications have been revamped too for the 0.4 release: "The brand new Notification Center catches notifications from apps and lets you see and act on them later. It also provides a handy system-wide Do Not Disturb toggle. By default, all apps show in the Notification Center, but you can disable noisy apps in the Notifications section of System Settings. The Notification Center is powered by the FreeDesktop notifications specification, so any apps following this open standard will work automatically." Additional details and screen shots can be found in the project's release announcement. Pay what you want (including free) downloads are available through the project's home page.
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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 |
Preferred web browser
Many of us spend a good deal of our time visiting web pages. Whether we are browsing the web for entertainment, work or research, a web browser is an important tool.
Linux users have a lot of choice when it comes to web browsers, from Google's proprietary Chrome browser, to the popular Firefox browser, to lesser known browsers such as Qupzilla and Otter. This week we would like to know which web browser you prefer.
You can see the results of our previous poll on encrypting messages here. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Preferred web browser
| Firefox: | 2028 (60%) |
| Chrome/Chromium: | 744 (22%) |
| Opera: | 138 (4%) |
| Vivaldi: | 122 (4%) |
| Konquorer: | 22 (1%) |
| Qupzilla: | 53 (2%) |
| Otter: | 25 (1%) |
| Other: | 235 (7%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Distributions added to waiting list
- WHALinux. WHALinux is a Linux distribution based on openSUSE and featuring the GNOME desktop environment.
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Web Browser (by jymm on 2016-09-12 00:26:54 GMT from North America)
Because of changes in Firefox I have moved to Pale Moon. It is a bit more work as it is not in the repositories and needs to be manually updated.
2 • Web Browser (by snowdust on 2016-09-12 00:34:16 GMT from North America)
On Debian and Debian-based distros, I use Slimjet and like it a lot.
On KaOS and ApricityOS, I use Chrome and Firefox.
3 • Browser (by Doug on 2016-09-12 01:14:12 GMT from North America)
I voted Chrome. I used to use FF until it kept resetting one of my passwords to an old password, so I had to manually type this password in every time.
4 • Apricity (by bigsky on 2016-09-12 01:16:17 GMT from Europe)
Having installed Apricity on a few occasions recently without issues the one problem that keeps coming up is the firewall GUFW would disable it's self and that happened numerous times on each install. So check to see if it stays enabled often. Other than that it's a charm to use. This has happened on other distro's also. Anyone else notice this ?
5 • Browsers, browsers, browsers (by Zsolt on 2016-09-12 01:32:40 GMT from Europe)
I use Firefox because, well, that's the default and widely supported.
Butit's integration with KDE is not perfect. not even with addons.
I'd use Pale Moon, it integrates a lot better, but some addons are not compatible (eg. Enpass).
The best would be a native KDE browser with addons/extensions support.
6 • browsers (by Steanne on 2016-09-12 02:06:21 GMT from North America)
depending on usage: firefox, the last presto version of opera, or chrome for the drm.
7 • Brave / Apricity (by linuxista on 2016-09-12 02:41:40 GMT from North America)
A quick comment on the browser. Just a few months ago I finally found a browser that was stable and performed well enough for me to ditch Chrome, which I've been itching to do for a long time for privacy/ideological reasons. Even though it's still in beta, Brave has proved to be stable, simple, fast, and have all the privacy/ad-block stuff enable d by default.
I have some recent relevant experience with Apricity OS. I just installed the recent release on a new laptop instead of trying to port my 6 year old Arch install from my old machine. Because of wireless issues I went with Apricity over Antergos, which requires a lot of downloading in order to install.
I did not share Jessie's experience in not getting a desktop. I installed the GNOME edition, not Cinnamon. Maybe that's the difference. Or maybe it's a difference in hardware. I installed on a skylake quad core and had no issues whatsoever.
I don't really care that much about what the default apps are in a distro, or other aesthetic choices generally. I just want an Arch base. That being said, the Apricity devs obviously put some effort into making an attractive GNOME desktop theme and a bevy of very nice default nature wallpapers instead of just the general vanilla GNOME setup. I'm using other preferred themes/wpps, but they made some nice choices.
And I learned a few things from Apricity.
1. They had a few interesting GNOME extensions installed that I was unfamiliar with.
2. They have a very attractive terminal powerline theme set up.
3. And best of all they have Zsh set up instead of bash. I think I'm a convert.
8 • Chrome vs Chromium (by Paraquat on 2016-09-12 02:49:55 GMT from Asia)
It's unfortunate in the poll that Chrome/Chromium are seen as a single browser. Yes, they are very similar and use most of the same code base, but they aren't the same. I use Chromium and (mostly) like it, but Chrome is very irritating.
Details:
1) Chrome mangles my bookmarks, spreading them out into separate drop-down bars all across the top of the screen - Chromium does not do this.
2) Chrome comes with built-in Adobe Flash, and I don't know of any way to turn it off (Chromium simply doesn't have it, so I suffer a lot fewer pop-ups).
3) Chromium places all its settings, bookmarks, etc, into the hidden directory .config/chromium - Chrome hides them someplace (I've now forgotten where) and it's really hard to find. This is significant - if you mangle your configuration and want to start anew, you only need to empty the contents of that directory and restart the browser. I tried to do that once in Chrome and it took me about 15 minutes to figure out where the hidden directory was - by the time I found it, I was so pissed-off that I just uninstalled Chrome. (Tip for Firefox users - the hidden configuration directory is .mozilla).
9 • Browser poll (by WH Berry on 2016-09-12 03:35:42 GMT from North America)
I use palemoon, it's not as "cutting edge" as FF, but always seems to report as an out of date version of FF, creating it's own set of problems. FF seems to change things in the ui just to be changing things. Unending aggravations for no reason.
10 • Web Browser (by marame on 2016-09-12 05:31:24 GMT from Europe)
I use both Firefox and Slimjet (aka Chromium). Firefox is very heavy and slow, some sites do not work with it (example militarymaps.info) and translating text with a plugin is not always working. Sometimes FF blanks or blinks or crashes randomly on some sites
Slimjet can not show videos especially embedded in twitter accounts (problems with flv and gif etc....) but Google Translate works pretty good automatic or manual. Is lighter as FF
So I must use both in certain sites.
11 • Browser Choice... (by Zork on 2016-09-12 06:19:42 GMT from Oceania)
Use Firefox on my main machines... Choose not to use Chrome on "philosophical" grounds...
Was also using Midori for a long time on a lesser machine as a light-weight browser...
12 • Seamonkey (by RoboNuggie on 2016-09-12 06:41:01 GMT from Europe)
Firefox compatibility without the cruft and bad UI choices. Think of it as Netscape UI and Firefox Internals if you will.
13 • Web Browser (by adtys.deb on 2016-09-12 07:10:04 GMT from Asia)
Mostly i used iceweasel/firefox-esr in my wheezy/jessie machine.
But, they're should be on the list:
1. why there is no GNU IceCat in the poll. I surprise and really appreciate that Ruben Rodriguez of Trisquel who still continue to develop and maintain icecat until now. I think icecat is much better than firefox since it's more fast to run jquery i used to develop website. But icecat is still use old version firefox-based of 38.8.0 gnu2 which i think it is much better comparing than firefox-esr 45.3.0/firefox 48.0.1.
2. To compare with palemoon, I think there is no real difference between icecat. they both really fast although palemoon use their own engine modified from firefox engine. I'm happy that they remove australian tab from firefox and use older firefox v24 tab and it really helped to make palemoon is the fastest comparing to firefox.
3. SRware iron is chromium based which is no differences with chromium except they removed google-sh$$!
4. I also haven't seeing midori in the list of opinion poll. Midori is tiny browser and I think it should be in the list. You can't underestimate the performance of this browser.
5. Seamonkey is really similar to firefox browser and there is no real difference when opening and managing tabs compare with firefox.
It is up to you which is the best browser you prefered used or liked it. It's the same as you use your prefered linux distribution.
But I'm happy as long as that there is no macro$ I$/Edg$ browser in the list of poll ;-)))
14 • Browser (by argent on 2016-09-12 07:21:10 GMT from North America)
Like others and certainly the majority of the poll use iceweasel/firefox-esr/firefox. So many different variables, and Google Chrome or even Chromium simply won't due primarily of a negative reputation of exploitation.
Tried other browsers and many are really great contenders as a stable useable browser, main drawback is the use of flash, and that is needed for news, weather or just what-have-you for those needs.
Seriously, a need for a real honest browser is a must for linux, and really none of the current choices are adequate, they barely suffice. Will wait this out and hopefully someone will produce a browser that doesn't have it's best interest ahead of the linux user.
But on the bright side of things, almost all of them don't come close to being as bad as Internet Explorer, except one. Your guess!
15 • Apricity (by Minda on 2016-09-12 07:33:54 GMT from Europe)
To bigsky:firewall GUFW. Hello. I found the solution:
sudo systemctl enable ufw
sudo systemctl start ufw
16 • Browser preference (by Thomas Mueller on 2016-09-12 07:47:05 GMT from North America)
I like Mozilla Seamonkey when it builds successfully: same code base for the browser portion but is a fuller Internet suite that also includes mail and news (NNTP), composer and IRC. Not as good name recognition as Firefox, can get a warning when using for online banking apparently because their software doesn't recognize the name (Seamonkey) even if the browser functionality is fully up to Firefox standards.
I have some experience with Qupzilla, not up to Firefox/Seamonkey strength, crash-prone, but that was an older version. I'd also like to try Xombrero, Midori (because that's what's on System Rescue CD), Netsurf, maybe some others that come along.
Haiku has a browser of its own, Web Positive, which looks good but has apparently not been ported to any other OS.
17 • Browser (by Jonas on 2016-09-12 08:35:40 GMT from Europe)
Why, Fifth of course ;)
18 • Browser (by BeGo on 2016-09-12 09:09:33 GMT from Asia)
Err, strange that Midori forgotten. :)
OK, I normally use any Firefox derivatives out there (TorBrowser, IceCat, etc), cause I need compability to Zotero, but,
I vote others here. :)
19 • +1 for Palemoon (by curious on 2016-09-12 09:12:27 GMT from Europe)
Firefox-like engine with a *sane* user-interface - i.e. like pre-Australis, with menus, a status bar at the bottom, and tabs below the adress bar. And not 25+ releases per year ...
20 • Browsers and distros (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-12 09:38:13 GMT from Europe)
I typically use Firefox for a better browsing experience, but other than that Midori. The latter is quite lightweight, though riddled with bugs and crashes on heavy websites. There are some projects like xombrero or surf (from the suckless community), which use a bare webkit engine + simple gtk3 widgets. Worth checking out for low-end machines.
I feel that modern browsers do so much more than they really have to, taking up precious resources :(.
21 • Vertical Tabs (by PePa on 2016-09-12 09:40:34 GMT from Asia)
Must have vertical tabs on my browser, it seems Firefox is still the only option -- why not more browsers don't offer this is beyond me.
22 • @21 - vertical tabs (by Uncle Slacky on 2016-09-12 10:10:21 GMT from Europe)
Vivaldi has vertical tabs and is very configurable as to how they work (e.g. page previews on tabs etc.) - I thoroughly recommend it.
23 • Light vs Heavy (by session on 2016-09-12 10:13:41 GMT from North America)
The frustrating thing about all these light webkit browsers (xombrero, midori, etc) is that, at least on Ubuntu, the webkit dependencies need sse2 to run. Firefox, for all its "heaviness", doesn't.
Also, "light browser" these days is kind of a misnomer. The browser is either heavy enough to render app-y html5 sites correctly, or it's something like Dillo..
24 • @7 Apricity (by snowdust on 2016-09-12 11:03:36 GMT from North America)
I also installed Apricity-Gnome on a brand new skylake quad core laptop and have no issues; simply elegant, beautiful, fast and responsive. Just my $0.02 cents. :)
25 • Another +1 for Palemoon. (by Vic7 on 2016-09-12 11:58:10 GMT from Europe)
Looks like it has more fans than I expected :)
26 • @22 Vivaldi (by PePa on 2016-09-12 12:14:15 GMT from Asia)
Vertical tabs indeed work on Vivaldi. I'm checking our the new 1.4 release. What I'm missing from Firefox how the zoom-factor that I use on a site doesn't get remembered. And iconized pinned tabs. I'll have to spend more time with it. How is the adblocking? Undo closed tabs??
27 • Another +1 for Palemoon (by fizzler on 2016-09-12 12:14:15 GMT from Europe)
..it's the only logical choice
28 • Browser Poll (by cykodrone on 2016-09-12 12:15:19 GMT from North America)
I voted Firefox only because I'm a long time user and not quite ready to switch yet. I'm getting progressively fed up with Firefox. One should be able to do a deep privacy/security cleaning without losing bookmarks, their icons or Firefox automatically changing Preferences/Advanced/Data Choices/Enable Crash Reporter back to enabled without my/your permission. I don't want my browser to report anything to anybody, this is why I don't/won't use Goggle's Chrome, or even Android for that matter (I got sick of the Android bloat and tracking and went back to a simple, old school flip-phone). If huge corporations want my surfing habits and consumer demographic info, they can pay me for it, until that day, they can shove their spyware. Sorry to veer a little off topic, but guess who pays for the background data traffic all that corporate spyware uses, YOU, that's who, in essence, YOU are paying for corporations (to get your info, it has to get from your device to theirs some how) to make yet more money off you by selling your private info. Gotta love the 21st century.
29 • Light and Heavy (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-12 12:17:23 GMT from Europe)
@23,
I didn't know that parts of webkit might require sse2. I tested the mentioned browsers on a i386 FreeBSD-11 installation on an Intel Celeron M 575 based laptop. Would sse1 not be Pentium 3 or Pentium 2?
I agree that the Internet nowadays is more problematic than the browsers themselves. I would gladly use Dillo if it got me the minimal reasonable functionality per page. Not possible, since websites are crawling with javascript, flash and other stuff.
30 • Brave (by bigsky on 2016-09-12 13:02:31 GMT from Europe)
@7 Just installed Brave and I must say very nice indeed. Took a couple of minutes to get the layout right. adding bookmarks using the + and saving with the usual star works great. A clean browser and I also like their philosophy in regards to ads, at least they come clean and say it and not hide in the bushes. Very honest indeed. Thanks
31 • Browsers (by Tony on 2016-09-12 13:13:42 GMT from Europe)
I use the Pale Moon browser most and not so often Cyberfox (yes it has a Linux version now!) and Slimjet. Chrome - newer!
32 • @26 - Adblocking (by Uncle Slacky on 2016-09-12 13:40:27 GMT from Europe)
Vivaldi is compatible with Chrome extensions, so I use uBlock Origin for ad blocking. Not sure about undoing closed tabs - I don't have it running in front of me at the moment. I think there must be a "recently closed tabs" option similar to Firefox.
33 • Speedy Browsers (by tunj on 2016-09-12 13:47:00 GMT from Europe)
In the beginning Firefox for a long time and later Chromium and Opera. I've been using Slimjet lately. @Tony me too, Chrome, newer!
34 • Browser (by thym on 2016-09-12 14:02:02 GMT from Europe)
Seamonkey. Like the interface, the stability, the general approach: a whole internet suite. Something that is different from mainstream trends (aka minimizing everything)
35 • Browser (by Lee on 2016-09-12 14:05:39 GMT from North America)
Firefox with a few common add-ons has been my choice across several platforms for many years.
The only exception is using Chrome for my digital edition of the Chicago Tribune which will not work in Firefox on Ubuntu in spite of my best efforts.
36 • Init Scripts (by Justin D on 2016-09-12 14:17:17 GMT from North America)
LFS is a good reference that I use when I am trying to learn about a program. However, I thought it would be more helpful to help me understand how to do init scripts. I'm using Archbang OpenRC, and I want to setup iptables to run as a service. Since the package comes from Arch, it only supports systemd services, so I really don't know how to make this work. I don't really want to learn sysvinit or openrc in great detail (the other sysvinit scripts I looked at look like I'm writing code); I just want a firewall. One consequence of so many distributions supporting a single init system is it becomes very difficult to find documentation or support on other inits. At the same time, I can see why people love that particular init since it does solve the problem of writing new scripts from scratch.
37 • Init Scripts (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-12 14:53:14 GMT from Europe)
@36,
Init scripts might seem daunting initially. However, once you get how to do start/stop/restart, things will become super smooth.
For iptables and other firewalling stuff with init scripts I recommend asking the CRUX and Slackware Linux communities or browsing through their respective documentations. All you really have to do is write a simple Shell script that starts a program with your desired options ;).
38 • All about cron (@Jesse) (by Anonymous on 2016-09-12 15:01:58 GMT from South America)
I would suggest two things which could be mentioned as well:
1) the command "at" allows an user to run a job quite like cron would do, but only once. It may help for testing the command before it goes to production
2) some - or a lot of - Linux distributions have directories like /etc/cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly} where a user can put jobs to be run regularly each {day,hour,month,week}, but at a time not specified by the user. I feel there is a recommendation to use those directories instead of the old method of configuring cron directly with "crontab -e"
Only my 2 cents
39 • Want to like Firefox.. but bugs (by Jason on 2016-09-12 15:21:21 GMT from North America)
I want to like Firefox, but on Xubuntu it keeps freaking out while at rest and spiking to 100% CPU, and I have to kill it. So I'm using Chromium. Vivaldi is a good browser, but unfortunately not open source.
40 • vivaldi undo closed tab (by metak on 2016-09-12 15:22:58 GMT from Europe)
@26 middle click on trash icon is supposed to open last closed tab??
41 • Adobe (by Glenn Condrey on 2016-09-12 15:32:55 GMT from North America)
They've caved...started losing market to Pepper flash browsers. I am really glad to hear this. I maintain a old Debian Etch derivative distro Xandros 4.5. I have managed to install Firefox 17...and I started running into problems with Flashplayer being so out of date.
Perhaps I will find a way to be able to install the new flash into Firefox 17. 8-)
42 • systemd timers (by sam on 2016-09-12 15:34:15 GMT from Europe)
A new alternative to cron is systemd timers. They are very flexible andhave an easier to read syntax. They can also do things like wake the machine up in the middle of the night to do a task. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.timer.html
43 • Best browser (by OstroL on 2016-09-12 15:38:12 GMT from Europe)
The best browser out there is not available for Linux. Its called Cent Browser, based on Chrome and only available for Windows.
44 • Firefox (by Carlos on 2016-09-12 16:44:38 GMT from Europe)
Many years ago I've tested DeadBeef with several output options: Pulseaudio, ALSA with several resample quality settings and pure ALSA without resampling.
Pure ALSA without resampling won, by a large margin. Bitperfect.
Pulseaudio sounded so bad, but so bad that it seemed like a blanket was separating my ears from the speakers. Really bad sounding resampler.
As Pulseaudio also usually gives me problems (no sound!) in several machines, with Pro audio cards or even bog standard Realtek audio codecs, then why bother - uninstall.
But now, since version 45 of Firefox, there is no sound in the browser.
Nothing has changed in my configurations, but suddenly no sound in Firefox.
Every other browsers have audio (Chrome, Brave, etc) on the same machine.
I've tried it all and from my investigation, it seems like Firefox now NEEDS Pulseaudio. No Pulseaudio = no sound.
I give up. Off goes Firefox.
And when everything in Linux needs Pulseaudio, off goes Linux.
45 • Cent Browser (by bigsky on 2016-09-12 16:57:54 GMT from Europe)
@43 How can it possibly be the BEST browser out there if it's not available for Linux ? This makes no sense at all in this forum. Holy smokes eh.
46 • Pale Moon (by bison on 2016-09-12 17:01:02 GMT from North America)
I was barely aware of Pale Moon, but after reading the comments here I gave it a try. It was easy to install using the Pale Moon installer, although it did not detect my Chromium installation and so could not import book marks. I was able to export/import bookmarks via an HTML file. I really like the conventional and clean user interface, and will consider switching over as my default browser.
Now if I could just find a good email client...
47 • a trustworthy browser (by CC on 2016-09-12 17:21:18 GMT from Asia)
The web browser is probably the most important program for most computer users. It needs to come from a trustworthy developer. Regardless of the choices they have made on the user interface and on features included in Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation is IMHO one of the more trusted organization.
48 • Browser (by Ed on 2016-09-12 17:34:11 GMT from Africa)
Loving BRAVE.
49 • Waking up (by Jesse on 2016-09-12 17:38:28 GMT from North America)
>> "A new alternative to cron is systemd timers. They are very flexible and have an easier to read syntax. They can also do things like wake the machine up in the middle of the night to do a task."
I've scheduled wake ups using the sleep timer and a shell script. While systemd offers a nicer interface, the ability to wake the machine up to perform tasks at a set time has been around for a while.
50 • Browser (by Ulisses on 2016-09-12 18:35:45 GMT from South America)
Another one for Pale Moon and sometimes Vivaldi.
51 • Opera Browser (by Charles Burge on 2016-09-12 18:40:12 GMT from North America)
I was an enthusiastic Opera user for more than 15 years. However, I recently made the switch to Chrome, because Opera went in a new direction that I didn't like, and the incompatibility issues with older versions got to be more than I was willing to put up with. I was always sad that Opera could never gain more traction, because it really was a superior browser for many years. They invented tabs, which is something we all take for granted now.
52 • Firefox without PulseAudio (by cpoakes on 2016-09-12 19:01:57 GMT from North America)
@43 Carlos - I run a ThinkPad T530 Debian Jessie without pulseaudio and have no problem with FF 48.0. I run flash the freshplayerplugin/Adobe PPAPI. Freshplayerplugin depends on libpulse0 but uses alsa when pulseaudio daemon is running.
53 • Correction: Firefox without PulseAudio (by cpoakes on 2016-09-12 19:04:31 GMT from North America)
...Freshplayerplugin depends on libpulse0 but uses alsa when pulseaudio daemon is NOT running.
54 • one more +1 for palemoon (by Steve on 2016-09-12 19:05:12 GMT from North America)
I started with Mosaic, then Netscape, the floundered around for a bit until Firefox came out. I was happy with Firefox and Thunderbird for quite a while, then they started dicking around with the user interface and then I found out about the Google tie in so I had to replace both (the UI crap was reason enough for a change).
Eventually settled on Palemoon and FossaMail. Hopefully, I won't need to look again for a bit, these two work the way I want. I've never used a lot of add-ons with either the browser nor the email client and the few I do use work fine with both.
If you liked what Firefox used to be then you definitely want to give Palemoon a try. And FossaMail is a decent replacement for Thunderbird (at least for me anyway).
55 • Bringing up recently closed tabs in Vivaldi (by Bruce Fowler on 2016-09-12 21:41:21 GMT from North America)
CTL-SHIFT-T revives the last closed tab. I'm liking Vivaldi a lot, especially with the vertical tab bar at the right. Not remembering the zoom level for commonly-used web pages is my main complaint. I have a bunch of browsers on my Manjaro Linux machine and bounce around between them.
56 • Browser diversity, scheduling (by mikef90000 on 2016-09-12 21:54:11 GMT from North America)
Despite its wandering direction I still stick with Firefox for being open source and having critical add-on functionality not found elsewhere. Working on 32-bit and non-SSE2 capable processors helps out on older laptops.
Opera is useful for being noticeably faster than Chrome with Google services that I use.
Keeping my eye on Vivaldi but being closed source will not become the 'primary'.
Pale Moon works well but may be strangled by Mozilla's move away from the older API for add-ons.
For those of us who don't use cron / crontab regularly, the gnome-scheduler GUI is recommended; have not tried kcron yet so feedback is appreciated. What do people use for more extensive batch job production scheduling?
57 • Flash still needed, unfortunately (by mikef90000 on 2016-09-12 22:02:31 GMT from North America)
Need to mention, Flash is still needed due to damnable DRM'ed proprietary media players and lazy web site designers. Why do these a**holes use Flash to do trivial tasks like launching an external PDF or image viewer? Are they in love with IE6? Arrgh.....
58 • Browsers (by Scruntime on 2016-09-13 01:07:04 GMT from North America)
I have Palemoon on all my machines now and used to have Qupzilla though since they changed to using Chrome in some way it will no longer even open in my Manjaro and i cant find out why....I really dislike chrome based browsers so it will be adios to Qupzilla i think..
Palemoon seems to be very reliable more so than FF was last time i ran it
59 • Hair-brained Webworks (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-13 02:14:27 GMT from North America)
Many browser issues spring from JavaScript. I've seen too many infinite loops fail to bail. The browser of the future may some greasemonkey for the unwashed masses to wrestle JavaScript properly. Yes I'm aware of NoScript, AdBlock, etc. I think their existence tells us something is wrong with the web.
The idea of hybridizing a static delclarative XMLish language with a semibaked script is ... weird. In fact ... how many languages does a website have? HTML, JavaScript, insert-JS-framework-here, CSS, insert-CSS-framework-here, robots.txt, cookie data, PHP, insert-PHP-framework-here, HTML5/media, Flash, SSL-TLS, NextBigThingHere, ... Does the modern web seem a rather confused, genetically modified organism? It might be easier for a server to share an X.org window with clientele and skip the cruft.
Anyone know a bookmarks manager still alive these days? A modded SQLite database browser might cover FF format. Stand-alone bookmarks apps have vanished. I dislike the way browsers assume I want my bookmarks squirreled away in mystery compartments - and how they assume I want to "sync" in the "cloud." I don't.
Best browser option today? Hard to say, but Xombrero is yet another fine offering from OpenBSD monkeys. I still have to thank them for OpenSSH, too. Go monkeys!
https://www.maketecheasier.com/xombrero-minimalist-browser/
60 • My Eyes Hurt Now (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-13 02:32:49 GMT from North America)
... MySQL, SVG, PDF, ...
61 • Browsers (by Gary W on 2016-09-13 05:42:24 GMT from Oceania)
I like Firefox, always have. If it had multi-threading, and a task manager like Chrom*'s which enabled me to identify a tab with bad javascript, I would use it exclusively.
62 • browser preference (by abhra on 2016-09-13 05:49:07 GMT from North America)
i choose Opera as the preferred browser. it is so as i use opera for visiting maximum number of sites. opera turbo and default unlimited vpn are two most important things going in favor of opera. but for my official works, banking activities, i exclusively use firefox; no other browser.
do not have chrome/chromium installed in my computers. i agree with the point that in the poll, chrome and chromium should not have been coupled together.
63 • firewall (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-13 11:27:11 GMT from Europe)
@36&37 the easy way to get a Firewall is the ufw package [available in most distros]; gufw is the graphical version. The problem with these is that it is hard to see what they are doing.
I have been using the Firewall described in the "paper" by Amaril Dojr [https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/tutorial-expert-linux-firewalling.376935/]. I foolishly copied [cut-and-pase] the iptables rules from there into a file which I execute during boot. How you do this depends on which init system you are using, but /etc/rc.local may be a good place to put boot-time commands. This is also available on github [https://github.com/amarildojr/Firewall], but I am not sure if the github stuff is the same.
Simplicity and Trust versus Dirty Hands.
64 • Firewall [oops] (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-13 11:54:26 GMT from Europe)
@63 I forgot to mention that Amaril's firewall script contains explicit reference to the ethernet and host names, which will be different in your case.
65 • web browsers (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-13 13:31:59 GMT from Europe)
@20 I have tried to find a low resource web browser. Often they crash a lot ["a lot" means more than once for a web browser!]; tried surf, arora, qupzilla, and many more]. Midori is a good compromise, but I still come back to Chromium, and try not to think about "Evil" things. Firefox-esr is a reasonable fall-back.
66 • web browsers (by Jordan on 2016-09-13 13:54:36 GMT from North America)
FF is the way to go for those of us who don't want to worry about whether or not a page is going to display correctly (as in, as intended by the page's makers). It's also quite robust in the addon department.
I've never seen it crash completely, but it did lock up once when I had several tabs up and most of them multimedia rich.
No Pale Moon. Nothing there. No Chrome or Chromium. Very VERY annoying in some sort of "bossy" way, as in less configuration options, etc.
Opera and Safari are ongoing jokes, with Opera coming out a bit ahead of Safari in usefulness.
67 • Browsers (by bushpilot on 2016-09-13 16:34:04 GMT from North America)
I have been using Firefox & Chrome & Opera browsers for some time with Debian Jessie. Recently I installed Slimjet. So far it has been a stellar performer and very configurable. The only drawback to it is that it will not run Netflix. Other than that, it is my new favourite browser. Cannot get it installed in Antergos, bummer.
68 • @37 (by Justin D on 2016-09-13 17:33:08 GMT from North America)
Thanks for your response. I actually found a solution: the archopenrc repository (included by default) has what I need. So, for my example, I just need to install iptables-openrc, and that gives me the scripts. There wasn't a search, but when I went poking around on sourceforge, I found the file list and then tried it.
I'll keep CRUX and Slackware in mind for next time. It also looks like Gentoo has stuff. I agree that it should be a simple script, and I was just going to have Openbox autostart the firewall (I have all the iptable commands; just want it to start on boot in case I forget). I sort of want auto-restarting the firewall to happen, but when it comes down to it, autostart works pretty well (I want to do my own update notifier that way). Your KISS approach is quite practical, especially for this low-end machine.
69 • Anacron (by Timekeeper on 2016-09-13 17:34:57 GMT from North America)
Surprised there was no mention of anacron. You can use that for machines that aren't normally on (see the man page). I would love to see some examples of using anacron since my machines are mostly off.
70 • Firefox (by abrowser on 2016-09-13 17:53:47 GMT from North America)
I use Firefox exclusively. Others have discussed my issue with Chrom(ium) browsers. I also agree with @47 that the browser is the key interface to the web, and you need a trustworthy team behind it. By that I also mean, a security conscious team. I've played with several of the smaller browsers mentioned here. For me, it always comes back to who is security-conscious, do they have a team, are they pro-active, etc. At least with Firefox, I know what I'm getting (despite I'm sure what people will rebuttle about Chrome), I have several extensions and firejail to sure up its defenses.
Like @59, @60 said, it's a zoo out there. For those that don't care, just look up all the libstagefright and long list of other exploits affecting hundreds of millions of users. Sure, not all of them will get exploited (and not all at once), but why am I going to set myself up like that when prevention is possible?
At the same time, I agree with the other comments and would say that Firefox needs a rewrite. It needs to cut the crap (literally) and give it another go. Look at what Microsoft Edge did, despite what people might think (it did the best at pwn2own; Firefox didn't even get tested).
If someone can find a browser that meets my criteria (Linux, open source, security-conscious team, trustworthy, fast, customizable), I'll take it. For me, that's still (for better or worse) Firefox.
71 • Vivaldi (by cornelius on 2016-09-13 20:45:16 GMT from North America)
When Opera was bought by a Chinese company I tried to switch to another browser (I have nothing against the Chinese, I just don't trust Chinese companies). I tried to use the latest version of Vivaldi but I found it buggy. Some pages refuse to load. The icon shows the page is already loaded but the page is blank, or partially loaded. Hitting the reload button doesn't help. Another bug is that sometimes the browser spawns a lot of processes and this affects the performance of my laptop. I have to manually kill the processes in order to make my laptop usable again. I'll wait for version 2.0 until I give it another try. It's a really nice browser in terms of features (especially the Chrome extensions). It's a shame it so buggy on my laptop.
72 • browser (by argent on 2016-09-13 21:39:47 GMT from North America)
Tried Otter and found it a little old school in appearance, easy enough to set up the preferences. Also uses flash and have video, that is a big plus.
So far no crashes or freeze-ups, will give Otter a spin and see how ell it does.
@ 66 Jordan: Agree Opera and Safari are just that "on going jokes". Need to fire everyone and completely start over in my opinion.
73 • There's an App for That (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-13 22:14:09 GMT from North America)
"If someone can find a browser that meets my criteria (Linux, open source, security-conscious team, trustworthy, fast, customizable), I'll take it."
@70 Then you want Xombrero. I'll add a bullet to your list: "Authors not shipping it to make money."
Returning to Unix design philosophy, I use SMTube to view youtube, a web browser to view web pages, and were I using e-mail, an app for that. Someone should carve bookmarks management out of Firefox to make it an app.
74 • Browsers (by M.Z. on 2016-09-13 22:20:55 GMT from North America)
Like most in the poll, Firefox is my main browser of choice. I find it fairly robust, stable & quick to a degree that most others aren't, & it's by the one of the most trustworthy groups in open source. I didn't like some theme changes, but thanks to Classic Theme Restorer & some other select add-ons I always get my browser my preferred way.
I also use Opera/Vivaldi a fair amount & find them to be fairly solid alternatives, though not as good as Firefox overall. Also Chrome is there just for Netflix.
@66/72 - Pale Moon is the real joke
I don't have many real problems with Opera, though it does sometimes hang & mess up graphically on my main PCLinuxOS KDE desktop PC, though it never happens on my laptop with LMDE Cinnamon or Mint KDE, so I'm not sure what's going on there. I've got some of the same problems with Vivaldi though.
If you want a real joke of a browser that's been my experience with both Pale Moon & to a lesser extent Qupzilla. I tried Pale Moon after several version releases & gave up after a series of rapid fire crashes every time. I'm not going to bother jumping through the install & un-install hoop again when Firefox is 1000x more stable on it's worst day on identical hardware. I've had more than a few crashes with Qupzilla too, though not to the extent that I saw with Pale Moon; however, the font rendering can also be fairly spotty with Qupzilla in my experience.
75 • Crappy Certsec (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-14 00:16:54 GMT from North America)
Firefox lovers, your browser will soon break on purpose. Mozilla wants to protect the certificate cartel. Go back over my links on patching broken protocols.
Contrast with Moz: "Richard Barnes, the author of Mozilla's HTTP deprecation announcement and policy, [said] experience with HTTPS shows ... its weaknesses can be patched."
https://konklone.com/post/were-deprecating-http-and-its-going-to-be-okay
Good luck with that, captain.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/further-evidence-lenovo-breaking-https-security-its-laptops
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
I see a false-choice fallacy between the cert cartel or cleartext. Just drop GnuPG into your source tree, Moz. Then let geeks invent new protocols and security measures. All they need is JavaScript API.
Of course, that move would not be good for brow$er bu$ine$$.
Centrally-controlled certsec is crap, or to put another way, "security theater" that charges by eyeball count, regex, and key length - in short, every way conceivably possible to extract lucre. "Trust" is for sale, kids. We need free unlimited P2P security for the masses, not a better cert cartel.
76 • browsers (by tuxtest on 2016-09-14 00:21:09 GMT from North America)
I'am use every day chrome, at work windows explorer and edge, slimjet, modori and test vivaldi. My god FIREFOX is for me the best navigator all the way.... Configuration, extension, management favorite etc,,,,,,, FIREFOX is all the way the browsers
77 • WebBrowser (by sherman jerrold on 2016-09-14 00:32:10 GMT from North America)
I like and use Firefox on a number of computers for myself and those I setup with Linux for others. However, for the many older (8-14years old) computers I own/use or setup for others, the Pale Moon browser seems to be lighter and quicker and yet it has virtually all the features and capabilities of Firefox. Because there is already to much intrusion on our privacy, I won't use Google products at all, especially the Chrome browser. I use Bleachbit to try to rid computers of Google infestations.
78 • Panopticlick_test_criteria_and_updates_of_browsers (by k on 2016-09-14 06:55:50 GMT from Europe)
Like many users of Linux operating systems, I too rely on Firefox
derivatives, especially the TOR browser and Iceweasel, selection
based on Panopticlick test results for anti-tracking and ad-blocking
performance.
I have tried nearly all browsers, including Brave -- fast, including
set-up, but weaker than TOR browser in Panopticlick test, and not
readily available from Debian's current repository --.
Like MZ (comment #74 above), Chrome is used "sparingly"-- from
firejail "sandbox", of course :) --, but I am a bit "puzzled" by the
fairly high frequency of "updates" the Chrome browser seems to
require, lately. What might that be about, does anyone know?
79 • web browser panic (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-14 10:43:04 GMT from Europe)
addendum: having said I use Chromium [have done for years], it is now refusing to work with verified-by-visa for my weekly shop. I tried Firefox-esr [Devuan] and it worked. then I remembered that I upgraded Chromium to 53.0.2785.89-1~deb8u1 last week. inverse progress? question [rhetorical]: is this Chromium or Devuan?
80 • Browsers, browsers (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-14 14:18:50 GMT from Europe)
@73,
I totally agree on using SMTube for browsing YouTube and something lightweight like xombrero for the rest. Really, a browser shouldn't require much more than just the engine, and a thin wrapper to build the "window" and keep things relatively sane. If only there was a standalone filtering tool a la AdBlock, it would've been golden. That, and a bookmarking app, of course :).
81 • cron during time changes (by nkuitse on 2016-09-14 14:56:12 GMT from North America)
New cron users should also be aware that some cron implementations do not properly handle time changes; this can cause a job to be skipped or repeated. For example, in my time zone (America/New York) I avoid scheduling cron jobs at or between 2AM and 3AM.
82 • @73 Xombrero (by abrowser on 2016-09-14 17:03:47 GMT from North America)
I took at look at this based on your session. I'm surprised how fast and resource-lite it really is! It also made me realize that I guess I have some UI preferences (there's a lot of keyboard to learn here) and functionality preferences that I can't figure out how to do. Here is my wishlist:
- Temporarily whitelisting js/cookie/plugin that would close when the browser does (I see a "session" in the list, but stuff like :cookie save just makes things permanent, which I don't always want).
- Ad-blocking or some kind of extension support. I realize that that opens up security questions, but I just can't stand slow page loads and gaudy ads over the place (so uBlock Origin or ABP stuff would be useful). I also like downthemall for its feature set.
- Finer control on referrers. I wish I could make domain exceptions because a few sites need the real referrer, most don't care, an a couple work better when you forge them (i.e., pretend you're a search engine). There appears to be a master setting only.
I'm going to try use this one for a while as an alternate just to see how it goes. Maybe this would be good for most general surfing and then I can switch back into another browser if I need that functionality. Firefox has kept me mostly because of the great set of extensions, but this browser has my attention.
83 • @73 Xombrero (by abrowser on 2016-09-14 17:18:32 GMT from North America)
NVM about temporary stuff: you do :cookie toggle or :js toggle to do that kind of thing. You have to be on that particular page to do it.
Now my biggest problem is I keep closing tabs when I try to switch to them (close is on the left instead of right). I really wish I could fix that..!
84 • There's Another App for That (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-14 23:32:29 GMT from North America)
"If only there was a standalone filtering tool a la AdBlock" (#80)
"Ad-blocking or some kind of extension support" (#82)
Privoxy.org works with any browser.
https://siderite.blogspot.com/2013/05/adblock-easylist-filter-and-action.html
https://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/actions-file.html#HIDE-REFERRER
85 • Browser Choice (by ChickT on 2016-09-15 03:46:21 GMT from North America)
I used to be a happy Firefox user, until Slackware upgraded from Firefox 38 to 45. I use dial-up internet access, and the new Firefox consumed so much of my bandwidth that it was like I was connected at about 24,000 bps. I don't know who it was chatting with so vociferously, but it had to go for the sake of my internet experience. So I played with some other browsers and settled on Vivaldi (with an occasional use of Slimjet, Midori, and Qupzilla). Vivaldi even works better on some websites I had been having problems with while using Firefox.
86 • brave (by bigsky on 2016-09-15 04:00:04 GMT from North America)
Be Brave and soon you will see why we have been sucked into this sinkhole called browsers. Thanks Y'all.
87 • @85 Firefox (by linuxista on 2016-09-15 04:04:26 GMT from North America)
The reason I moved away from Firefox a few years ago was I found that on low bandwidth connections it rendered significantly more slowly than Chrome/Chromium/webkit browsers.
88 • rekonq web browser (by Elcaset on 2016-09-15 06:38:03 GMT from Europe)
I prefer to use Firefox as my main web browser, & also use rekonq some of the time.
89 • Internet web browser choices; Slimjet is the best. (by Greg Zeng on 2016-09-15 10:30:49 GMT from Oceania)
So far, about eight (8) mentions of Slimjet. Most users here seem to prefer the Linux default, generally being Firefox (FF).
In the staff-hiring business, if the prospect prefers the default operating system, and the default applications (FF, here), then we categorize these people as beginners, with poor exploratory abilities.
Even FF knows that it is a poor browser, like conventional Linux operating systems that avoid systemd. Both have very poor simultaneous multiple processing, forcing the load and unload times to be very lengthy.
Most users prefer any of the nine (9) Chromium-based browsers, listed here in the order of my preference. Not just Chromium, and not just Google Chrome. In Linux, the Chromium based browsers include: 1) Slimjet, 2) Chromium, 3) Chrome, 4) Opera, 5) Vivaldi, 6) Maxthon, 7) Superbird, 8) Iron64 and 9) Otter Browser. In web-browser user statistics, this explains the Chrome popularity.
My Dell XPS-15 notebook computer is multi-booting about 12 Linux operating systems and three Windows, easily chosen from the Grub-customizer menu, in both UEFI and BIOS booting. Only Slimjet web browsers allows my addons and extensions to auto-update, regardless of which operating system and Linux kernel I used for that particular user name.
Every time I install (or re-install) Slimjet, it will auto-set the configurations for that user-name, including the usual 51 out of 149 extensions that are used with the web browser.
Power users of computers like myself know that hardware & software change every day, so web-browser extensions change. Generally the changes are for the better. If a new version is un-suitable, there are usually "standby" extensions that will work until the error is corrected.
FF knows just how badly FF performs, so it has promised drastic improvements soon. Surprisingly, FF users seem to not know what is bad & slow performance. When I do use FF, it needs at least forty (40) extensions to do serious web work. Like Slimjet, it auto-synchronizing the extensions, but not as well. It crashes more often, and recovers back to the pre-crash settings. The only advantage of FF (genuine) is that it is days ahead of its one Linux derivative, Pale Moon.
For comparison, Windows has Chromium-based browsers with about forty (40) brandnames; FF-based number is about fourteen (14). All of these have been regularly tested by myself, plus the nine (9) "multi-engine" web browsers.
90 • @89 autoupdating (by OstroL on 2016-09-15 10:57:41 GMT from Europe)
Its better, if you can update manually. Autoupdating is quite dangerous, don't you think so?
91 • Re: Arch Watcher (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-15 11:04:04 GMT from Europe)
@84,
Thanks a lot for the links. I also forgot that the pesky IP addresses with ads can be filtered out via proper iptables / ufw firewall rules. True, not everything goes down then, but at least ad blocking is done on a much lower level and browser plugins are no longer needed :). I did it that way via PF on FreeBSD.
92 • Chrome-based browsers are all bad: (by curious on 2016-09-15 11:10:02 GMT from Europe)
They all force me to adapt to a user interface design that I don't like and that interferes with my browsing habits (even Vivaldi, that claims to be so configurable).
And the problem with Firefox is that it is becoming more Chrome-like with every release - first the user interface change ("Australis"), then the signing requirement for addons (many of which are just not possible for Chrome-based browsers), and for the near future, completely changing the addon format to one like Chrome uses etc. etc.
If these changes make it "ahead of" Pale Moon, then only in going the WRONG way.
And there is at least one other "Linux derivative" of FF, which would be my second choice, since it also still has a decent user interface: Seamonkey.
93 • Dooble Web browser (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-15 11:42:51 GMT from Europe)
Has anyone tried/used the Dooble web browser [dooble.sourceforge.net]? Is there some secret reason that it is not more popular, other than needing to be compiled from source? Ok, the latter is a bit of hassle that busy minds can do without.
94 • Browsers, browsers (by Andy Mender on 2016-09-15 12:20:54 GMT from Europe)
@93,
The project's website looks nice and the browser itself promising as well. I think the reason why so many people use Firefox is that it already has a name on the browser market and people tend to trust longer-lived products. Other than that, smaller browser projects often lack features easily accessible in major offerings like Chrome, Chromium, Safari, Firefox, etc. Finally, the "other than needing to be compiled from source" is a strong repellent against many.
95 • dooble web browser (by nolinuxguru on 2016-09-15 18:59:37 GMT from Europe)
@94 if it weren't for the need to start from source code, which in web browser terms, is tiny [42k sloc] compared to FF etc, then I would worry that it was a honey-trap. I will try it in a Firejail and report back the next time there is a browser question of the week.
96 • Adobe Flash and my preferred web browser (by Simon Wainscott-Plaistowe on 2016-09-15 19:54:34 GMT from Oceania)
Awesome to hear that Adobe has finally decided the Linux community is worthy of their support. I'm looking forward to being able to run the latest version of Flash on my preferred browser (Firefox) without having to resort to the Fresh Player plugin.
97 • Firefox am I missing something (by mandog on 2016-09-15 20:04:28 GMT from South America)
I have used FF since forever and seem to be missing something. its a little bit more modern now, version 48 .0.2 still has the menu bar, the square edges of the tabs have gone, the theme is the same as gnome3 or any other distro that I use. Flash comes from pepperflash v a wrapper so what did I miss when they updated to this interface. It looks nothing like chrome to me.
And the performance is unbeatable on Linux and BSD.
98 • You Can't Fool All of the People All of the Time (by Arch Watcher 402563 on 2016-09-15 23:34:20 GMT from North America)
SlimJet pays for promotional blog posts:
http://www.slimjet.com/en/help-promote.php
An AirVPN staffer on SlimJet:
https://airvpn.org/topic/14306-webrtc-leaks-solved/#entry28011
Greg, I got chuckle out of your HR comment. Most HR offices insist on "WORD FORMAT ONLY!!" - hardly explorers.
You miss no chance to promo systemkudzu. A sales expert should spot deceptive marketing, never mind poor engineering or infinite mission creep.
My opinions came from using it. Have you ever written a unit? I didn't begin a "hater." I began a "believer" and used it. Gather facts, not RedHat marketing deceptions. Ask anyone here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/supervision@list.skarnet.org/
Geez, even Linus got fed up with the bugs...
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/04/04/1523231/linus-torvalds-suspends-key-linux-developer
99 • @90 Autoupdating is quite dangerous?; @98 (by Greg Zeng on 2016-09-16 03:19:35 GMT from Oceania)
@98: "Most HR offices insist on "WORD FORMAT ONLY!!" - hardly explorers."
FYI: LibreOffice is the most famous replacement for Microsoft Office. In Windows, there are at least seven (7) other replacements of the malware M$ Office.
@90: Updating internet web browsers, is ok for addons and extensions, for each registered user. Rarely, incompatibilities happen, such as interering with the functions of other parts of the browser. Slimjet's updates are per user, so it does not affect other users.
Linux has several other way of updating it operating system and applications, with specialized precautions needed each time.
Updating Mint-based operating systems allow various degrees of updating, from (1) to (5), color coded, so that you know that (5) is riskier. Linux operating systems generally allow both the operating system and the properly registered applications to update to the latest stable versions. Ubuntu's PPA system generally works, but sometimes starts downloads from a slow server.
Generally Linux operating systems must be root-allowed to update the operating system. Microsoft Windows hid this control from most of its home users. Microsoft has many strange, difficult ways of updating, beyond the scope of this site.
100 • Xombrero dead? (by Sam on 2016-09-16 16:07:41 GMT from North America)
@70, 73: Is Xombrero still active? There are pending pull requests from 19 months ago. I think that fails your criteria of wanting a pro-active team.
101 • @98, @89 (by Justin on 2016-09-16 16:30:26 GMT from North America)
Thanks, Arch Watcher, for the links. We can add $limjet to the list (though that looks a bit ugly... maybe just $$$ Slimjet $$$).
I also agree with the "have you tried it?" approach. My experience has been the opposite in terms of default performance: default Debian 8 is much slower than default Debian 7 (I've tried it several times because I was doing custom live ISO work where speed was the #1 factor). One could claim that those results aren't conclusive because there are too many moving parts.
Okay, then I tried Archbang, which offers live CDs with both. I had two VMs ready that I launched together. One sits on the grub menu waiting to auto boot while the other I hit "at the same time." Let's just say my Debian result wasn't a fluke (no matter which order I switched them around or who I let get a slight lead... it wasn't close to me). For these tests, I was coming in trying to accept (and even favor) the newcomer because I want the latest and greatest. At least on my hardware, my setup, my testing of what I believe to be stock setups, I let the performance decide. For others, YMMV, so go with it.
@Slimjet: Please send my compensation here to Distrowatch.
102 • Learning Suites (by Mark Hughey on 2016-09-16 23:42:43 GMT from North America)
Not so much a comment on the week's Watch, which I always find informative, but a question: Have you, or could you, take a look at possibly comparing some of the distros more pointed toward education and students?
I ask because I downloaded Uberstudent after seeing it on the YUMI list... and I was floored by what a sleek, well-designed Distro it was for students, especially since I'd really never heard of it otherwise. The only other real learning suite I'd touched was Sugar on a Stick, which I heard good things about but actually found it very non-intuitive, especially for beginners. As a father and stepfather of three, I like the idea of trying new suites that are designed to help students through school, and would love to see a comparison of some of the frontrunners.
Keep up the awesome work!
103 • @99 Libre Office a replacment for Microsoft Office? (by imnotrich on 2016-09-18 00:54:21 GMT from North America)
LOL!
Apparently you're a tad out of touch. Aside from a few bugs Libre Office is not horrible, but it is not and never will be 100% compatible with Microsoft Office formats. That's not entirely LO's fault, but it's something users have had to deal with for years.
If I absolutely must create a document that is to be shared in a professional setting, my only option is Microsoft Office.
104 • LibreOffice (by M.Z. on 2016-09-18 06:06:18 GMT from North America)
@99&103
Last time I had to work on a document collaboratively we used the MS equivalent of Google Docs & it ran okay in Linux for the most part; however, there were enough issues with it for the group overall that the consensus was to recommend Google Docs for that type of thing in the future.
On a personal note I used LibreOffice almost exclusively to write all the college papers I needed over the past few years & when I turned them in as individual projects I know the formatting was always perfect because I exported them to .pdf format from within LibreOffice. If I had to collaborate someone else always offered to do the work on final formatting in Word, so I rarely if ever really needed MS Office for anything while earning my BS or MS.
For my part I think LibreOffice is basically there unless you need 100% perfect compatibility with MS Office, though from what I understand you don't even get that with two different versions of MS Office released a couple of years apart. I hear that MS explicitly decided not to follow the standard they released to the ISO or some other standards organization, so you'll basically never get perfect formatting with different versions of Word because they were designed that way.
Anyway I think the pdf export function from LibreOffice is probably the most reliable way to get finished documents out in a universal format & is better than MS Office for final documents. If you need to collaborate there may be some minor issues, but it hasn't been bad enough for me to need MS for anything. YMMV, but LibreOffice is certainly good enough for me.
105 • Preferred web browser (by win2linconvert on 2016-09-18 10:24:17 GMT from North America)
Definitely Opera 12.x series was my favorite. Now I use my second choice, Firefox, and occasionally my third, Vivaldi. I sure miss the old and better Opera though. Well... That's my two cents.
win2linconvert
106 • Firefox bloat (by Peter on 2016-09-18 12:56:33 GMT from Europe)
I just tried an old hard drive with an installation of Mint 17 KDE installed, complete with Firefox 28. Synaptic tells me it's 65Mb in size. By comparison the latest update to FF48 is 110Mb. Wasn't one of the arguments Mozilla used to justify the removal of customisation features from FF29 onwards something about reducing bloat? Incidentally, my weapon of choice is Pale Moon.
Number of Comments: 106
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| • Issue 1165 (2026-03-23): Argent Linux 1.5.3, disk space required by Linux, Manjaro team goes on strike, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA driver support and builds RISC-V packages, systemd introduces age tracking |
| • Issue 1164 (2026-03-16): d77void, age verification laws and Linux, SUSE may be for sale, TrueNAS takes its build system private, Debian publishes updated Trixie media, MidnightBSD and System76 respond to age verification laws |
| • Issue 1163 (2026-03-09): KaOS 2026.02, TinyCore 17.0, NuTyX 26.02.2, Would one big collection of packages help?, Guix offers 64-bit Hurd options, Linux communities discuss age delcaration laws, Mint unveils new screensaver for Cinnamon, Redox ports new COSMIC features |
| • Issue 1162 (2026-03-02): AerynOS 2026.01, anti-virus and firewall tools, Manjaro fixes website certificate, Ubuntu splits firmware package, jails for NetBSD, extended support for some Linux kernel releases, Murena creating a map app |
| • Issue 1161 (2026-02-23): The Guix package manager, quick Q&As, Gentoo migrating its mirrors, Fedora considers more informative kernel panic screens, GhostBSD testing alternative X11 implementation, Asahi makes progress with Apple M3, NetBSD userland ported, FreeBSD improves web-based system management |
| • Issue 1160 (2026-02-16): Noid and AgarimOS, command line tips, KDE Linux introduces delta updates, Redox OS hits development milestone, Linux Mint develops a desktop-neutral account manager, sudo developer seeks sponsorship |
| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Dynasoft Linux
Dynasoft Linux was a Chinese Linux distribution based on Red Hat Linux. It includes a modified version of KDE with full support for Chinese language and a Chinese input system called "Yangchunbaixue" developed in-house.
Status: Discontinued
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