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1 • LinuxMint (by sofiasmith on 2018-05-07 00:15:30 GMT from Spain)
The king is dead. Long live the king.
A new sheriff in town: Manjaro.
2 • Vanilla Gnome (by linuxista on 2018-05-07 00:21:23 GMT from United States)
Gnome is vanilla on every other distro I am aware of other than Ubuntu, so the first and last choices on the survey could have been collapsed into one.
3 • TrueOS review (by Jordan on 2018-05-07 00:24:52 GMT from United States)
It's a good review. I tried TrueOS last year and it was one of those distro tries that just had too many things cropping up in too many different areas for me to be able to justify messing with it, let alone keeping it as a regular os on one of my machines.
It felt like a work in progress and I was supposed to do all the work.
4 • @ "perform administrator actions without a password" (by OS2_user on 2018-05-07 01:23:39 GMT from United States)
> "... seems oddly permissive ... It's not often unprivileged users are given so much free access to manipulate the system"
Only on about a billion Windows systems! Users "given" access is large part of why Windows took over, and why Linux today is still "not ready for the desktop".
> "The ease with which non-admin users can adjust settings, without even a password, concerns me."
Just DROP that 1970's multi-user idea: I have a PERSONAL computer!
However, just when the review got me interested in TrueOS, I read that on real hardware: "it would not boot in Legacy BIOS mode, only in UEFI mode. I also could not boot the system with the default settings and drivers. I had to run the operating in safe mode with the generic vesa graphics". -- Better than my own experience last year: TrueOS put up a text spinner and nothing else, ever.
I WISH there were a rational alternative to Windows, but there is not.
5 • Gnome Survey (by Andy Figueroa on 2018-05-07 03:50:09 GMT from United States)
Developers could take a hint. Most users don't care for Gnome. If we wanted bloat and feature creep, we would use Windows. :-)
6 • Gnome (by George on 2018-05-07 04:19:00 GMT from United States)
Unclear why Ubuntu chooses, again/still, a relatively unpopular DE. Even more unclear that even one Ubuntu variant doesn't grab the opportunity and support for 5 years... but maybe that's when corporate funding would be helpful.
Not sure about "feature creep". I haven't found easy ways in Gnome-Ubuntu to duplicate some features that other, more trim, DEs include. Using XFE file manager and text editor in place of Gnome-Ubuntu's corresponding apps does ease the pain and doesn't seem to confuse the system. (One click and you get a tree in the left panel and two more panels to manipulate files.)
===
Thanks for the thorough review of TrueOS.
7 • KDE Plasma (by Andy Prough on 2018-05-07 04:24:15 GMT from United States)
The better Gnome
8 • Live upgrading Raspbian (by rk on 2018-05-07 05:11:38 GMT from Germany)
Is it really a good idea to copy the sd-card while the filesystem on it is live?
Did I miss something?
9 • Gnome? (by lupus on 2018-05-07 05:31:56 GMT from Germany)
Gnome is beautiful and well thought out but sluggish on older Hardware and I'm more of a keyboard less of a touchscreen Type. The only Desktop Environment that is even worse is KDE. (K onfigure yourself to DE ath) I hate it because it lacks of sane choices and therefor I want to endorse: (Drumroll)
Manjaro Deepin
Liked the Deepin Desktop from the start, had my doubts cause of the origin, been trying it out for a week, simply loving it (sane choices)
Only quibble: Energy Management is simply nonexisting anymore (Deepin 15.5) but to be honest doesn't work very well on most Distros so I have learned my way around it so I will put up with just switching off the Monitor.
Bye Lupus
PS Tiling the windows (left half/right half) only works with the Mouse/Touchpad no Keyboard shortcut by default but I can work around that one too I learned
10 • Dying (by lupus on 2018-05-07 05:38:59 GMT from Germany)
The commen denominator of this issue seems to be Distributions dying or not getting enough support!
Void, Korora, Ubuntu Studio etc.
I fear herein lies a trend so I will up my donations to the Projects I would really miss. Hope you guys do the same!
Bye Lupus
11 • @2,5,6,7,9... GNOME liked? (by Greg Zeng on 2018-05-07 05:56:30 GMT from Australia)
Very good question, again. Agree with the comments so far. Gnome(3) is the heaviest of all the Desktop Environments, by deliberate design. Most us prefer less heavy eye-candy. Gnome(3), like KDE Plasma, is still far from being settled into steady maturity. Everything is rapidly evolving, including bugs, bug-fixes and add-ons.
Which do I prefer- customized. However, in the multiple choice alternatives, I also prefer others, to the unstable feature-deprived heaviest two Desktop-environments. Most others are lighter weight, stable, and more feature rich.
12 • Gnome...? (by OstroL on 2018-05-07 06:11:43 GMT from Poland)
I voted no. Atm its 61% nos. Cannonical had taken the wrong decision by choosing the gnome shell as default. Gnome shell is the most unpopular DE today. The idling memory at 1.2GB and memory leaks, which need never ending fixes, etc would not bring in users. Once sluggish KDE is now idling at 370MB! Gnome devs had not learned a lesson. They still think that they dictate how the users must use a DE.
13 • Distrowatch wallpaper (by Chris on 2018-05-07 06:25:41 GMT from Australia)
The Distrowatch wallpaper by Pedro is good.
14 • TrueOS.... (by ed on 2018-05-07 07:02:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
I tried the TrueOS and looks like buggy... main terminal app crashes due to lumina desktop -known bug since a couple of years... pending to be fixed sometime in the future (No comment here), BTW not so 'rolling' release, TrueOS's repos (repo in fact. just hosted on one site IIRC) are lagging behind the FreeBSD's
15 • GNOME (by Felix on 2018-05-07 07:05:20 GMT from Germany)
I use ls, cd, cp, mv. Why would I need something like GNOME? As an application menu I use dmenu and yes I have a status bar displaying the date, time, battery state, cpu load, network state and giving me quick access to wifi settings. Most people watching me work say: "oh my god this is so inconvenient" but I tend to be faster then they are. Even the many clicks they need to unmount a flash drive is slower than typing umount /mnt/usb.
16 • TrueOS (by jadecat on 2018-05-07 07:33:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
TrueOS (sorry the name is still stupid) use their own CDN as a repo. You do have the option to get later packages within the AppCafe. Come back PC-BSD - when KDE was default - all is forgiven.
17 • Gnome, vanilla or otherwise (by Romane on 2018-05-07 08:22:38 GMT from Australia)
In my very first foray into Linux a couple or few decades ago (not sure, think it was very early Red Hat, well pre-commercial) the desktop was Gnome. I was very impressed. Very.
I ended up moving away, primarily to KDE (now dumped roughly about a year ago thanks to a particular developers attitude) but on occasion went back and tried the evolving Gnome desktop. It finally reached the point where it had, quite frankly, started telling me how I was allowed to run MY computer. My last look at Gnome was on Fedora about a year ago, and I hated it. Don't think I'll bother again - it really has departed from how I wish to use my computer.
This does *not* mean that Gnome is a bad system for the desktop. I know many like it and are very happy with it. But for me - I really don't care if it is vanilla or customised. They lost me long ago.
18 • @1 Long live the king (by kc1di on 2018-05-07 08:31:47 GMT from United States)
Still using Mint here :) think it will come back to retake manjaro? I Don't know but still like Mint better.
19 • Gnome (by Jim on 2018-05-07 10:20:17 GMT from United States)
I loved Gnome right up until Gnome3. Now I only run OS's that offer the Mate desktop.
20 • From PC-BSD to TrueOS (by Microlinux on 2018-05-07 10:40:41 GMT from France)
PC-BSD was a nice system. Based on stable FreeBSD, with a no-nonsense KDE desktop. Then came TrueOS, based on Lumina (basically a toy), and with the switch to a rolling release model the whole thing became a moving target. I lost interest at that point.
21 • #20 (by jadecat on 2018-05-07 11:18:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
You are basically right, but, then came PC-BSD with a multitude of DE's. That is where it went down hill fast. Still there is always GhostBSD... But wait! (check the news stories above)
22 • GNOME and Canonical (by dragonmouth on 2018-05-07 12:11:52 GMT from United States)
Looks like Canonical is following Microsoft's example in creating their own versions of existing software. (Mir, Unity, snaps, now GNOME) Are they doing their iteration of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? It didn't work for MS and it is not working for Canonical. They had to give up on Mir. They gave up on Unity. Will they be forced to give up on their heavily customized version of GNOME? While users like Ubuntu, they are not particularly thrilled with Canonical's proprietary software.
23 • proprietary (by Tim Dowd on 2018-05-07 13:15:28 GMT from United States)
@ 22
None of the projects you just mentioned are proprietary software. They're all free and open source.
24 • Poll (by zfoo on 2018-05-07 13:30:47 GMT from United States)
I find it interesting that the poll shows a large amount of the distrowatch visitors do not prefer Gnome but many of the most visited/popular distros are Gnome focused.
25 • Raspbian upgrade and GNOME (by Jesse on 2018-05-07 14:09:18 GMT from Canada)
@8: >> "Is it really a good idea to copy the sd-card while the filesystem on it is live?
It may not be ideal, but it's not exactly a bad idea. Worst case scenario in this situation is probably that when you restore the old image and boot your Pi off it, the system will perform a fsck. It takes a few seconds and then you're back to normal. It's no worse than having the power interrupted.
If you're really worried, you could re-mount your file system in read-only mode before doing the snapshot and then remount in read-write mode to do the upgrade.
@24 "I find it interesting that the poll shows a large amount of the distrowatch visitors do not prefer Gnome but many of the most visited/popular distros are Gnome focused."
Are they though? Of the top 13 projects on our PHR only two are really focused on GNOME (Ubuntu and Fedora). Maybe three if you count Debian, but it's so open to customization I think it's difficult to think of it as GNOME-focused. And of those three, Ubuntu is a very recent convert to GNOME 3, most of its popularity was gained during its GNOME 2 and Unity years. So, really, only one project (Fedora) in the top 13 PHR is truly a long-term, GNOME 3 focused project.
The rest are either new to running GNOME 3 or simply offer GNOME as one of many options.
26 • Gaak - Not again. (by davej on 2018-05-07 14:31:26 GMT from United States)
I'm a longtime user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, twenty plus years. I use multiple FreeBSD servers in a production environment. I was tired of hand building graphical environments for my servers each time and thought that a PC-BSD install could take over the drudgery. I rarely need a graphical environment, but the need is still a requirement. I tested PC-BSD for awhile. It had its quirks and I found that it was doing things differently than the way I wanted them done. I went back to doing things by hand. Gee, then they went 64bit only... Okay, PC-BSD, out the door. TrueOS evolves out of PC-BSD. I experimented with it for 6 months or so on a half dozen machines. It wasn't wasn't right for me. Too many deviations from FreeBSD and was inconsistent and unreliable. If what you want to do is work on the OS instead of using the OS to do work, then TrueOS might be for you. OpenRC? <- this doesn't fly with me. I tried GhostBSD and it was good and it was configured like I would configure my systems. I was about to fully embrace it as my "base system" and now I'm hearing that they are changing to the TrueOS setup. Damn it, I'm rolling snake eyes every time.
27 • Distro's dropping 32-bits support... (by Marc Visscher on 2018-05-07 14:41:02 GMT from Netherlands)
I see a strange paradox going on in Linux land. Lots of distro's aim at old computers, which are mostly 32-bits machines. But the choice to install these distro's is getting smaller and smaller. Am I the only one who finds that a strange thing?
Another thing: Lately I wanted to install Bohdi Linux on a very old laptop with only 256MB of RAM. Bodhi only needs 128MB's of RAM to run smoothly, and many people out here advice Bodhi on very old hardware because it runs pretty smooth on old computers. But (and here's the catch): to install Bodhi I need an image on a USB-stick or... a DVD! Bodhi is just a few MB's too big for a normal CD-R. Big problem, because the laptop was only equipped with a CD-ROM drive. So Bodhi intents to be a perfect distro for old hardware, but when you try to install it on old hardware you find out there is no way to write an image on CD-R. Lots of old computers don't have a DVD-drive or are able to start a distro from USB. Eventually I had to install AntiX. Which is fine too, but is just a bit slow on only 256MB's of RAM.
But back to the subject again: if distro's decide to drop 32-bits images, don't advertise with "perfect for older hardware". Because that ain't entirely true. To me 64-bits computers aren't considered "old hardware". Just in the recent years 64-bits became common.
I have 11 computers at home (I know, way too much!), but 8 machines are 32-bits machines. Some laptops are like new, have lots of "juice" to run a decent 32-bits distro (Xubuntu, Mint MATE, BunsenLabs, Debian). But if this trend goes on, I feel like I'm forced to buy new hardware. Which I don't want, because these machines run fine! Really!
I said it before a short time ago: at this moment it's too soon to drop the 32-bits architecture. Wait 'till 2020 and they might have a point.
28 • GNOME (by Roy Davies on 2018-05-07 14:45:11 GMT from United Kingdom)
I will use Gnome if that is the default for the distro I am using. However, my prefernce is for xfce
Also, I totally agree with comment 27. THe loss of 32 bit support from developers is a travesty. There are still many,many, 32 bit computers out there with years of usable life.
29 • Congratulations to Manjaro.... (by Marc Visscher on 2018-05-07 14:55:34 GMT from Netherlands)
And my congratulations go to Manjaro! Mint just lost it's number one ranking on Distrowatch, and to be honest: I'm not surprised at all. Mint is a great distro, but Manjaro is, at this point, the most user friendly Linux distro around. I mean: since I got Manjaro installed on two computers, I NEVER had to use the terminal. Not even once! I really think that's impressive. For me the terminal is no problem at all (I like doing things in the terminal sometimes), but see it from the new Linux introducees for instance. If people want to try Linux for the first time, Manjaro is "thee" distro to advice.
Besides of being user friendly it looks wonderful. The theme looks very slick, the icons are top notch, and... maybe the most important of them all: the eye candy in Manjaro looks very consistent. Not a lot of distro's can say that. I really love Linux, I use a lot of distro's, but on the eyecandy-side lots of distro's still look like an inconsistent mess (just like TrueOS, see the review). On linux sometimes it's not different: inconsistent window borders, mixed use of different sorts of icons, ugly use of color palets.... awful sometimes.
I despise Windows and MacOS (for different and/of particular reasons), but they managed to be consistent in the way it looks. There's no denying that. It should be the same on Linux.
30 • @27 - You couldn't be more right (by davej on 2018-05-07 15:14:56 GMT from United States)
Last week I downloaded and burned a dvd from the Bodhi iso file to use on a 32 bit machine. Yeah, I had to temporarily add a dvd drive to the system in order to boot the OS. The kernel crashed every time on this computer (Compaq deskpro EN 1Ghz Pentium 3 with 512MB). I chose Bodhi because it was said to run well on older computers. Hmm... Didn't work on this Compaq.
31 • Manjaro...Mint...etc (by OstroL on 2018-05-07 15:18:42 GMT from Poland)
Manjaro is not Arch, Mint is not Ubuntu, but...you can use Ubuntu packages in Mint, while you can't use Arch packages in Manjaro. If you mix Arch repos in Manjaro, the poor pacman would go haywire...
32 • Gnome (by Jordan on 2018-05-07 15:20:52 GMT from United States)
Gnome is so much about more than just the desktop/wm. It's deep. Just like KDE you need so many libraries and other supportive software in there that it makes me wonder why it's still included as an alternative in so many distros, let alone as the main wm. I admit to not understanding why it's even still out there in its present form.
Still, if you want this or that game or other app that you loved when KDE or Gnome were smaller/faster, and you're running XFCE etc you'll often be downloading dependencies galore.
33 • Gnome on OpenBSD (by fred on 2018-05-07 15:56:03 GMT from United States)
I use Gnome3 on OpenBSD. It's simple to install, works consistently, and is performant on my $200 thinkpad. It's a beautiful thing.
34 • KDEfied Bodhi Moksha User Here + @6, why not? (by BeGo on 2018-05-07 16:14:31 GMT from Indonesia)
@6,
"Unclear why Ubuntu chooses, again / still, a relatively unpopular DE."
Ubuntu is a "Mother OS", so its presence foster "child OS" that specialised for its intended market.
And of course, Mother should be happy if the child became popular. :P
And Gnome is the most mature DE environment currently, compared to KDE and others.
I prefer my Moksha off course, coupled with several KDE apps. :)
35 • GNOME, Rankings (by c00ter on 2018-05-07 16:18:24 GMT from United States)
Two years ago the GNOME Shell DE's popularity exceeded KDE Plasma's by quite some bit. GNOME was THE desktop, as KDE was struggling to get users to stop bemoaning the loss of KDE4 and accept KDE5. I don't know what went on in development circles, but Plasma got a lot better while GNOME.org's developers seemingly rested on their laurels or--what grates on me personally--started removing popular features while implementing applications like GNOME Recipes. This smacks of Marie Antoinette's reputed statement to the starving French people to "Let them eat cake." But never fear, fellow Penguininstas! In the rapidly changing Linuxworld, what goes around comes around. Again. And again. ;)
Congrats to all of the developers, team leaders, moderators, and especially the nifty Manjaro Community for the new #1 Distrowatch Ranking. Now is not the time to rest. Press on. :D
36 • Gnome 3.. (by Bill S on 2018-05-07 17:41:55 GMT from United States)
I find it interesting that 62% of us here do not use Gnome 3.
And I wonder to myself if Gnome's developers even care.
Ah - nope.
37 • Manjaro-Arch repositories (@31) (by brad on 2018-05-07 17:50:05 GMT from United States)
yaourt works fine for building AUR source code for packages that are usable in Manjaro. It's the only way I can get my Canon PIXMA printer running properly in Manjaro.
Pacman is for pre-built packages only.
38 • gnome shell (by MALsPa on 2018-05-07 18:06:44 GMT from United States)
I'd be careful about jumping to any conclusions based on any poll results here. I enjoy using GNOME Shell ("vanilla," in Debian Stable) as well as other DEs and WMs. I wasn't a big fan of the old GNOME 2, but no big deal, I used that sometimes, too. To me, GNOME Shell is a lot better than the old GNOME, but whatever, opinions are like [you know], everybody has one.
39 • Releases with engineering tools already installed (by John on 2018-05-07 18:19:50 GMT from United States)
Hi Jesse and all,
Great issue as always.
I would like to find 'live' distributions with recent versions of engineering tools like Kicad, LibreCAD and other design tools installed and running. Maybe you could add that to your search terms? Installed and known to work.
I finally got the recent version of Kicad to compile and install on this dist. which is now an older live version of AntiX 16bit. It runs on an SD plugged into a USB2 adapter.
I had to compile it on using a desktop machine. This laptop kept getting half way through and shutting down due to getting too hot!!
I also found the same problem while trying to compile wsjt.
John - Concord, NH
40 • Engineering tools (by John on 2018-05-07 18:25:18 GMT from United States)
I should have said 32 bits!!
41 • GNOME? You see the result within the opinion poll above! (by Gerhard Goetzhaber on 2018-05-07 18:25:23 GMT from Austria)
KDE (which I would mostly use all through my first years with Linux), as described by another poster, never and never gets mature. It's about pretty one year now I've been setting all distributions (mostly turning around between Sparky, Fedora and OpenSUSE) up with Xfce only, and I'm getting excitingly happy with it more and more ...
42 • Save Ubuntu Studib, help musicians and multimedia gents ! (by rey on 2018-05-07 18:54:16 GMT from Canada)
Hi,very disappointed to see Ubuntu Studio struggling to keep afloat.If you do music outside Microsoft and Apple expensive apps you only have UbuntuStudio.This has been my distro of choice for yrs now..
GNOME -
I have stooped using it yrs ago including KDE Plasma- LXDE,XFCE,etc much better choices and less recurrent historical bugs.
43 • KDE Fanboyism (by linuxista on 2018-05-07 20:26:16 GMT from United States)
This thread is a perfect example of the KDE fanboy hate that arises every time Gnome is mentioned. 61% don't use Gnome according to this non-scientific survey, but ... 39% apparently do. Not bad that a single desktop is apparently the preference of almost 40% of users, probably a clear plurality (so maybe developers do know what they're doing). Gnome is the default on most major distros: Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Antergos; or the basis for most of the rest, like Solus, Mint, and Elementary. Lots of users simply prefer Gnome3, and it's not because we're unfamiliar with KDE (quite the contrary), and weeping and gnashing your teeth every time Gnome is mentioned will not change that.
44 • @23 Tim Dowd: (by dragonmouth on 2018-05-07 20:51:17 GMT from United States)
I am aware that the Canonical projects are free and open source. However, many of them are still "proprietary" in the meaning of "belonging to or controlled by". Many of the projects were created just so that Canonical could have a final say in their development. Something similar to what Microsoft did with "J". They wanted their own version of Java. IIRC, Mark Shuttleworth admitted in so many words that Mir was created just so Canonical can control it. Unfortunately for him and Canonical, other Linux developers were perfectly happy collaborating on preexisting projects such as Wayland.
45 • Gnome? Windows 8... (by Kazan on 2018-05-07 21:15:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Gnome-shell is Linux world's Windows 8.
Windows learned from its mistake and moved to Windows 10, while Gnome devs don't learn. Microsoft listens to its users, while Gnome devs want you to listen...
46 • @31 Manjaro is not to Arch what Mint is to Ubuntu (by edked on 2018-05-07 22:49:06 GMT from Canada)
Your analogy is not an apt one; Manjaro relationship to Arch more resembles what Ubuntu is to Debian, not what Mint is to Ubuntu, and you don't see people getting annoyed at not being able to directly install from Debian repos in Ubuntu.
43: a large chunk of this thread is also people dumping on KDE, so you're just showing the usual "everybody's picking on my side" blinkered-perspective of any DE fanboy.
47 • Re: Distro's dropping 32-bits support (by John on 2018-05-08 00:00:01 GMT from Canada)
Well to be honest, Linux on 32 bit systems has a limited life time, approx 20 years left. That is due to the year 2038 issue.
But for old 32 bit, I would recommend either NetBSD and OpenBSD. Both converted over to a 64 bit time_t, this no 2038 Issue. I tried both on very old hardware and both seemed to run fine and I think either can make for a nice alternative.
48 • Gnome? (by seacat on 2018-05-08 00:35:38 GMT from Argentina)
No, MATE.
49 • "I like GNOME but on a different distro" (by malcolm on 2018-05-08 01:32:27 GMT from United States)
I like Gnome, but on a different distro. I swap between many different window managers/desktops on my Arch daily driver, and always come back to Gnome as my top choice. Sure it's had a lot of changes, but I like how straightforward and "modern" it looks. I have a lot of RAM, so the resource usage doesn't bother me... and I haven't experienced any memory leaks that caused any "major" problems. I haven't really ever tried Ubuntu save for one time in a vm, but I didn't use it long enough to become familiar with their gnome stylings and wasn't a fan.
I think vanilla Gnome looks great out of the box, but may not be the best choice for minimal hardware
50 • Gnome 3 workflow (by Nathan on 2018-05-08 02:21:12 GMT from United States)
I don't have any strong opinions regarding Gnome 3 itself, but rather the workflow. It just makes sense to me to CTRL-ALT-DOWN to push a new window onto my task-stack, and then CTRL-ALT-UP to pop, never having more than one window open on a single workspace. I currently use Gnome 3 on my systems that can handle it, and XFCE or Fluxbox on the others, but my workflow on all of them has converged to the Gnome 3 workflow simply because I like it the best. Makes Fluxbox rather silly when I don't use its tabs, though.
51 • gnomell (by Osrana Kurwa on 2018-05-08 03:54:31 GMT from Netherlands)
>"never having more than one window open on a single workspace"
L0L. yeah, because the crippled cell phone interface is the UI ideal. L0L
>CTRL-ALT-DOWN
>CTRL-ALT-UP
The gnome 3 finger salutes... bacause CTRL-ALT-DEL was already taken. L0L
bork bork pork
52 • Trueos (by proxy on 2018-05-08 08:15:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
I was wiling to give trueos a try, just to see if it was any better at handling drives that have ext2/3/4 filesystems. I was able to install but it borked the first partition, which trueos was not being installed on and should not have touched. Lucky for me I had a fairly recent backup of what was on the first partition. This happened on a GPT formated HD. I am back to freebsd on a msdos formatted HD. Didnt work for me to well.
53 • @29 MANJARO (by frisbee on 2018-05-08 09:24:25 GMT from Switzerland)
Mint just lost it's number one ranking on Distrowatch ... and that's rely sad.
Mint is a great distro, but Manjaro is, at this point, a distro ... that needs a lot of work done to achieve the reliability of Mint.
I mean: since I got Manjaro installed on two computers, I NEVER had to use the terminal ... except all of the time ... to get printer or scanner working, to repair the broken icons or themes, to install from AUR ...
I really think that's impressive ... that one can use Mint without the need for Terminal since there is a .deb for virtually everything.
If people want to try Linux for the first time, Manjaro is "thee" distro to ... avoid since it has some issues all of the time. From one day to another, Samba stops working, printer doesn't print, scanner gets suddenly "not found" ...
Besides of being user friendly it looks wonderful ... after one replace or repair missing or hardcoded icons, after some theme editing to fix inconsistencies, after one fixes the nonsense on the taskbar and in the menue ...
The theme looks very slick, the icons are top notch, and... one could put them on just about every other system out there if one really likes them that much.
Maybe the most important of them all: the eye candy in Manjaro looks very consistent ... after the user him-/herself makes the "finishing touch".
Sorry, it just had to be.
I use Manjaro too, beside Mint, Springdale and a couple of others. Manjaro is a very fine distro but it has a VERY, VERY, VERY LONG WAY TO GO to become a replacement for Mint.
54 • GNOME (by Brenton Horne on 2018-05-08 09:44:32 GMT from Australia)
I prefer distros that ship with a vanilla version of GNOME, mostly because it's easier for me to customize it from a vanilla starting point than from a distro-customized starting point. I like to install several extensions (e.g. dash to panel, clock override, system monitor, uptime monitor, etc.), change the theme (e.g. I like the obsidian icon theme, along with the United shell theme and Azure GTK theme) and make it look more like Windows but with some GNOME-only charm. Like this is my present GNOME desktop on openSUSE Tumbleweed: https://imgur.com/bscUqVy.png.
55 • Gnome3 (by Mark on 2018-05-08 11:05:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
Vanilla Gnome is weird to use without customization. I can't believe you still can't minimize windows by default. Like others I find it annoying that the Gnome developers think they know better than me how I should work on my computer. It is possible, however, to do a lot of modifications yourself using Tweak tool and gsettings.
I find Ubuntu's Gnome generally easy and pleasant to use. Ubuntu have always got the important things right, in terms of usability, and I think that's a major reason why it's been so popular.
Centos's Gnome desktop is very good too, but I wouldn't generally run Centos as a desktop OS.
56 • Gnome (by Linux on 2018-05-08 12:00:30 GMT from Portugal)
A suggestion: swap Gdm to Lightdm. No clue why, but there'll be a noticeable change in Gshell performance, for better.
About pools: Mostly misleading. They reflect DW user's preferences, just that. Not Linux wise preferences.
Comments is about the same. The happy ones (on what they use) don't give a 2cent. about the unhappiness of those who don't use what they use :))))))
57 • @50 "never having more than one window open on a single workspace" (by curious on 2018-05-08 12:30:48 GMT from Germany)
Because that *really* makes sense on a large modern widescreen display (at least 16:9 aspect ratio - some are even wider!), especially when actually trying to get any real work done...
Btw, I think it is significant that over 60% do not use Gnome 3. I doubt that the same would be true for the other well-known desktop environments. They probably have less people each who *prefer* them, but more who will at least use them now and then (not surprising, since they don't force the users to reorganize their workflow).
On the point of 32bit support, the bigger, better funded distros seem to support 32bit systems longest: Linux is developer-driven. Things happen if developers want to do them. If the developers are no longer interested in old systems, they will be dropped. This is natural for a free ecosystem. Only developers who are themselves interested in old computers will continue to develop (and test!!!) for these - and perhaps some who have corporate backing and get paid for it. The corporations might still want 32bit software for embedded devices (there was such a discussion in Ubuntu a while ago).
58 • Manjaro (by Harry on 2018-05-08 15:27:22 GMT from United States)
Just downloaded and installed Manjaro XFCE. It got to 93% and stopped. Rebooted and it came up as installed, but no internet. This is my second try of Manjaro, and it still does not compare to Linux Mint.
59 • Manjaro (by vern on 2018-05-08 15:35:09 GMT from United States)
My install of Manjaro XFCE was flawless. Works better than any distro so far. Several major updates since forst install.
60 • proprietary (by Tim Dowd on 2018-05-08 18:13:32 GMT from United States)
@ 44
I think the word you're looking for is custom. Proprietary has a very specific meaning- closed source, send the FBI after you for redistributing, etc.
The distinction matters, because Canonical gets smeared an unbelievable amount in this forum and many others. It almost makes you forget that they provide a quality product free of charge to anyone who wants it, and that a lot of our lives have been measurably improved by them.
None of the software you cited had any evil origin or was an attempt to shut anyone out. They were trying to develop an OS that worked on everything from phones to desktops. So they paid to develop software they thought would accomplish this... and then gave it to everyone for free. When they decided to change business models, they stopped developing the software they didn't need any more. No one was ever given anything but what they thought was the best.
61 • I do not use Gnome (by denpes on 2018-05-08 18:25:13 GMT from Belgium)
Gnome has been dreadful since version3.xx.
I guess all the work on Gnome is under the hood. Probably with the trackers, and making data available to the user by indexing everything from every application. This is very useful for those who like this feature.
However the interface itself is just terrible. It fails with the lack of the option to easy customize the desktop to your needs. You need separate tools for even the most basal modifications. You have gnome-tweak, which is indeed easy, but has very little features. then there is dconf, which has a lot of options, but a terrible interface, and probably too hard to use for the non technical people.
Compare that to for example Mate. Wanna add an app, indicator or plugin to your panel? Well just right-click on that panel. Wanna configure the panel, well, just right click the panel and go to preferences. Easy and logical. And so is the rest of Mate compared to Gnome.
No one at Gnome has been reviewing their interface since april 2011??, because it still sucks, and it's 2018 now.
62 • Arch Then Manjaro... (by brad on 2018-05-08 19:09:12 GMT from United States)
I recommend that everyone that wants to "use" Manjaro.. learn ArchLinux inside & out as much as possible.. then after you learn arch itself, if you have to reinstall for any reason or install on a new computer/laptop, then use Manjaro.. it has "some" hiccups.. but if you know arch first.. you can deal with all issues for the most part.. and Arch Wiki is impressive as they come.. that's my .02 YMMV
I use Arch KDE plasma w/ all lightweight apps.. (like the plasma shell only and the tweakability)
I use Gedit, Thunderbird, Clementine, Hexchat... and more..
enjoy!
63 • LMDE 3 (by Carson on 2018-05-08 20:04:11 GMT from Canada)
I didn't even know there was going to be a LMDE 3, and I never understood why there was a LMDE 2. I thought that since it was rolling there were not version numbers
64 • Gratitude (by GlassofJuice on 2018-05-08 20:09:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
As someone who uses Windows 10 at work and at home, and pays for Office 365 (at home), I am grateful to the Linux community for providing an excellent alternative.
I first tried Slackware 3.0, quickly replaced by 3.1 which I seem to recall was much better. In recent times as Windows 10 moves to becoming SaS and is annoyingly intrusive I have begun using Linux Mint (and Raspbian) as my daily home drivers for personal use.
It is gratifying to see how far the Desktop has come.
The DE wars seem irrelevant to me. I've used Redhat, Debian (six floppy disks seldom installed without error), Suse and early flavours of Ubuntu.
Here in 2018 most major Linux distros just work for us home users with a slightly geeky bent.
It seems that a huge amount of effort from capable developers is wasted in creating vast quantities of alternative distributions.
I wonder if the bazaar or the cathedral will win in the end.
65 • GNOME (by ivan on 2018-05-08 20:18:28 GMT from United States)
I don't use GNOME but I like it quite a bit. Default configuration is better. It improves even more with Dash to Dock and Workspaces to Dock. Even if GNOME was better in its Ubuntu configuration, Ubuntu should still use default, as configurations can break things and confuse new users.
This comment section has really devolved into a debate about whether GNOME is awesome and KDE sucks or the other way around. I like both - GNOME is more easy to use and has marginally better apps, KDE (which I use) is a better desktop that is "simple by default but powerful when needed."
66 • @53 linuxmint (by pengxuin on 2018-05-08 20:33:43 GMT from New Zealand)
"Manjaro is a very fine distro but it has a VERY, VERY, VERY LONG WAY TO GO to become a replacement for Mint."
As a longtime Linux user, I recently tried Mint18.3 Cinnamon in a virtual machine to see if the "hype" about Mint is all its cracked up to be.
Where should I start?
Created a standard Virtual system ( 1proc/4G ram/20G VHdrive) and restarted with live.iso in virtual optical drive.
Live boot up was problematic, retried in compatibility mode and managed (eventually) to get to a slug for a desktop i.e click an icon and wait (and wait some more) oh -look, somethings happening, wait for it..... ok, application has opened -yay.
Ok, lets check the version of the application- 2 or 3 versions old(!) so sometimes not even the not latest release!
Ok lets install onto virtual drive.
Seemed ok until restart - cannot get to desktop in either normal or compatibility mode -oh dear. looks like a great recommendation for Mint.
Should I have to tinker with drivers just to trial the system? I dont think so - sorry, cant recommend Linux Mint.
Do Mint developers actually QA their product?
For the record I have over 30 distros in virtual box systems, running on the latest Virtual box, Debian to Zorin, including Windows. (No tinkering with drivers to install any of them)
On the host machine, clicking an application launcher presents the app window in less than a second, so not hardware, me thinks.
Have yet to had a look at Manjaro, but how could it be worse than my Mint experience?
67 • @60 Tim Dowd: (by dragonmouth on 2018-05-08 21:21:31 GMT from United States)
The word I was looking for and found is 'proprietary', not 'custom'. 'Belonging to or controlled by' is part of the dictionary definition of proprietary and that is exactly what Canonical wants to do with these projects.
As for the rest, that is your interpretation of the facts. If you like Ubuntu, that's your choice. However, AFAIAC, there are too many parallels between Windows and Ubuntu for my taste.
68 • TrueOS review and DW wallpaper (by cykodrone on 2018-05-08 22:26:24 GMT from Canada)
Your TrueOS review was my exact experience (and opinions) as well, spot on.
Thanks for the nifty wallpaper. :)
69 • @58 • Manjaro (by Goe Savage on 2018-05-08 23:06:24 GMT from Canada)
I'm pretty baffled too. Mint is more mature and still seems more reliable and better served than Manjaro. I saw no speed advantage with Manjaro. I wonder if it is just being voted up like PCLinuxOS was.
70 • LMDE 3 (by Jesse on 2018-05-08 23:09:18 GMT from Canada)
@63: "I didn't even know there was going to be a LMDE 3, and I never understood why there was a LMDE 2. I thought that since it was rolling there were not version numbers"
Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 and 3 are not rolling releases. The former is based on Debian 8 Jessie (Stable) and the latter will be based on Debian 9 Stretch (Stable).
71 • Manjaro>Mint (by lupus on 2018-05-09 04:14:25 GMT from Germany)
Well deserved No 1
When some time ago I had to install a Linux on a computer for my father in law I chose Mint and it's been working fine except 2019 I will have to go there and install another Linux beacause of EOL.
The Manjaro Machine that I gave my wife runs flawlessly since 2016. I will not have to change anything hopefully till my EOL. So Manjaro is doing a great job keep it up Philip Müller Some Donation is coming your way!
Lupus
72 • @70 LMDE (by Jyrki on 2018-05-09 04:19:36 GMT from Czech Republic)
I also had an impression LMDE was a rolling release distro, in fact it was a semi-rolling release. Obviously they have changed their mind between LMDE and LMDE2 https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=247865&start=60
Manjaro is fine (I was using it until they had OpenRC community edition, now I use Artix and DragonFlyBSD) but when a colleague of mine asks me if I can install Linux for him/her, I use Mint because it's more suited for someone who just want to use it without the need of deeper Linux knowledge.
As for GNOME3, in many cases it's default DE and some people stick with it just because of this. But Antergos shows my opinion on GNOME3 the best, their install media uses GNOME3, I think it's good just for installing other DE, in my case Xfce. People don't like GNOME3, that's why we have Cinnamon, Budgie and others.
73 • @66 (by frisbee on 2018-05-09 05:14:05 GMT from Switzerland)
Don't mix installing the systems on a real HW with virtual machines. It's not the same.
I have also very many systems in VirtualBox. One way or the other, you'll have to install VirtualBox extensions manually to all of your operating systems, otherwise no network shares, no copy & paste, no usb ... and, they need different settings to.
I usualy install the current extensions from virtualbox.org and not the ones available over the repos. The last ones are usually too old versions or some non-proprietary, "community versions" offering less functions.
The difference on how different systems are "reacting" on VirtualBox is, that some will not even let you install the extensions easy way, on some you'll have to start with installing the Vagrant first (because of dependencies) and some others will get killed by simple, normal installation process, without some workarrounds.
However, to test an operating system properly, you must install it on a real HW and that HW should also not be some old junk that gets Linux just because it's not good enough for the Windows anymore (which is very popular thing to do).
And so: "... sorry, cant recommend Linux Mint." -- is NOT ACCEPTED. ;)
Not because I am an Mint fanboy, I don't really care what operating system it is, as long as it can make my job done, but because I've tried many systems in a long run, over the years and on real HW and VM and there is nothing more reliable than Mint -- in the long run.
74 • Nope, have to agree with #60 (by Garon on 2018-05-09 12:32:12 GMT from United States)
@67
You have misinterpreted the meaning of proprietary. Whatever it is you are trying to say just doesn't make sense the way you are presenting it. #60 had the most logical opinion and used facts to backup his statements. If you don't like Ubuntu or Canonical that's fine. Don't use it or support Canonical in any way. There's nothing wrong with that. Remember it's not nice to bash people all the time. The fire that comes out of a dragon's mouth can burn anyone for no good reason.
75 • @74: (by dragonmouth on 2018-05-09 12:53:49 GMT from United States)
Argue with the dictionary as to the definition of "proprietary".
76 • @ 74 proprietary... (by OstroL on 2018-05-09 12:57:57 GMT from Poland)
adjective: proprietary
1.
1.1 relating to an owner or ownership.
"the company has a proprietary right to the property"
1.2 behaving as if one owned something or someone.
"he looked about him with a proprietary air"
2.
(of a product) marketed under and protected by a registered trade name.
"proprietary brand of a ........"
77 • proprietary software (by Tim Dowd on 2018-05-09 13:36:30 GMT from United States)
@74
"Proprietary Software" has a specific meaning. It implies closed source and non-free licenses. I'm aware that proprietary is an adjective that can be used for many things- but not with software.
The distinction is very important here. You're trying to claim that Canonical is "like Microsoft." That's an unfair charge.
Lets take Unity and Mir as a specific example. Canonical stopped supporting them because they were no longer part of their business model. But they're not gone. A community of people has continued to maintain Unity 7 and not only is this ok, Canonical even puts their work in the Ubuntu repositories. A few months back Ubuntu MATE was considering continuing Mir in some capacity. That would also be perfectly ok.
Could you imagine what Microsoft would do if someone decided that the Windows 98 desktop was the best thing ever and just started working on the source code and redistributing it?
Hence the reason this distinction matters. It's very unfair to accuse someone of abusing their power when they (out of no obligation) made their work available under a free license.
78 • Mint split (by corktowner on 2018-05-09 14:52:53 GMT from United States)
It's true...Mint is dead to me. I am moving towards Kubuntu or Fedora. Both of their recent releases are very impressive.
79 • Ubuntu Studio (by cobb on 2018-05-09 17:10:40 GMT from France)
@42 : I've always found KXStudio to be far more interesting than Ubuntu Studio, which is nothing more than a collection of software pre-installed on top of Ubuntu. KXStudio has the best repos for audio software as well as great default settings.
80 • Linux Mint (by M.Z. on 2018-05-09 17:46:15 GMT from United States)
@63, 72
I've been running LMDE 2 on my laptop since it came out & I'm looking forward to LMDE 3. There are a few minor things it lacks compared to Mint 18.x & I'm hoping that LMDE 3 move back toward the cutting edge. They have had smooth automatic desktop upgrades & newer Mint tools for most of the time it was around, but I guess it got a bit old & was upgraded with less urgency. It's still super stable & easy to use, and I'm hoping it gets a little extra attention.
@79
Funny, Ubuntu has been dead to me since Unity started looking in on users & they certainly aren’t impressing me with their move back to Gnome for their main edition. As for Fedora, I want to like it, but it keeps falling over on its self & eating it's copy of grub. It's also far from appealing as an easy to use desktop, even if delta RPMs are neat. I'll stay with Mint & perhaps try PCLinuxOS again for a good KDE distro.
I think Mint 18 has done some great things with flatpak & has by far the most promising combination of easy of use, great new features & possibilities for cutting edge software. I recognize the allure of a full rolling/cutting edge system that Majaro provides; however, Mint looks like a far better solution to me & combined with a bigger selection of Flatpaks it can provide both a more stable & reliable base as well as cutting edge software.
81 • DW page hit rankings (one more time...) (by brad on 2018-05-09 17:47:43 GMT from United States)
"They (the rankings) simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."
That's all folks - for instance, when crowds of cars slow down to rubberneck a car accident, are people thinking, "Wow, that's great! I should do that!".
When people gather at the scene of a murder, are they telling themselves, "Wow, I wish that was me!"
Nothing to see here folks, move along...
: - )
82 • flatpak (by tim on 2018-05-09 17:54:47 GMT from United States)
@81 flatpak is flatpak. If mint and manjaro both support use of flatpak packaged applications, mint having "a bigger selection of" flatpaks seems like an impossible statement.
83 • Dpkg, and also Korora (by bgstack15 on 2018-05-10 01:05:59 GMT from United States)
Rant about debian:
Why does the upgrade command pause to ask questions? This seems like a show-stopper for a package manager. If I tell a system to upgrade packages, I want it to be DONE when I return, not paused at 8% asking if I'd like to keep my customized sshd_config! I like the rpm-based methodology of dropping in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.rpmnew and letting the admin sort it out!
About Korora:
If firnsy, csmart, ozjd, or any of you other awesome Korora people read this, I want to thank you for facilitating my adoption of GNU/Linux into my personal life! In my original research in late 2015, I settled on Korora as a desktop distribution. It was rpm-based and provided various media configs built-in that made it the ideal choice for me. I have since migrated to upstream Fedora due to the exact customizations for my DE workstations, but I still choose Korora for the regular users' workstations because it makes it so easy to get the applications a non-techie wants.
84 • Poll Results (by win2linconvert on 2018-05-10 01:28:47 GMT from United States)
@24 24 • Poll (by zfoo on 2018-05-07 13:30:47 GMT from United States)
I find it interesting that the poll shows a large amount of the distrowatch visitors do not prefer Gnome but many of the most visited/popular distros are Gnome focused.
Actually, the poll results show that DistroWatch Weekly readers who participated in the poll do not prefer the current iteration of Gnome. I suspect though, that if Mate DE (Gnome 2.x) would have been an option, it would probably have garnered a fair number, possibly a majority, of the votes.
Nice job on the True OS review Jesse.
I also agree with comment 27 that the loss of support for 32bit is a travesty. Or at least a sad turn of events. There are still a lot of perfectly usable 32 bit computers out there with years of life left in them. There are also still a lot of people out there who can't afford to upgrade to a newer computer. Not even an older, newer computer. Besides, dropping support of perfectly good hardware and forcing users to upgrade to the latest & greatest hardware in order to have a secure, modern OS and usable, up to date applications, is so Apple and Goggle. Does the Linux community really want to be tarnished with that kind of tainted image. I hope not. It certainly doesn't seem the best way to attract more people to Linux and grow the user base.
85 • Gnome (by win2linconvert on 2018-05-10 02:19:27 GMT from United States)
@45 45 • Gnome? Windows 8... (by Kazan on 2018-05-07 21:15:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Gnome-shell is Linux world's Windows 8.
Windows learned from its mistake and moved to Windows 10, while Gnome devs don't learn. Microsoft listens to its users, while Gnome devs want you to listen...
Microsoft only listened because a satisfied user base is in their best interest financially. I suspect that the vast majority of Gnome users never contribute to gnome in any way, financially or otherwise, that's probably why Gnome developers don't seem to feel any urgency to placate their user base. That being said, I don't like Gnome 3 at all.
Gnome2... People don't know what a good thing they have until it's gone.
86 • Gripes and comments (by Anthony Pereia on 2018-05-10 13:30:56 GMT from United States)
One person appears to be a troll. I won't answer his comments directly since it's a waste of energy. Let's put it this way, I personally went Micro$illy WinSux free in October of 2003. I never looked back. I never paid for another operating system or anti-virus program. I have and continue to be productive on a daily basis in a professional IT environment in education. I even earn extra cash on the side repairing or performing data recoveries for WinSux users who've hosed their systems. I'm an old-timer who started back in the day before nice and shiny desktop environments. Those who argue about one DE or another are really just wasting their time unless they are giving feedback to the developers who are doing the heavy lifting for the projects.
87 • Gnome (by Voncloft on 2018-05-10 17:25:33 GMT from United States)
Gnome lost me when they switched to unity on Ubuntu - ununiformed windows, the close and max/min buttons were no longer apart of the application. A touch screen os was used as a desktop - I said "F" this and went to kde!
Never looked back.
They tainted themselves with the madness of a mess.
88 • TrueOS (by Dave Postles on 2018-05-10 17:29:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
You can still use the XFCE desktop instead of Lumina.
89 • @87 Re: Gnome (by Rev_Don on 2018-05-10 20:21:42 GMT from United States)
"Those who argue about one DE or another are really just wasting their time unless they are giving feedback to the developers who are doing the heavy lifting for the projects."
The problem with that is the Gnome team doesn't want or appreciate feedback from users unless it is telling them how good of a job they are doing (and I seriously doubt they get much of that). They attack anyone who offers useful suggestions or constructive criticism of their so called vision of what a DE should be. That makes it impossible to actively assist them in making Gnome 3 a viable or useful DE for the masses.
Now compare that to Martin Wimpress and the Mate team concerning the excellent Gnome 2 fork. They not only invite feedback, suggestions, and constructive criticism, they embrace it. While not all suggestions can be utilized, but they do listen to their users and endeavor to make Mate a better DE. That's what's missing at Gnome and why your comment simply isn't practical when the DE developers don't want to listen to what anyone has to say.
90 • @89 Gnome... (by OstroL on 2018-05-10 21:31:33 GMT from Poland)
You are right about Gnome devs trying to tell the users how to use our own computer. Now that Ubuntu had embraced Gnome as their default, the once friendly Ubuntu Forums had gone crazy, jumping on anyone who might say something against Gnome.
91 • Manjaro (by Jordan on 2018-05-10 22:07:56 GMT from United States)
@53 I never had ANY of your listed issues with Manjaro. Flawless from install to regular use every day for months on end.
I now run MX on my main machine out of preference.. and must confess that I found MX and Manjaro on par with one another. XFCE or Mate, both run wonderful on both of those distros.
Mint? Feh.. have fun.
92 • Ease + Stability + Cuting Edge Software (by M.Z. on 2018-05-10 22:53:17 GMT from United States)
@82
If that was directed at me, then I've got to say for me the allure of Mint + flatpak comes back to the stable base + cutting edge apps thing I said above. I mean for a fair portion of users the main allure of a cutting edge rolling distro is the apps right? If you can get all the cutting edge apps you want from an improved version of Mint Software Manager & you get the ease & stability of Mint, then it's a better solution than Manjro from my POV. It's about combining many cutting edge apps with the ease of use that no other distros seem to do as well as Mint. I might well try Manjaro, but I wouldn't bet on something Arch based being anywhere near as reliable as say LMDE & I'd guess that PCLOS was a better & more stable rolling daily driver for my main PC.
I'm talking about something with the ease of Mint being able to eventually match any rolling distro around in terms of cutting edge apps & to do it in an easier & more reliable way. I really like PCLinuxOS & the combo of stability & freshness it provides, but I've had to roll back to old kernels on it more than a couple of times, which is something I can't really say about Mint. Fedora also has lots of fresh software, but is even less stable/reliable than PCLOS in my experience. Given how big Fedora is & how big & competent it's backers at Red Hat are I have my doubts that Majaro car really provide anything better in terms of stability.
If you look on the other hand at how easy flatpaks are in Mint Software Manger & think that there is a decent possibility that not only will the Software Manger improve, but the flatpaks & their selection may as well, then you have a killer feature. I'm already very impressed by what I've seen over the past few months running faltpaks for LibreOffice, GIMP, & various games on Mint. I think with just a little bit more polish & a bigger selection Mint will have the biggest, best, most reliable, & easy to get to selection of open source software anywhere period. Yes they've done it in a more open way that benefits other distros, but that's part of the allure compared to Ubuntu + Snaps. They may share faltpaks across all distros, but everything is easier in Mint right now & only getting better. They seem to be the leader in easy desktop distros right now & have been for a good while now. They can potentially keep & improve on that ease of use while matching anyone in cutting edge software. To me that looks like a hard combination to beat.
93 • @91 (by frisbee on 2018-05-11 07:42:40 GMT from Switzerland)
And you know what? I beleive you! Most distro hoppers are not geting that kind of issues since they are not using their systems long enough.
MX is fine but, also not fully suitable for everybody since it‘s unfinished.
The Devil is in details... If I set up 4 different users / 3 languages + english, how exactly do I setup 3 different languages for those accounts? Yes, I know, the Debian way ... manually add the Location file in the Home folder.
It works but it’s Not Professional, it‘s just not what it‘s supposed to be in 21st century. Mint can do that easily - under XFCE, Mate or Cinnamon.
94 • @27 (by Fantomas on 2018-05-11 10:31:31 GMT from France)
@27
ANTIX RAM USUAGE
antiX is idling after my fresh install on Ancient 32bit machiene using only 60MB of RAM, out of 256 / 800MhZ Pentium Proc. It is snappy and very fast. (Am not using the Internet Browser)
PLOP BOOT M
Use / Plop Boot Manager 5.0.15 / In order to Install your Distro to some ancient PC via USB Stick. Sometimes it works out of the box, somethies you have to select another boot Manager from the Plop List.
Yes you are right about the 32bit Support, but lets take it for what it is. Thanks antiX, for giving us the basic option that fits on to the CD in 2018.
OBSERVATION
Also, something interesting;
In my opinion antiX surpassed Slitaz in productivity, as Slitaz is perhas way smaller,and faster to Install, but uses the same amount of RAM ideling, like antiX.
Thank you
95 • Debian (by Tim Dowd on 2018-05-11 19:33:43 GMT from United States)
@93
Please remember that when you're using Mint, you're using Debian. Mint is able to smoothly finish the rough edges because Ubuntu and Debian have supplied the stable base.
These distros are part of the same family and they grow together, not in competition.
96 • GNOMer (by edcoolio on 2018-05-11 23:49:00 GMT from United States)
I love GNOME... when it is called MATE.
97 • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (by Gibbs Gonzalez on 2018-05-12 05:00:52 GMT from Canada)
Just wiped-out new installation of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which shipped with Linux kernel version 4.15, which indeed reached EOL - End of Life.
rest remained traces of few iNodes and gb-O|Ob-lick-c.so. I have fews Qs.
1) Will Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support Linux kernel version 4.15 until 2023 for next five years?
2) What is the best course of action for remainder iNodes and gb-O|Ob-lick-c.so?
98 • @95 (by frisbee on 2018-05-12 06:13:11 GMT from Switzerland)
"Please remember that when you're using Mint, you're using Debian. Mint is able to smoothly finish the rough edges because Ubuntu and Debian have supplied the stable base."
Yes, I'm very much aware of the fact that Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian or that Mint (LMDE) is based on Debian.
We have 300+ distros out there and not even a half dozen that one can seriously use -- we need more "finished" and "polished" products like Mint if Linux is to become any kind of competition to Apple & Microsoft.
"Smoothing the rough edges" is what makes one product "professional".
The huge majority of computer users out there are non-techy and all they want is a working system and not a one more thing to take care of or to repair.
"It just works" is the secret. Nobody cares how or why.
Mint did the best job so far in Linux world.
99 • Giving feedback to developers (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2018-05-12 14:10:11 GMT from United States)
@86 "...giving feedback to the developers who are doing the heavy lifting for the projects."
It would be nice if all the developers would post an email address so that we could send them suggestions for features and improvements etc. But it seems that many-to-most of them are afraid of being inundated/swamped with lots and lots of emails, so they don't post an email address to reach them at! And so they lose out on feedback: suggestions to add features and observations on features that don't work well, and which features that don't work - to lose... They could have an email switchboard that reads the emails and then posts them to the appropriate distro area (an idea I have floated before, but with no takers.) Too many distros have a formal proceedure to follow and hoops to jump through (on their terms only) to tell them about anything! I won't do that overly-complicated game, and they lose my input and that of others. Have an email address and a switchboard to re-direct input...
100 • @97 Re: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Kernel 4.15 (by Rev_Don on 2018-05-12 19:57:49 GMT from United States)
"1) Will Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support Linux kernel version 4.15 until 2023 for next five years?
2) What is the best course of action for remainder iNodes and gb-O|Ob-lick-c.so?"
Wouldn't it make more sense to ask Ubuntu about that in the Ubuntu Forums?
101 • Korora (by Winchester on 2018-05-13 11:43:20 GMT from United States)
I have to say that Korora Linux was a nearly complete ,ready to use "out of the box" distribution.
Also with a very smooth looking themed XFCE , MATE , and Cinnamon. (Although Cinnamon version in Korora did crash every once in a while.)
102 • GNOME (by Ariel on 2018-05-13 13:45:42 GMT from Argentina)
don't let statistic play tricks on you, while, 60% don't use gnome, means quite a lot people still use it, because those 60% is spread on KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, fluxbox, lxde, Unity, Budgie or whatever DE you say, and I don't think any of them would take that 40% alone within that 60% remaining. Cheers...
103 • @99: (by dragonmouth on 2018-05-13 16:52:41 GMT from United States)
Developers are convinced that they know better what the users want/need. Why should they bother to listen to the users?!
104 • Questionable polling (by M.Z. on 2018-05-13 20:25:23 GMT from United States)
@102
"...while, 60% don't use gnome, means quite a lot people still use it... ...I don't think any of them would take that 40% alone within that 60% remaining..."
It looks like you are making a deeply misleading & misinformed assertion based on one questionable data point. Polls are notoriously unreliable unless you get a really good cross section of people & do it in a very specific way. You seem to be relying on rather questionable polling to make your assertion. The last polls I saw that seemed halfway reliable indicated that XFCE as most popular, followed by KDE. I think there were a couple of decent looking polls in the same year that said that, while the DW poll is one data point that is unlikely to get an accurate sample of users.
One could also easily question how the DW poll was worded & if many of the answers were from multibooters who preferred another DE better than GNOME, while still liking one implementation of of GNOME better than other versions of GNOME. At any rate, GNOME certainly seems to have lost more than a few users since it transitioned to version 3. Perhaps efforts like the one by Ubuntu to make GNOME more palatable to it's users are having an effect though. It will of course take more than one DW poll to say with any certainty what's going on there.
105 • desktop popularity (by Jesse on 2018-05-13 20:47:40 GMT from Canada)
@104: Our very first poll was about desktop environments and it showed KDE and Xfce approximately tied for first place. GNOME was about in the middle of the pack at the time: https://distrowatch.com/polls.php?poll=1
This week's poll wasn't about how popular GNOME was, it was more focused on whether people like customization vs vanilla desktop software. We shouldn't draw any conclusions about any desktop's usage based on this week's poll.
106 • That's better (by M.Z. on 2018-05-13 23:00:32 GMT from United States)
@105
Yes, that's more to the point of what @102 was trying to infer. I think if you add that together with another poll or two from other websites that Linux desktop users are likely to frequent you could say 'yes that probably about where things stand on Linux desktop share'. Of course that would still be a ways off from anything scientific or statistically accurate. It would just a reasonable indicator, a bit like DW hit page rankings are for Distro interest.
Number of Comments: 106
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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