 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 792, 3 December 2018 |
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Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Most operating systems in the BSD family tend to operate behind the scenes, doing duty on servers, firewalls, and on the occasional toaster. It is less common to see flavours of BSD focused on desktop usage, but that is exactly GhostBSD's niche. The GhostBSD project provides a pre-configured desktop environment, graphical package manager and the latest version offers a rolling release platform to keep users up to date with modern desktop software. This week we begin with a look at GhostBSD and its desktop features and then link to an interview with the project's founder in our News section. Another flavour of BSD, DragonFly BSD, was in the news last week as the project offers improved wireless support on the install media. Also in our News section, we talk about the Fedora team considering a pause in Fedora's rapid development cycle to address infrastructure changes. Meanwhile Fedora 27 reaches the end of its supported life, and we talk about changes coming to Redcore's software management tools. In our Questions and Answers column we talk about when to use swap space and how much. This is a topic a lot of people have suggestions about and we open the floor to feedback in our Opinion Poll, asking how much swap space our readers use. We are also pleased to share last week's releases and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: GhostBSD 18.10 - Changing the base
- News: DragonFly BSD improves wireless support, Fedora plans temporary pause in development, Fedora 27 reaches EOL, Redcore changes ports management tools, interview with GhostBSD founder
- Questions and answers: When to use swap space
- Released last week: Calculate Linux 18 "LXQt", BlackArch 2018.12.01, 4MLinux 27.0
- Torrent corner: 4MLinux, BunsenLabs, Calculate, Clonezilla, HardenedBSD, KDE neon, Robolinux, Slax, Ultimate Edition
- Opinion poll: How much swap space do you use?
- New distributions: Avouch Linux
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (17MB) and MP3 (13MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
GhostBSD 18.10 - Changing the base
GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented member of of the BSD family. Past versions of GhostBSD were based directly on stable releases of FreeBSD and typically offered multiple desktop editions featuring the MATE and Xfce desktop environments. The latest version of GhostBSD, 18.10, shifts its base to TrueOS. TrueOS is itself based upon FreeBSD's development (-CURRENT) branch, making running GhostBSD roughly similar to running a FreeBSD development snapshot, though the two may not be binary compatible. This arrangement gives the operating system access to the latest FreeBSD drivers and features. GhostBSD 18.10 ships one edition featuring the MATE desktop.
Along with the change in its base, GhostBSD switches to the OpenRC service manager and swaps out OpenSSL in favour of LibreSSL in the base operating system. The latest download for GhostBSD is 2.5GB in size. Booting from the live media brings up the MATE desktop with a two-panel layout. The Applications, Places & System menus are placed in the upper-left corner of the desktop while the system tray occupies the upper-right. The second panel is home to the task switcher at the bottom of the screen. On the desktop we find icons for opening the Caja file manager, the system installer and the HexChat IRC client. Opening the IRC client automatically connects us with the GhostBSD support chat room.
System installer
GhostBSD's system installer is a graphical application which I feel bears a resemblance to Calamares. The installer walks us through selecting our preferred language, our time zone and keyboard layout from lists. When it comes to disk partitioning we are given three general options: using UFS on the whole disk, manual disk partitioning with UFS, and setting up a full disk ZFS volume. I opted to experiment with the ZFS option. When using ZFS we just need to select which disk(s) to use and how large our swap space should be. We are then asked to create a password for the root account and make up an account username & password for ourselves. The account creation screen allows us to select our preferred shell, with options including sh, csh, tcsh, bash, fish, ksh and zsh. The installer then copies its files to the hard drive and offers to restart the computer.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- The system installer
(full image size: 1.4MB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
Early impressions
The freshly installed GhostBSD boots to a graphical login screen. Here we can enter our username and password to sign into the MATE desktop. There is a message on the login screen letting us know we can switch session options by pressing F1, but without any alternative desktops installed, nothing happens when tapping F1.
GhostBSD runs the MATE 1.20.3 desktop and my first impressions of the desktop were positive. There were no pop-ups, no welcome window and very little in the way of visual effects. The interface was responsive and uncluttered. The default theme uses a pleasantly high-contrast approach and text is usually displayed as white-on-black or black-on-white.
Hardware
I experimented with GhostBSD in two test environments. When running in VirtualBox, the operating system booted and ran well. The desktop was able to dynamically resize and use my host computer's full screen resolution. GhostBSD does not allow for mouse integration, so the mouse pointer gets "trapped" inside the virtual machine's window. Another issue I had with the mouse was, in the virtual machine, the mouse was super sensitive and would zoom across the MATE desktop with very little encouragement. I was able to change this in the MATE mouse settings by setting pointer acceleration to its lowest setting and sensitivity to the highest. (By default, both options are set to their lowest level.)
GhostBSD 18.10 -- Exploring the MATE desktop
(full image size: 601kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
When running GhostBSD on my desktop computer, I found the operating system performed well. This was a pleasant surprise as, in the past eight years, I don't think I have ever had a member of the FreeBSD, TrueOS & GhostBSD family both boot on my workstation and support my monitor's full resolution. Some past versions would boot, but with unusually low screen resolutions, most failed to boot at all with the default settings. GhostBSD broke this tread, running smoothly, working well with my video card and offering a pleasantly responsive desktop interface. The mouse pointer even behaved itself when running on physical hardware.
A fresh install of GhostBSD takes up about 3.8GB of disk space. When signed into the MATE desktop I found the operating system used about 310MB of active memory and 636MB of wired memory, including space set aside for ZFS. The operating system tended to use very little of my CPU, or my host computer's resources when running in a virtual machine.
The only hardware issue I encountered came when I tried to add a CUPS virtual PDF printer, a method used to turn documents into PDF files. After I had installed the cups-pdf package, I went into the printer manager. Creating a PDF virtual printer was an option and highlighted as the default action, which looked to be a good omen. However, selecting the PDF printer and clicking Next took me to a screen for installing the driver and, on this screen, all the buttons were disabled. I could not select a driver or proceed to the next step, I could only go back to the previous screen. So I had to get by without the PDF printer.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- Trying to set up a virtual printer
(full image size: 1.3MB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
Applications
GhostBSD ships with a pretty standard collection of software. Looking through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser, LibreOffice, the HexChat IRC client, the Pidgin messaging software, Thunderbird for handing e-mail and the Transmission bittorrent software. The Atril document viewer, a dictionary and the Cheese webcam utility are installed too. The operating system offers a full range of media codecs along with the Exaile audio player and MPlayer media player. Xfburn is included to help us burn optical discs.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- Running LibreOffice and the Pluma text editor
(full image size: 185kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
There is a menu entry called GhostBSD Bugs which opens Firefox and navigates to the project's issue tracker. The Caja file manager is present and I found it worked well for me. There is a system monitor, the Eye of MATE image viewer and the Shotwell photo manager. A text editor, archive manager and calculator are provided. Though not enabled by default, GhostBSD ships with the Plank desktop dock, which offers a macOS-style dock at the bottom of the screen.
In the background, the operating system ships with the usual collection of BSD command line utilities and manual pages. The Clang compiler is installed by default and the system runs on FreeBSD's 12.0 kernel.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- The default media players
(full image size: 841kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
Software management
GhostBSD offered a few different tools for handling software. The first one I discovered was the update manager, which can be found in the System menu and in the settings panel. I did not get a chance to see it in action though as the update manager consistently reported there were no new packages to download during my trial.
The second graphical package utility is OctoPkg. This tool is in the Applications menu and is roughly divided into two panes. The top pane displays packages that are either installed or available while the bottom pane displays tabs of information. The bottom pane can show us project-related news, information on a selected package and progress information.
An unusual aspect of OctoPkg is that the top pane toggles between showing us installed packages or available ones (it does not show both at the same time). Further, by default no packages are shown when the Available button is toggled. The display is empty until we type a search for packages. We can find items by name or, sometimes, using a simple description.
Once we locate the items we want, we can click a button to queue a package for installation. Once we have selected all the software we want, OctoPkg will download the desired software in one big batch and install it. GhostBSD has a repository of over 32,000 packages and most open source software we are likely to want is available. For added flexibility we can use the FreeBSD ports collection and install new software from its source code.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- The OctoPkg package manager
(full image size: 164kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
Finally, GhostBSD ships with the FreeBSD pkg command line package manager. This utility is fast, has simple output and I find it pleasantly easy to use. The pkg command pulls in packages from TrueOS and GhostBSD repositories.
Unlike past versions of GhostBSD (and FreeBSD), the current version treats core operating system components as packages which can be managed by pkg. Past versions kept the core system separate and managed updates with the freebsd-update utility. Now things have been merged and simplified so all system upgrades can be handled by one package manager.
Settings
The operating system includes a settings panel with a pretty standard set of modules for adjusting the appearance of the MATE desktop. There is a notable lack of tools for managing the lower level parts of the operating system (such as the firewall and administrator authentication), but there are plenty of tools for tweaking the desktop.
Generally, the settings modules worked well. For instance, the screen saver kept coming on too frequently for my taste and it took just a few clicks to fix this. There is an option to switch window buttons from the right to left side of applications and this worked, though it had a side effect: the Applications menu disappeared and I had to logout and sign back in to get the menu back.
When the user signs in the system plays a sound and I had assumed I could turn this feature off under the Sounds module. Instead I found the login audio clip under the Start-up Applications module. The search for this option reminded me that everything is easy to find once you know where to look.
GhostBSD 18.10 -- Desktop settings
(full image size: 924kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels
Other observations
GhostBSD enables several different ways to perform administrator tasks. We can sign in directly as the root user (or use su) to switch to the root account. The first user we create can also use sudo to perform administrative actions. An alternative to sudo, called doas, is increasingly popular in the BSD communities and it is enabled by default too. The doas tool has several entries in its configuration file which allow members of the wheel group (which includes the first user account we create) to perform several tasks without providing a password. This allows our account to adjust network settings, install updates and lock packages without entering our password. Personally, this approach is more convenient (and less secure) than I'd like and I opted to remove these extra lines from the doas configuration, but I can see the appeal for users who want to quickly perform common functions without the hassle of entering their password.
I think boot environments deserve a special mention. When we set up GhostBSD on a ZFS volume it enables us to create file system snapshots and boot environments. A boot environment is a file system level snapshot of our operating system. Using a tool called beadm we can create snapshots whenever we are about to update the operating system or make a configuration change. Then, if anything goes wrong, we can simply restart the computer and select an existing snapshot from the boot menu. This not only allows us to undo mistakes, but means GhostBSD can survive almost any software error or broken upgrade.
One boot environment feature I especially liked is that when we boot into an older snapshot the last active snapshot (the default one) is automatically mounted under the /mnt directory. This allows us to quickly compare a snapshot to the broken environment, restore missing files or copying over configuration files we know worked in the past.
Conclusions
I was tentatively optimistic going into my experiment with GhostBSD. The shift from a stable FreeBSD base to a rolling TrueOS base was one which I had hoped would bring new features and hardware support, but I was also concerned the result might be rough around the edges. For the most part I was pleased with what GhostBSD 18.10 provided. In my opinion the MATE desktop performs well and looks good. One minor glitch aside, I had no complaints with the desktop experience.
I was very happy to find that GhostBSD would work with my desktop computer, a rare event for me when using FreeBSD or TrueOS. I'm hopeful this means future versions of FreeBSD will also work with this hardware. The only issue I ran into concerning hardware was GhostBSD was unable to work with a wireless network card I plugged into the machine during my trial.
I liked the default applications GhostBSD shipped with. The software included is mostly similar to what we would find in a mainstream Linux distribution and most of the extra applications I wanted could be found through the package manager. Speaking of package management, I think OctoPkg is capable, but not particularly user friendly. Even as a low level package manager, it takes some getting used to, compared to Muon or Synaptic. OctoPkg works, but I'm hoping future versions of GhostBSD are able to adopt a more beginner friendly software manager.
Unlike past versions of GhostBSD (and FreeBSD), this release unites managing the core operating system and third-party packages under one package manager. This is likely to be convenient for users as they no longer need to switch between pkg and freebsd-update to get all their security fixes. However, I think it is too soon to tell if this change brings any problems with it. I am curious to see how well upgrading end user applications mixes with core system security fixes. I am also curious to see how GhostBSD will handle future versions based on TrueOS's rolling release platform.
On the whole, I think GhostBSD is about as easy as it gets when setting up a BSD-based desktop system. Its installer is easy to use, the desktop is pre-configured, there are a small amount of useful applications available out of the box. It's a very positive experience, in my opinion. One of the few problems I think Linux users may face when trying GhostBSD is the lack of certain closed-source applications such as Steam and the Chrome web browser. These are not available on GhostBSD. For people who stick with open source applications, GhostBSD will probably provide everything they need, but people who want to watch Netflix or play big name games, this system may not be able to deliver those experiences. These restrictions aside, I'm very pleased with GhostBSD's latest offering and think it is a pleasant way to get the FreeBSD experience with a quick and easy set up process.
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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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Visitor supplied rating
GhostBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.4/10 from 58 review(s).
Have you used GhostBSD? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
DragonFly BSD improves wireless support, Fedora plans temporary pause in development, Fedora 27 reaches EOL, Redcore changes ports management tools, interview with GhostBSD founder
The DragonFly BSD team is working to make it easier for people to connect to wireless networks immediately after installing the operating system. This is being done by making the wpa_supplicant package available on the install media. Justin Sherrill gives some background on the new configuration: "Bear with me; this is the history: wpa_supplicant is the program DragonFly uses to connect to most wireless networks. It's been part of the base system for some time, but if you start it up, you will see a warning (at boot time) about how this version is deprecated. Installing from dports puts a newer version in place. As is the case with most third-party included in any operating system's base, there's always lag between the newest version of software and what's been included in." The faster moving port of wpa_supplicant will be available on the install media for DragonFly BSD 5.4.
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The Fedora team is considering taking a temporary break from the distribution's rapid, six-month release cycle in order to address changes to the project's infrastructure. Paul Frields has suggested that, following the release of Fedora 30, the team might put off working on Fedora 31 in order to address behind-the-scenes changes. "We should skip the F31 release cycle and leave F30 in place longer in order to focus on improving the tooling and testing changes. These tooling changes will improve the overall reliability of Fedora, and
will decrease the manual effort and complexities involved in producing the distribution artifacts. Although we've done this before to make 'editions' happen, the intent is to track this multi-team effort more actively so we can use the time as well as possible, and give the work maximum transparency." Further details and background on this proposal can be found in Frields' post.
Frields also posted this week on Fedora Magazine to remind Fedora users that version 27 of their distribution has reached the end of its supported life. "With the recent release of Fedora 29, Fedora 27 officially enters End Of Life (EOL) status on November 30, 2018. This impacts any systems still on Fedora 27. If you’re not sure what that means to you, read more below. At this point, packages in the Fedora 27 repositories no longer receive security, bug fix, or enhancement updates." Further information, including upgrade instructions, can be found in the announcement.
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Redcore Linux is a Gentoo-based desktop distribution which is making some adjustments to the way ports and packages are handled. The project's latest status update reports: "As you already know, vasile was used to manage the system (binary, hybrid, source) modes for Redcore Linux (for more details, read here) . And although this strict design and separation worked well, it seems it has hindered some potential users. I've been asked by many advanced Gentoo Linux users to just nuke the strictness, and to rethink the design to be more flexible. After lots of thinking I did just that. So, as of version 2.1812, vasile lost its ability to manage system modes, and they're effectively deprecated. However, it gained the ability to configure/reconfigure portage in a way sisyphus can use its new hybrid options (details bellow). While vasile lost some features, sisyphus our portage wrapper package manager gained many new features. The biggest one being its new ability to manage both binary and source (ebuild) packages." The status update includes examples of how the new versions of these tools will work.
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Eric Turgeon, the founder of GhostBSD recently gave an interview with FreeBSD Bytes to talk about how GhostBSD got started, what sets the operating system apart, and what comes next for the project. When asked what GhostBSD feature was most likely to attract new users, Turgeon replied: "ZFS, I started to use ZFS in 2017, and I can not live without it, it has made my file system administration super productive and straightforward. I have my development all under a dataset that I can send to my other machines, and it saves me time when I reinstall GhostBSD or TrueOS. I don't have to 'git clone' everything." The rest of the interview can be found in the FreeBSD Bytes article.
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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) |
When to use swap space
Should-I-use-swap asks: I've been told that I should create a swap partition for Linux, and that it should be twice my RAM. But I'm wondering if it's really necessary. Can I still put my computer to sleep if I opt-out of swap?
DistroWatch answers: Swap space is typically used in two scenarios. The first is when the operating system runs out of room in RAM for applications and needs some place to temporarily put data. A hard drive is slow compared to RAM, but space on a drive tends to be plentiful, so it makes for a good place to put data not currently being used.
Whether having swap space will be useful or not in this first scenario will depend a lot on how much RAM you have in your computer and what programs you are running. If you have a small amount of RAM (under 4GB) or if you run a bunch of heavier applications, then it is a good idea to have swap space.
Having twice as much swap space as RAM might be overkill though. These days most computers have more RAM than back when the "swap space should be double the size of RAM" guideline was created. These days I suggest most people have a swap space approximately the same size as RAM. So if you have a computer with 8GB of RAM, make a swap partition that is 8GB too. If you have 16GB of RAM then you might want to skip having swap space entirely as most workloads on Linux (at least on a desktop computer or laptop) will not require that much memory. (I rarely use more than 3GB of RAM, unless I am running virtual machines.)
As to whether you can put your computer to sleep without RAM, the answer is yes. You can use sleep (or suspend) functions as they keep information in RAM and do not write data out to the disk. However, if you want to use the even more effective power saving mode of hibernate then you will need swap space. The hibernate feature saves information from RAM on your swap partition, so you will need swap space to use hibernate. Probably as much swap as you have RAM.
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More answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Calculate Linux 18 "LXQt"
Alexander Tratsevskiy has announced the release of Calculate Linux 18 "LXQt" edition, a new variant of the project's Gentoo-based set of distributions with LXQt as the default desktop: "We are happy to announce the release of a new Calculate Linux Desktop flavour, featuring the LXQt desktop and therefore named CLDL. CLDL is the fifth little one in the Calculate Linux Desktop family, providing a fully-fledged workplace for both office and home. This new distribution perfectly combines the advantages of Qt 5, which is indeed the base for its interface, with the low system requirements of the Openbox window manager. CLDL is localized out-of-box in all standard European languages. CLDL offers the same sleek design as other Calculate Linux desktops, which means that you will immediately feel familiar with it. Note that in Firefox, an ad blocker is turned on by default while telemetry is disabled. CLDL implements single user authentication for Calculate Directory Server, roaming user profiles and sharing access privileges to network devices with Windows clients. Calculate Linux Desktop LXQt comes with LXQt 0.13, PCManFM-Qt 0.13 for file management, Firefox 63.0.3 as the Internet browser...." Read the rest of the release announcement for more information and screenshots.
BlackArch Linux 2018.12.01
A new version of BlackArch Linux, an Arch Linux-based distribution with a collection of over 2,800 penetration-testing and security tools, has been released: "Today we have released a new BlackArch Linux ISO and OVA images. Here is the changeLog: added more than 150 new tools; enabled wicd service by default; removed dwm window manager; removed wmii window manager; added bactl package (script to configure and set up BlackArch environment); included every tool of BlackArch except: cuda-/oclhashcat, vmcloak, theZoo; included Linux kernel 4.19.4; included wordlistctl; updated BlackArch installer to version 1.0.3; updated default ISO files (synchronised with archiso's template); package QAs (runtime checks) were performed prior the ISO image build; updated all BlackArch tools and packages including configuration files; updated all system packages; updated all window manager menus (Awesome, Fluxbox, Openbox); re-added multilib." Visit the project's blog to read the full release announcement.
4MLinux 27.0
4MLinux 27.0 has been released. 4MLinux is a project building a set of Linux distributions for desktops (with JWM, 32-bit only) and servers (with the complete LAMP stack, 64-bit). The new version comes with assorted improvements on the multimedia and gaming fronts: "The status of the 4MLinux 27.0 series has been changed to STABLE. As always, the new major release has some new features: optional support for AV1 video coding (encoding via FFmpeg and decoding via VLC and mpv), an option to disable PulseAudio with one click (important for those who use 4MLinux to play classic video games such as DOOM), better support for display drivers when 4MLinux is running in KVM (important for those who use a VNC client to manage 4MServer). LazPaint (small yet powerfull raster image editor with layers) and Blender (professional 3D computer graphics software) have been added as downloadable extensions. Additionally, some good news for gamers: more engines available for XBoard (GNU Chess, GNU Shogi, Fairy-Max) as well as more video games to play (Duke3D, Liero, Strifle). A few small terminal-based games have been added, too." Here is the brief release announcement.
4MLinux 27.0 -- Default desktop and the application menu
(full image size: 1.1MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not 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 in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 1,143
- Total data uploaded: 22.4TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll |
How much swap space do you use?
In our Questions and Answers column we talked about what swap space is used for and how much of it a person is likely to need. This week we would like to find out how much swap space, if any, you use on your main computer.
You can see the results of our previous poll on using Haiku in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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How much swap space do you use?
| I do not use swap space: | 398 (23%) |
| Less than 1GB: | 72 (4%) |
| 1-2GB: | 298 (17%) |
| 3-4GB: | 332 (19%) |
| 5-8GB: | 326 (19%) |
| 9-16B: | 141 (8%) |
| More than 16GB: | 66 (4%) |
| I use a variable size swap space: | 73 (4%) |
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| DistroWatch.com News |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Avouch Linux. Avouch Linux is a desktop distribution available in GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Xfce flavours.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 10 December 2018. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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If you've enjoyed this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly, please consider sending us a tip.
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • swap (by vern on 2018-12-03 00:41:52 GMT from United States)
I've used 2gig swap space for years, but wonder if its necessary now days. I use the old theory.
2 • swap (by DaveW on 2018-12-03 00:49:31 GMT from United States)
I have 16 GB of RAM and have a 20 GB swap partition defined. I think I used it once in the last five years, when a software development project ran amok. I don't use hibernate.
3 • Avouch Linux (by Richard Hannah on 2018-12-03 01:03:03 GMT from United States)
What is this based on? Arch, Debian? From their webpage I can find no answer.
4 • Swap (by Joseph on 2018-12-03 01:57:04 GMT from United States)
18 GB RAM, 30 GB swap. You never know when you might want to crunch lots of data with 1800 browser tabs open and then hibernate.
Given the massive sizes of hard drives today, I don't get the point of not having swap space. If you ever need that space and it's not there, your system is going to crash. Why take that risk?
5 • Swap and BSD kernels (by cykodrone on 2018-12-03 02:27:18 GMT from Canada)
My Debian based non systemd OS automatically allocated 1/2 GB above my system's physical RAM size (which is a lot). Some swap tips from my notes:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To show swap size (in KB):
cat /proc/swaps
To check your current value of swappiness, run this command:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
To make a change permanent, edit the configuration file with your favorite
editor as root:
<editor_name> /etc/sysctl.conf
If vm.swappiness does not exist, add it to the end of the file like this (0 is
disabled, or 10 to 100, 10 being least swappy, 100 being most swappy, default
value is 60):
vm.swappiness=10
Save the file and reboot. Changes will take effect once you reboot your system.
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Now I know why DW doesn't list the various BSD kernels...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_timeline.en.svg
6 • GhostBSD (by Gekxxx on 2018-12-03 02:53:31 GMT from Belgium)
My experience with the old GBSD was login with querty while using azerty. OS did not recognise external HD. I hope this issues are solved now.
7 • swap (by Gekxxx on 2018-12-03 03:00:01 GMT from Belgium)
To my point of view it is crazy to allocate 32GB swap on 16GB memory. 4 GB swap is then more than enough. And here Ubuntu is great by using a swap file.
8 • Swap Space (by brain_death on 2018-12-03 03:48:54 GMT from United States)
Equating to your physical RAM, the size of your swap space depends on it. As HD space is plentiful and cheap, you might stick to the old-fashioned, 2.5x rule. Or perhaps you might imagine, you don't swap space at all. Python aficionados ought to embrace Glances. This script will prove enlightening, for newbies and old-timers alike. It works on Windoze too and runs there, under your web browser...
9 • About swap, and to Jesse Smith about the BSD base change (by RJA on 2018-12-03 04:05:28 GMT from United States)
@8, a bigger swap is laughable, unless you hibernate or doing crash dumping, these days, as I have found that at least in the past, Linux don't even seem to demand swap like Windows does.
And the BSD base change, is a disappointment. Feels like rolling-release getting shoved down my throat!
10 • swap (by pengxiun on 2018-12-03 04:12:20 GMT from New Zealand)
depends on the hardware in use.
mostly run 8GB of RAM systems, but I do have a 512MB, a 2G and a 4G system.
generally the rule: RAM + 20% (allows hopefully for suspect ram).
11 • swap (by zephyr on 2018-12-03 04:31:48 GMT from United States)
Use the old formula, as a variable of 1 and 1/2 times the amount of installed memory.
12 • Dynamic swap space? (by Dojnow on 2018-12-03 06:35:58 GMT from Bulgaria)
"a variable size swap space" == dynamic swap space? How to?
13 • swap (by zykoda on 2018-12-03 07:48:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
My swap partitions are ~4GB: one for each hard drive. Each installed distro uses the swap partition located on the installation drive. With 8GB RAM I have never seen any swap space used. I am in the habit of suspending the machine overnight with five second resume.
14 • GhostBSD (by Saladin on 2018-12-03 08:30:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Couple (or more!) of issues with GhostBSD. When installing, be sure to set aside a hour or two - it's a looooong process. Preferably use a new hard disc and new DVD drive as the process is a massive to-ing & fro-ing process which could wear out older kit.
Shame Jesse didn't choose the Xfce version. It's not clear what this is - official or community release and where and how it can be obtained. When it first appeared as and alpha, I d/l-ed it. It ran OK on some machines as a liveDVD but refused to install to a stable version. Since then, the (semi?)official d/l site refuses to d/l at all, although it still appears as an option on some availability sites, not on all, though. Neither is its status, alpha, beta, final, given anywhere.
As for my installation of GhostBSD Mate, I find it cumbersome, arcane and bloated, although it was easy to install wifi on the live version, more tricky on the installed one. HW choice, level of dedication and expertise are factors to consider for putative users - many may not fully qualify!
15 • Swap (by Alexandru on 2018-12-03 09:36:21 GMT from Romania)
In Linux, the swap space is usually put in separate partition, but it can be configured to use a regular file in filesystem. In this later case its size can be adjusted on the fly (but in case of filesystem corruption, the precious swap file content may be lost).
One scenario when making a swap partition larger then amount of physical RAM size is justified, is when you are considering increasing the RAM amount. When upgrading the RAM, no OS needs re-installation, however resizing partitions potentially may corrupt them and need complete OS re-installation. Having the space on HDD and even of SSD so cheap makes viable the first option.
16 • GhostBSD (by alotov on 2018-12-03 11:07:29 GMT from United States)
I have a replacement laptop a dell 7 series with an i7 processor it has 16g of ram, but two graphic cards; one is an intel 5500 and the second is a radeon/amd/ati card. Ghost could not sort out the graphics, and just gave a black screen of failure. I have tried FreeBSD on this rig it also cannot sort out the graphics; but I think Ghost at least got a step further.
17 • 3 • Avouch Linux (by joji on 2018-12-03 12:26:22 GMT from Belgium)
Indeed this info is not available.
Downloaded the LXQT iso and did a poor man's install of Avouch on a stick.
Found that it is not depending on Debian nor Arch. Found out also that it has been developped in Pakistan Lahore by a certain Mr/Mrs Qurban Ullah. The packages' suffix is 'alp' (Avouch Linux Package?)
Am still looking for a means to add new packages (eg falkon, kshisen) but couldn't get any help on the internet nor on the distribution itself.
At first sight, this distro looks nice but I guess we have to wait for the 1,0 release and more info before we are able to judge ...
18 • GhostBSD (by Neville on 2018-12-03 12:39:37 GMT from Japan)
This is a reply to Saladin's comment. On a middle spec PC such as mine and using a USB thumb drive to install GhostBSD it takes about 10 minutes, not an hour or two. On a low spec laptop it takes at most 20 minutes. I have never used a DVD drive to install, but I seriously doubt it would take 2 hours.
19 • Swap Space (by Kevin on 2018-12-03 14:45:27 GMT from United States)
The amount of swap space I use varies with the number of applications I have running. At the moment, I'm using less than a GB. Now, if you're really wanting to know how much swap space I have available, that's a different story. It looks like I got carried away when I initially set up my current main desktop PC. I have 30GB of swap space in two 15GB partitions on two different drives.
20 • GhostBSD (by Jesse on 2018-12-03 14:50:45 GMT from Canada)
@14: >> "Couple (or more!) of issues with GhostBSD. When installing, be sure to set aside a hour or two - it's a looooong process."
In my case the install was under 20 minutes, about the same amount of time as any mainstream Linux distro.
>> "Shame Jesse didn't choose the Xfce version. "
There is no Xfce edtion. GhostBSD 18.10 is available in just one edition featuring the MATE desktop. Past versions did have an Xfce edition, but it has been dropped.
21 • SWAP (by Rev_Don on 2018-12-03 15:09:05 GMT from United States)
My rule of thumb for swap space is as much as I need and as little as I can get away with.
22 • Avouch (by cykodrone on 2018-12-03 15:41:20 GMT from Canada)
Went to the website, all desktop variants point to gnome(dot)org, umm? It calls itself a "company", the website is certainly not finished, most of the links don't work or point to the same thing. "Copyright avouch.org © 2018 | All Rights Reserved.", where, just Pakistan or worldwide?
23 • Dynamic swap space (by Jesse on 2018-12-03 15:45:50 GMT from Canada)
@12: You can manually add more swap space as needed. I wrote instructions for this before: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110117#qa
Or you can use a program that will do this automatically for you. On FreeBSD the swapexd program will do this for you, and I suspect there are equivalents on Linux.
24 • Swap (by P1nky on 2018-12-03 16:42:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
I just got some strange looks from colleagues when I read that "most computers have more RAM than back when the guidelines were created" and laughed!
Pretty much every system sold in the past 3 years has more RAM than we had as hard drives back then. My first Linux system was a P133 with a massive 32MB RAM and 3.2GB HDD, while my current laptop has 8 GB RAM and 2TB HDD.
25 • BSDs (all) - Strong advice from mine ... (by Gerhard Goetzhaber on 2018-12-03 17:21:54 GMT from Austria)
A. Besides all those problems with init procedures, consequently systems' everytime responsiveness and some as often as heartful desired Upnp functions there should be at least a simple boot configuration that can easily go together as minimally with Linux Systems. This said, I understand best NetBSD and OpenBSD having forked off from FreeBSD the matter they did. Instead of basicly requiring 1. one strangely tiny boot partition (<=64K) 2. one root partition 3. one swap partition all of them to be set up on GPT FreeBSD should better as fast as possible go back to ONE partition only then holding EITHER a BSD Disk Label (like Net- and OpenBSD) OR a ZFS tank!
B. Don't any more even further enlarge the distance to Linux systems - find some file system (may be XFS) getting supported from both sides to make holding an online contact on one machine possible! So far BSD maintainers want people adopt their system they should make it easier to step over from Linux - oder jumping BETWEEN planets : )
C. Though just this last opinion rather individually conceived by me, please do a lot more work to have (whatever) BSD install and run well wiith Xfce ...
26 • Swap's forensic benefits (by CS on 2018-12-03 19:52:49 GMT from United States)
Swap is certainly in the "might as well" category. Since memory is not aggressively evicted from swap you can log into a system that has been behaving strangely and if there is anything in swap you know the system ran out of memory at some point and adjustments are necessary.
"How to dynamically adjust swap"? Run Mac or Windows. There seems to be some half-baked Linux options but they look downright dangerous.
27 • Swap (by Justin on 2018-12-03 20:32:36 GMT from United States)
@24 is right. When we were working with MBs of RAM, having swap really mattered. I turned off swap on my 512MB XP machine (256MB still needed it because of greedy AV and Windows update) and never looked back. It made the machine much, much faster. On Linux, I don't use swap anywhere, even with bloated browsers, etc. I have 2GB machines that never use it, and on my larger machines I configure RAM disks to take advantage of all that extra (and fast) RAM. Unless I'm running several VMs (or maybe some kind of video editing or high-end games), configurations like @4 are just crazy.
The ext4 filesystem also does silly things like this. By default, 5% of the filesystem space is reserved for dumping system logs, file fragments, etc., when the drive is full. On modern 10TB drives, that's 500GB of wasted space! I turn the reserve blocks down to 0% on data drives and 1% on my OS drive. The setting must be whole percents and my OS drive is a 120GB SSD so I live with it (I only use 4-6% anyway for the OS).
The problem with rules based on percentages is that they grow exponentially. I expect 10 years from now people will be setting up 2TB of swap space "just in case" because they don't understand the reasoning or rationale behind where the numbers come from (put on your thinking caps people).
28 • #25 (by 0reilley on 2018-12-03 20:36:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
"...NetBSD and OpenBSD having forked off from FreeBSD..."
NetBSD was released before FreeBSD. OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD.
29 • swap (by Steve L on 2018-12-03 23:52:51 GMT from United States)
Since I started when memory was in the KB range, I have always configured swap. As memory size has increased thru MB and into the GB range I have to admit I've thought twice about the need, but what does it hurt to configure swap and, worst case, it will keep the machine running when it might otherwise run out of memory.
My current daily driver is a desktop I built a few years back, running PCLinuxOS with 4GB of RAM and 4GB of swap. With "only" 4GB of RAM I have, on occasion, found swap being hit kinda hard as applications have gotten so much bigger and sloppier about memory use. Fortunately, that hasn't happened very often, but it has happened.
I have several other machines but voted using my PCLOS box for current use. Each machine is configured with swap but size varies based on expected use and, of course, base RAM installed, but not more than 4GB of swap on any of them. The more RAM the less likely swap will be hit, so I might configure a bit less swap.
30 • I was banned for even discussing whether need swap! (by Steve Miller on 2018-12-04 01:15:22 GMT from Sweden)
2007 the PCLinuxOS board. They didn't want to hear it.
31 • Avouch? (by Angel on 2018-12-04 02:52:03 GMT from Philippines)
Not only is Avouch's website copied from elementary's, the "Avouch Applications" don't exist on the live ISO, and their helpful wiki does a great job of detailing how to install Fedora. No kidding!
"Live images allow you to preview Fedora before installing it. Instead of booting directly into the installer, a live image loads the same environment you’ll get after installation. Avouch Linux Workstation is live image.Use a live image to install your favourite system, test Fedora on new hardware, troubleshoot, or share with friends."
https://wiki.avouch.org/doku.php?id=avouch_linux_0.1.0_installation_guide&s=install
32 • swap (by Trihexagonal on 2018-12-04 03:26:14 GMT from United States)
I have four FreeBSD boxen running, three online and one as my dedicated .mp3 player. I use GPT for a Partitioning Scheme and let it allocate swap as seen fit during the build. I use swapexd on them all as mentioned by Jessie @23.
The one I'm using has 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD with 3852MB swap allocated and 7619K shown in use. FreeBSD sees unused memory as wasted memory. Of that 8GB RAM I show 445MB RAM free with no shortage of resources available. What I expect to see and consider normal for an infernal machine.
Another has 4GB RAM and 200GB HDD with 3979MB swap allocated and none in use. Of that 4GB RAM I show 141MB free.
The 3rd has 8GB RAM and 200GB HDD with 3979MB swap allocated and none in use. Of the 8GB RAM I show 791MB free.
The 4th is my .mp3 player with 4GB RAM and 200GB HDD with 3979MB swap allocated and 30MB in use with 121 MB RAM free at 207 days uptime. The music never stops.
33 • Will Avoid Avouch (by TheTKS on 2018-12-04 04:58:14 GMT from Canada)
@3 @17 @22
They forgot to wipe the word "elementary" from the text they lifted from elementary's website (Loki version), in at least one spot. One of the links points to elementary's github.
@31 "their helpful wiki does a great job of detailing how to install Fedora"
Avouch is in the Wiki text 42 times, Fedora 101 times.
Sloppy ripoff.
Easy avoid.
TKS
34 • Swap (by Hadrian on 2018-12-04 09:48:48 GMT from Netherlands)
My main desktop has 16G of RAM memory. It still has swap-space because I installed the system when I had less RAM (4GB), and never got around to repurposing the 4G swap-space. My laptop, an old-timer that's about 150 in computer-years, has only 3G of RAM and needs a few Gs of swap-space.
35 • GhostBSD and TrueOS (by alex dumas on 2018-12-04 09:49:04 GMT from Australia)
It is sad that GhostBSD swapped to TrueOS. I am a long-time FreeBSD user and AIX admin. I have often used GhostBSD (the old one) but TrueOS and PCBSD were usually beyond me. Once or twice I got an installation to give me something other than a black screen, but then the package manager or something else would barf. The GUI and wireless seemed to work when running from live media, but be unsolvable when the OS was installed. The hardware I used was always Thinkpads, so nothing unusual.
I did once get to use it long enough to start to appreciate the Jail Warden graphical tool, but after an upgrade found that this tool had been dropped. Such blatant disregard for the user base was a bit shocking.
I think that TrueOS is a bit of a stain on Dru Lavigne's great work.
36 • Re: Swap space (by Chris on 2018-12-04 11:44:34 GMT from United States)
I usually define a SWAP partition that is 1.2 times the amount of RAM that I have installed. My current workstation has 86 GB of RAM so I don't think my SWAP partition has ever been touched even though it's still there. LOL!
37 • GhostBSD (by Ankleface Wroughtlandmire on 2018-12-04 14:00:11 GMT from Ecuador)
I tried GhostBSD recently after they switched to the TrueOS base. It also impressed me, and pretty much everything worked on my Thinkpad laptop. The major thing that would prevent me from using it or any other *BSD is the lack of support for Bluetooth, as I work all day wearing Bluetooth headphones. Also the difficulty/impossibility of installing proprietary applications that are available for Linux would be a problem.
38 • Swapping and security (by msi on 2018-12-04 18:17:04 GMT from Germany)
On a side note: Doesn't swapping also pose a security risk? If I understand it right, anything that is held in a machine's RAM might land in the swap space, i.e., on disk. That sounds like something you don't want on systems that don't use full disk encryption.
39 • The swap poll has turned into bragging. -- 86GB current Topper. (by Andy Szrwicki on 2018-12-04 18:25:31 GMT from United States)
Presumably most users are interested in mere desktop use. For that, it's a bloated / mem hungry distro that actually needs even one G of RAM, and will never touch swap. My bet.
40 • swap security (by Jesse on 2018-12-04 18:45:26 GMT from Canada)
@38: Swap poses a small security risk IF an attacker has physical access to the machine AND swap is not encrypted AND sensitive information was swapped out. Applications which use sensitive information can use the mlock() function to prevent things like passwords from being sent to swap space though.
In the end, if your disk is not encrypted there are easier ways for an attacker to gain access to your data than combing through swap space.
41 • Re: swap security (by msi on 2018-12-04 18:56:40 GMT from Germany)
@40: Ok, that was helpful. Thanks.
42 • To Swap or not to Swap...that is the question... (by tom Joad on 2018-12-04 23:09:42 GMT from Switzerland)
With winders a swap file is demanded and used. But I have always been at sea so to speak about Linux and Swap files. Linux is way more efficient that winders in a lot of ways including swap files.
So, owing to the poll question, I looked at all four of my running computers to see how much swap space I am using. All four have swap files of varying sizes and none of the machines are using the swap file.Those four machines are running either Mint 18 or MX Linux. None are struggling or having issues BTW.
So maybe deleting, removing, shrinking the swap file is in order. I know that can be done but SHOULD it be done?
Advice anyone? What is the downside and the upside or should I just let that sleeping dog peacefully sleep?
43 • Re: To Swap or not to Swap..that is the queation... (by DaveT on 2018-12-05 19:56:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
I stopped using swap on linux years ago. You don't need swap so get rid of it.
BUT, as has been pointed out above there are times when you will need it such as IF you do massive number-crunching or want to use hibernate etc.
44 • Swap Vs HDD Space (by M.Z. on 2018-12-05 22:56:50 GMT from United States)
Physical HDD space is fairly cheap these days. I remember a song that a friend of mine downloaded that had a line like "... Microsoft - 5 Gig Drives Don't Grow On Trees!". Times have change quite a lot. I'd say there is no particularly good reason not to give 4GB or so over to swap just in case. I had a fair bit more on my laptop for awhile, but last time I changed things around I put about 4GB, because I'm not going to miss it in the /data partition I created & I have plenty of room in other partitions to multi-boot different distros. I don't think any of my newer computers ever touch swap, but I see no reason to not make a little room so it's there if needed, just like a fire escape that should & hopefully will never be used, or airbags in a car.
Of course if I used hibernate more space would be better, which I didn't think of much before this DW Weekly.
45 • Swap Poll (by 2damncommon on 2018-12-06 01:20:01 GMT from United States)
I wonder why "Equal to Swap" and "Half of Swap" weren't options.
People would scatter their choices all over the options without being clear those were their choices.
46 • Poll bashing :) (by curious on 2018-12-06 12:04:22 GMT from Germany)
While everyone is at it:
Which options should one choose if one uses 2.5, 4.5 or 8.5 GB swap space? These values are outside any of the options given.
47 • Poll (by dragonmouth on 2018-12-06 13:38:09 GMT from United States)
I totally agree with M.Z. Were I to get rid of my 4 GB Swap and add the space to either my / or my /home, it effectively would not make any difference in the amount of available storage but it might make a difference during heavy use of the system. 4 GB is about half the size of the latest Scientific Linux .iso.
48 • SWAP use (by Plamen on 2018-12-06 14:22:19 GMT from Bulgaria)
I often use the hibernate option on linux. So swap of 1.1x times of RAM is a must. The current allocation of RAM is not in question.
49 • Swap... (by Vukota on 2018-12-06 18:39:18 GMT from Serbia)
Using a swap partition on the SSD only hard drive is crazy. I just had an SSD drive (less than 2 years old) fail on Windows, due to swap/hibernate. My linux laptop that has the same age SSD used 1/4th of the lifetime (without swap partition and without intensive re-installations and data intensive use).
On any computer that has magnetic HDD and enough RAM, having swap partition with default swappiness parameters (on most Linux distros) will kill performance. If you disable swap use unless 100% necessary, it should be ok to use 1x or 2x RAM size so you can do hibernation.
50 • swap on SSD (by Jesse on 2018-12-06 18:54:42 GMT from Canada)
@49: >> "Using a swap partition on the SSD only hard drive is crazy. I just had an SSD drive (less than 2 years old) fail on Windows, due to swap/hibernate. "
This is highly unlikely. Under normal use, a modern SSD should work with swap for years, possibly even decades. The old rule about SSDs wearing out due to too many writes in the same location just doesn't apply (and has not applied) for over a decade. These days SSDs should have about the same life span as spinning disks.
I'd also like to point out that these days it is recommended that you put swap on an SSD because it allows for faster random access and reading data back into RAM.
51 • BSD (by visnu on 2018-12-07 06:40:13 GMT from France)
to Richard Hannah, BSD is not based on Linux but on Unix !
There is many BSD distro out there to check out, interesting isn't it ?
52 • Swap space and why it may be needed (by GusFun on 2018-12-07 09:42:21 GMT from Greece)
The best argument for swap I have found is that if you use ext3-4 file systems their journaling activity needs swap space to be able to fix the disk when a sudden power interruption occurs. If it is not available the partition may be corrupted. This is also an argument against a swap file in the same partition.
If you have 4GB of RAM and your use mostly is around 1.2GB of it, then 1.5GB is plenty. If you have 1GB of ram and you are constantly at the limit 2GB swap may be good and you will see it being used.
The argument "I have 16GB of RAM and use 75MB of swap and never had a problem" is really not an argument at all. It is coincidence. It is like having car insurance all your life and never had an accident.
# free
is a nice command with options that shows you really what is going on. Sometimes you are only using 20% of ram but the system is also using swap, it stores memory parts that are not used often but needed eventually.
Number of Comments: 52
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| • 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 |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
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| Random Distribution | 
OsoLinux
OsoLinux is Chinese desktop Linux distribution based on Fedora and optimised for multimedia and gaming use. It deploys the KDE Plasma desktop. Some of its other features include pre-installed basic development environment and many popular desktop, office and multimedia applications, addition of default touchpad tap settings and emulator game tools, and inclusion of the latest Linux kernel in the distribution's default live environment.
Status: Active
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| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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