 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 855, 2 March 2020 |
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Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Most people are less concerned with what operating system they are running than they are with which applications their system can run and how they can go about getting additional applications. This makes the selection of pre-installed software and desktop environments important and often heavily influences the choices people make when selecting a distribution. In our Questions and Answers section this week we talk about finding distributions which come with specific web browsers and desktop environments. Then, in our News section, we talk about the Ubuntu team changing how some default applications are packaged, swapping out Snap bundles for Deb packages. We also cover openSUSE's progress toward a new stable release of the distribution's Leap edition and Arch Linux gaining a new Project Leader. First though we share a review of the Solus distribution, a rolling release project which is available with four different desktop editions. One of these desktops is the custom-made Budgie desktop environment and Joshua Allen Holm covers its features in his review. In our Opinion Poll we ask which of the Solus desktop editions appeals the most. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Solus 4.1 "Fortitude"
- News: Arch Linux under new leadership, openSUSE's Leap edition nears stable release, Ubuntu swaps out calculator Snap package
- Questions and answers: Finding just the right software
- Released last week: Manjaro Linux 19.0, IPFire 2.25 Core 141, Android-x86 9.0-r1
- Torrent corner: Absolute, Android-x86, GhostBSD, IPFire, KaOS, KDE neon, MakuluLinux, Manjaro, Nitrux, OpenMediaVault, Raspberry Digital Signage, SystemRescueCd
- Opinion poll: Favourite Solus desktop edition
- New distributions: Linux Kamarada, Slint
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (13MB) and MP3 (10MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm) |
Solus 4.1 "Fortitude"
Solus is desktop-focused distribution that is not based on any other distribution. Many of the packages used in this distribution will be familiar, but instead of using APT, DNF, or one of the other common alternatives, Solus uses their own eopkg package manager, which is a fork of the PiSi package manager, and one of the desktop environments available for Solus is Budgie, which is developed by/for Solus.
There are four different images available to download for Solus 4.1 "Fortitude": Budgie, GNOME, MATE, and Plasma. The Budgie and Plasma images are 1.8GB. The MATE image is slightly smaller at 1.7GB and the GNOME image slightly larger at 1.9GB. Each image provides a live desktop environment and installer that installs Solus with the desktop environment that the image is focused on.
Solus 4.1 -- The live Budgie desktop
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
For this review I selected the Solus 4.1 image that has the Budgie desktop environment. I began by downloading the ISO and copying to a flash drive. I rebooted the computer and found that I had to turn off Secure Boot before I could boot from the image, but once I did that, Solus started very quickly from my USB 3.0 flash drive. Once I verified that all my hardware was functioning normally, I moved on to the next step and launched the installer.
Installing Solus
Solus uses an installer that they package under the name os-installer. This installer provides all the standard options, so there should be no surprises for anyone who has installed any modern Linux distribution. One nice thing about the installer is that the steps are clearly listed in a sidebar, so it is easy to see how many steps are left in the process.
Solus 4.1 -- The installer
(full image size: 1.3MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I quickly worked my way through the various steps, which started with language, location, keyboard layout, and timezone options before dealing with disk partitioning, settings, and new user creation. Once all that was completed the actual installation started.
Installing Solus on my computer was fast, maybe not as fast as the Solus 4.1 release announcement brags about, but still very quick. Once that was done, I rebooted the computer and was very, very, very quickly at the login prompt; the Solus developers might have slightly oversold how quickly Solus installs (they claim that, thanks to their switch to zstd compression for the SquashFS images, copying files to the computer would be quicker than the time it takes to answer all the questions in the install wizard; the copying was fast, but not that fast), but the boot speed more than make up for that.
Budgie desktop environment
The Budgie desktop is based on GNOME 3 with several changes. The default Budgie layout features a single panel at the bottom of the screen. This panel has the same basic layout of the modern Windows desktop. On the left is an application menu and application shortcuts. On the right are controls for networking, notifications, battery, sound, Bluetooth, power off/reset/logout, time and date, and the shortcut to show the Raven panel.
Solus 4.1 -- Budgie desktop with application menu
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The Raven panel pops out from the right side of the screen and by default contains two tabs: applets and notifications. The applets tab has a calendar, volume control, and more. The notification tab displays notifications from all applications. Basically, the Raven panel works very much like the same feature in recent version of Microsoft Windows.
Solus 4.1 -- Applets in Raven side panel
(full image size: 1.5MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Overall, Budgie takes GNOME 3 and turns it into something much closer to what Windows users would be used to. It is not a Windows clone exactly, or a KDE Plasma clone, but it provides a desktop experience much more in line with how those desktops work.
Solus 4.1 -- Budgie's desktop settings panel
(full image size: 1.4MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
One drawback, at least in my opinion, to Solus Budgie's customization is that the default dark theme is too dark. Maybe I am just getting old and my eyes do not work as well as they used to, but Solus's default dark reminds me of the all black ship in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that had black labels on black buttons and black indicator lights. Sometimes the contrast between a button and the window it is in is not very distinct. There is an option to turn off the dark theme in Budgie's settings, but it does not seem to work when using the default "Plata-Noir" widgets. Switching to plain "Plata" makes it so the switch toggles between a dark and light mode, and that widget's light mode is much easier on the eyes.
As nice as the Budgie desktop is, it is not without flaws. The Budgie Desktop Settings are not integrated with the GNOME 3 Settings application at all. This means that some settings are in one application, but other settings are located elsewhere. This is not too confusing, but it would be nice to have things tied together more. And while Solus's Budgie desktop uses a lot of GNOME applications, which would make this hard to do, it would be nice if there was more Budgie branding in place of the GNOME references, just for clarity. For example, the About link in the application menu, which opens the About panel in GNOME Settings identifies the distribution as "Solus 4.1 Fortitude" and mentions GNOME's version number (3.34.3), but there is no mention of Budgie at all. This makes it a little harder for people using a computer they did not set up themselves to figure out what they need to research in order to solve a problem. GNOME 3.34 instructions may, or may not, apply to Budgie.
Default software selection
Solus 4.1 comes preloaded with a decent selection of software. The default selection of software is sufficient for users who use their computers for web browsing, e-mail, and word processing. In addition to various accessories and utilities, most of which come from GNOME, Solus comes with Firefox, Thunderbird, HexChat, LibreOffice (Calc, Draw, Impress, and Writer, but not Base or Math), Rhythmbox, and GNOME MPV. The Linux kernel version the distribution runs on is 5.4.12. Nothing too extraordinary here, but the overall Solus experience brings all the component pieces together well.
The only bad thing about the default software selection is the use of GNOME MPV. With just the default packages installed, I could not get GNOME MPV to successfully play 1080p videos without the video immediately lagging. Hardware acceleration was not enabled, but passing the "-hwdec" option to MPV was not enough to fix the problem. In order to everything working properly, I had to install the libva-intel-driver package before the "--hwdec" option worked properly. The frustrating thing was that when I installed GNOME Videos (Totem), which is the first thing I tried to see if a different media player worked, it played videos flawlessly even though it did not need to install the package that I needed to get GNOME MPV to work. Solus comes with codecs that many other distributions do not ship by default (or at all), but has a default video player with extremely sub-par performance on modest hardware, which does not make a lot of sense to me.
Installing additional software
The default selection of software pre-installed in Solus is great, but there is a lot more software available to install. Software Center is the graphic tool for doing this, and it is excellent way to find packages and install updates. The Home tab shows categories of software that are further sub-divided into more specific categories. I found this really helped me discover what applications were available when I needed software that could perform a specific function, but did not have any specific application in mind. For when I knew exactly what I wanted the search function worked very quickly. There is also a "Third Party" tab that lists various popular third-party packages like GitKraken, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Skype, Slack, Spotify, Android Studio and several JetBrains IDEs. Overall, I very impressed with the software selection. I was even able to install RStudio from Software Center. On most distributions I have to download the RStudio Deb or RPM from the RStudio website and install it manually.
Solus 4.1 -- Third-party software in Software Center
(full image size: 129kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
On the command line, Solus uses eopkg to manage packages. There are a few differences, but for the most part eopkg works much like APT and YUM/DNF. I found the functionality available to be very good. The search and info options worked quickly and provided useful information. The "install" and "remove" commands worked as expected for packages that had no dependencies, but "autoremove" works better for packages with dependencies. Just using "remove" leaves unused dependencies in place, and "autoremove" removes the dependencies. There is also a "history" function that can display a log of transactions and rollback to earlier states. Because it is not exactly like other command line package managers, it took a little while to adjust to using eopkg, but once I had adjusted it was wonderful to use.
Solus also comes with Snap and Flatpak support pre-installed. There are no Snaps installed by default, but installing something with the snap command will install a package from the Snapcraft.io site. On the other hand, Flatpak comes with no repositories pre-configured, so heading over to Flathub and following the instructions there to enable the Flathub repository (or doing the same thing for some other repository) is necessary to make Flatpak support usable.
Final thoughts
With the exception of the issues I had with GNOME MPV not being able to play high definition videos on my computer without having to tweak a few things first, Solus 4.1 is a very polished distribution. Maybe users with more powerful hardware do not need to enable hardware decoding and install additional packages to make GNOME MPV work with high definition video without lagging, but the issues I had with video playback were my one major critique of the distribution. Everything else is well thought out and the default software selection is excellent. There are a few minor issues with some of the Budgie Desktop Settings application, but those are minor.
If you are looking for a desktop Linux that does its own thing instead of being yet another "Ubuntu plus a few extra packages" distribution, Solus is an excellent choice. The Budgie desktop environment and the eopkg tool are very good. I highly recommend this distribution as a general use desktop distribution for users of all levels of experience.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an ASUS VivoBook E406MA laptop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Pentium Silver N5000 CPU
- Storage: 64GB eMMC
- Memory: 4GB of RAM
- Networking: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
- Display: Intel UHD Graphics 605
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Visitor supplied rating
Solus has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.6/10 from 241 review(s).
Have you used Solus? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Arch Linux under new leadership, openSUSE's Leap edition nears stable release, Ubuntu swaps out calculator Snap package
The Arch Linux team has been talking about how best to pick a leader to guide the project and, after some discussion, the developers have decided to elect new leaders for terms lasting two years. "In a team effort, the Arch Linux staff devised a new process for determining future leaders. From now on, leaders will be elected by the staff for a term length of two years. Details of this new process can be found here. In the first official vote with Levente Polyak (anthraxx), Gaetan Bisson (vesath), Giancarlo Razzolini (grazzolini), and Sven-Hendrik Haase (svenstaro) as candidates, and through 58 verified votes, a winner was chosen." Levente Polyak has been declared the new Arch Linux Project Leader. Congratulations, Polyak, and good luck!
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The openSUSE Leap edition is getting close to a final release. During its development cycle openSUSE Leap, version 15.2, is updated as a rolling release platform rather than publishing fixed alpha and beta snapshots. "There are no concrete milestones in the rolling development model. As bugs are fixed and new packages introduced or excluded, snapshots of the latest beta phase builds will be released once they pass openQA testing. After the gold master is released, the rolling development model will stop and maintenance and security updates will then be released for the new minor version of the Leap 15 series." The final, stable release of openSUSE 15.2 is expected to happen on May 7th, 2020.
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For the past few years the Ubuntu team has been encouraging people to use Snap packages, portable packages that are bundled with their dependencies. The Ubuntu developers have even replaced the Deb packages of some commonly installed applications, such as the Chromium web browser, with equivalent Snaps. The trend may be reversing though as a recent change to the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 release replaces the Snap bundle for GNOME Calculator with its equivalent Deb package. Snap packages have been criticised for being larger than their Deb counterparts and slower to start, which makes some users disinclined to use them for desktop applications.
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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) |
Finding just the right software
Looking-for-a-specific-browser asks: Is there a distro that ships with Chrome by default?
DistroWatch answers: Should you find yourself in a situation that specifically requires the Chrome web browser, and not a similar browser such as Chromium, then there are not a lot of distributions which ship with Chrome installed by default. Off the top of my head I think deepin and Q4OS do. If you are open to running Chromium in place of Chrome, then you can find distributions that include the open source browser on our Search page.
Typically it is fairly straight forward to add a new browser to the system once the operating system is installed so the default browser is not usually a deciding factor, which makes me think you may be working in an environment where you cannot install new software. If that is the case then you may want to look at Endless OS too as it offers large editions with lots of software for off-line use and ships with (I believe) Chromium as the default browser.
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Seeking-older-packages asks: Are there any distros or third-party repositories that still offer KDE 4? I cannot stand using KDE 5.
DistroWatch answers: While there are a lot of changes behind the scenes and some new features, the look and behaviour of KDE 5 should probably not be all that different from what you are used to when running KDE 4. If it is, then I suspect you can adjust KDE 5 to act like the older version of the desktop you are used to by changing the theme and colours in the System Settings panel. KDE Plasma is, if nothing else, amazingly flexible and can be configured to look and act very differently if its defaults are not to your liking.
Getting back to the original question, not many distributions still offer KDE 4 packages as it is not being worked on anymore upstream. I think Slackware 14.2 might be one of the last supported distributions to offer KDE 4 packages. Debian 8 "Jessie" shipped with KDE 4, but it only receives a few more months of official support. The CentOS 6.10 release is similarly close to the end of its supported life, but it includes KDE 4 packages.
If you crave even older versions of the KDE desktop, Q4OS ships with the Trinity desktop, which is a fork of KDE3. That may be going back to an older generation of desktop than you want, but it is still supported.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
IPFire 2.25 Core 141
IPFire is an independent Linux distribution designed with firewalls and routers in mind and features a web-based interface for easy remote administration. The project's latest release updates several base packages and reworks DNS lookups. "IPFire is a modern distribution as we change and update many essential system components regularly. That allows us to keep you safe, support new features and of course be fast by taking advantage of modern hardware. In this update, we have rebased the system on GCC 9 and added support for Go and Rust. We have included Python 3 to the base system and deprecated Python 2 which is out of support by now. Not everything has been converted to use Python 3 yet, but we will hopefully soon be able to drop support for Python 2 altogether. Unfortunately the system is growing larger and larger with every update. Software in general is quite bloated although we are trying our best to keep IPFire as small as possible. On systems that have a 2GB root partition and many add-ons installed, disk space might be running out. This update clears a lot of files that are no longer needed." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
Manjaro Linux 19.0
Philip Müller has announced the release of Manjaro Linux 19.0, the latest stable build of the project's rolling-release distribution originally forked from Arch Linux: "We are happy to publish another stable release of Manjaro Linux, named 'Kyria'. The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Only a few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. With this release we ship Xfce 4.14 and have mostly focused on polishing the user experience with the desktop and window manager. Also we have switched to a new theme called 'Matcha'. A new Display-Profiles feature allows you to store one or more profiles for your preferred display configuration. We also have implemented auto-application of profiles when new displays are connected. Our KDE edition provides the powerful, mature and feature-rich Plasma 5.17 desktop environment with a unique look-and-feel, which we completely re-designed for this release." Read the full release announcement for further details.
Manjaro Linux 19.0 -- Running the Xfce desktop
(full image size: 1.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Android-x86 9.0-r1
Version 9.0 of Android-x86, an unofficial port of Google's Android to standard computers using the x86 architecture, has been released. This version is based on Android "Pie": "The Android-x86 project is glad to announce the 9.0-r1 release to the public. This is the first stable release for Android-x86 9.0 (pie-x86). The 9.0-r1 release is based on the latest Android 9.0.0 Pie release (android-9.0.0_r53). The features include: support both 64-bit and 32-bit kernel and userspace with latest LTS kernel 4.19.105; support OpenGL ES 3.x hardware acceleration for Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and QEMU (virgl) by Mesa 19.3.4; support OpenGL ES 2.0 via SwiftShader for software rendering on unsupported GPU devices; support hardware accelerated codecs on devices with Intel HD and G45 graphics family; support secure booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk; a text-based GUI installer; add theme support to GRUB-EFI; support multi-touch, audio, WiFi, Bluetooth, sensors, camera and Ethernet (DHCP only); simulate WiFi adapter on devices with Ethernet only to increase app compatibility; auto-mount external USB drive and SD card...." See the detailed release notes for more information. The default ISO images come with Linux kernel 4.19, but there is also a separate image (k49) that uses the 4.9 version of the Linux kernel.
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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: 1,848
- Total data uploaded: 30.6TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Favourite Solus desktop edition
Our Feature Story this week talked about the Solus distribution, an independent, rolling release project. Solus is available in four editions, including one featuring the custom-made Budgie desktop. Which edition of Solus is your favourite?
You can see the results of our previous poll on Void's unusual features in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Favourite Solus edition
| Budgie: | 216 (15%) |
| GNOME: | 48 (3%) |
| KDE Plasma: | 151 (10%) |
| MATE: | 113 (8%) |
| No preference: | 12 (1%) |
| I do not use Solus: | 903 (63%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Linux Kamarada. Linux Kamarada is a Brazilian distribution based on openSUSE's Leap edition which features the GNOME desktop environment.
- Slint. Slint is a Slackware-based distribution which offers multi-language support. Slint is accessible to visually impaired users, with speech and with a braille device, from installation to usage in a console and in graphical environments.
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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, 9 March 2020. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Solus (by vern on 2020-03-02 00:47:22 GMT from United States)
I tried Solus, and I believe it uses way to much efi, fat partition memory for me to use. There was something on that line that didn't work well.
2 • Solus (by Carlos Felipe Araujo on 2020-03-02 01:12:19 GMT from Brazil)
I tried Solus, but I love XFCE and I can't use it...
3 • Solus 'Budgie': another viewpoint. (by R. Cain on 2020-03-02 01:21:02 GMT from United States)
"Solus 4.1 Budgie review - Me luck has run out"
Updated: February 22, 2020
“...Sometimes, I wonder if I should stop testing Linux distributions for good. The soul toll is immense. Not just the fact that things can fail, which can be okay now and then, but the whole unnecessary rollercoaster of pointless regressions and unpredictability...”
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/solus-4-1-budgie.html
4 • Solus (by jonathon on 2020-03-02 01:32:04 GMT from Australia)
When distrohopping to Solus I'll often choose Mate over Budgie. This is mainly due to the lack of a system monitoring applet for Budgie, and my laziness, for not just overlaying conky. I think I am just spoilt for choice by all the richness of the Linux world.
5 • Seeking-older-packages (by Jeffrydada on 2020-03-02 01:52:51 GMT from United States)
Rosa, ships both a KDE4 and Plasma versions in it's latest releases. I don't know the level of maitenance they provide for KDE4 applications but the default KDE4 desktop uses the "Homerun" style full screen menu which I always favored, going all the way back to Mandrake/Mandriva - that Rosa is a fork of. Once apon a time Mandrake was the King of Linux Distros and I loved it. For a nostalgic reason I once rebranded a Rosa KDE4 (desktop fresh 9) with artwork and logos from Mandrake 9. It was very cool!!
6 • KDE's Plasma 5 updated loses functionality for personalizations. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2020-03-02 04:59:19 GMT from United States)
With its latest revision Plasma 5 has become less pleasant to work with but not as
bad as it was when introduced,
I have been using KDE since Mandriva 2006, the updates have always caused
problems for me because I am accustomed to using it in a certain way and
that is almost always changed at the beginning of a version number.
Eventually the flaws are ironed out but some of the best features have
been neglected in the recent flood of releases.
KDE System Settings
Currently the login screen is stuck with the user name revealing version
or a completely blank login which does not even show "***" for the password
characters. So far I see no way to change this.
No longer can we download to the relevant directories background,
themes or any other part of the system we are used to altering.
This machine which has been upgraded since 5 came out has
not yet lost that capacity but my machine which I take to LUG
meeting can no longer demonstrate the capability.
bliss
7 • Solus MATE thank you (by mojo on 2020-03-02 05:23:15 GMT from New Zealand)
I just replaced a flaky (but highly rated on DW) distro with Solus MATE 4.1. A gust of fresh air in a room full of stuffy same-as distros. The updater may be a bit slower than bigger distros with more and faster mirrors, but Solus has a good selection of very up to date software (way ahead of the Debuntu clan). Smooth and solid, predictable in operation - which is exactly what my application needs.
:) I always smile at all the quotes "attributed" to (Mark Twain) ... haha :) Prolific he was, quoted he is.
8 • OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 (by Gerhard Goetzhaber on 2020-03-02 06:46:47 GMT from Austria)
Evenly using it as my main system for any purpose, I've been working on this alpha for more than two months continously. While having liked Leap much from it's beginning, I can't do but seeing this latest edition as the greatest milestone OpenSUSE has ever brought to engaged GNU Linux customers as besides it's wellknown reliability it's now shipped with a contemporary kernel (5.3 with Leap's own backports) the first time. However, same-same all Linuxes getting installed to my workstations and laptops, due to my best experience it's set up with XFS partitions (as root, too) and Xfce (Phoronix nerds will not like me : ) exclusively ...
9 • Solus, into dismal darkness (by hank on 2020-03-02 07:36:05 GMT from Germany)
Black on black with blurry blackness, makes you think your eyesight is failing.
No one action way to go to light theming. Fonts look out of focus, like through mucky glasses or
trying to read after too much guiness.
Sorry this only moves me in one direction. Reformat USB stick and forget.
10 • Solus (by OstroL on 2020-03-02 08:22:45 GMT from Poland)
@Joshua Holm,
Would you like say something about the fact that the Budgie DE is not moving ahead any more?
11 • Solus (by Roger on 2020-03-02 12:35:48 GMT from Belgium)
Mate, always Mate it is my prefered desktop.
I install it in every Distro I test, otherwise XFCE when there is no other way or I don't want to do much.
12 • SolusOS (by Barnabyh on 2020-03-02 12:43:00 GMT from Germany)
Hi Joshua, thanks for the review. I tried all four editions of Solus recently for comparison and the one with the Budgie desktop is by far the heaviest, it responded slowly even on an eight core and ram usage was through the roof (in comparison). It uses even more resources on top of GNOME. GNOME Shell fared marginally better but I found only Plasma or MATE are useful choices if one actually wants to use their desktop without getting frustrated by that heavy, slow feeling interaction.
Otherwise nice looking but too dark, as mentioned.
13 • KDE 4 vs. CentOS (by Microlinux on 2020-03-02 12:52:59 GMT from France)
Hi,
There's a mistake in the text above. KDE 4 is still shipping with CentOS 7 and will thus be maintained until june 2024.
Slackware 14.2 is still maintained and also offers a very polished KDE 4.
14 • Solus 4.1 (by Rick on 2020-03-02 13:26:24 GMT from United States)
"Solus 4.1 is a very polished distribution" Really? Dedoimedo says, "But these (good points) are more than offset by glitches, bugs and the installation trouble. It's a no-go. Dedoimedo, sad and out." I've had niightmares with other Solus releases and have never managed to install it on any of my Lenovo Thinkpads. Nothing personal, but I will go with Dedoimedo's assessment and have done so for years.
15 • Older versions of KDE (by dragonmouth on 2020-03-02 13:53:49 GMT from United States)
PCLinuxOS offers a version with Trinity DE which they maintain up to date.
16 • Solus and DE (by Friar Tux on 2020-03-02 13:58:31 GMT from Canada)
I voted 'I don't use Solus'. I tried it, but it didn't seem to wanna play nice for me. Besides, my DE of choice is Cinnamon. (Though I HAVE given Budgie the occasional sideways glance. I kind of like the Raven idea.)
As for the black-like background, I prefer it, for the very reason Joshua mentions - my eyesight. I find staring at the average 'light' theme is like staring at a 60 watt bulb so I use a 'dark' theme. However, I have come to hate the standard 'dark' themes that most distros use as they are just variations of a really ugly grey. I usually rework any theme to a background of black, with the font in cyan and any borders in dark cyan. I find this quite easy on my eyes. (Since I've discovered the Oomox Theme Builder, themes have been so much nicer to adjust and/or build, and Oomox does a beautiful job.) By the way, the black background also extends the battery life on my HP Pavilion quite a bit.
17 • Solus (by Hoos on 2020-03-02 14:44:39 GMT from Singapore)
Solus is an OK choice as the only distro on a computer if you're happy with the packages in their curated repository. You get a rolling distro you don't have to worry about updating.
However, it doesn't seem to play nice with others when you try to install it on a multi distro machine where you don't want it to control the bootloading.
I say this as someone who has been trying out different versions of it, including the latest 4.1, since it was EvolveOS.
18 • Solus and Budgie (by akoi on 2020-03-02 15:51:01 GMT from United Kingdom)
Budgie won't go forward. Maybe, one of the reasons why its creator had left suddenly and without letting others know. He has been starting something, then dropping it halfway.
19 • Solus (by Otis on 2020-03-02 15:58:45 GMT from United States)
As noted @18 there have been team issues at Solus.. but at least they're moving along and the distro did not go the way of others which ended or were absorbed by other projects. I can see what they're trying to do at Solus. It looks good to me and the hope is that it'll pick up energy and live up to expectations.
My experiences with Solus over the years has been very good. I just ended up gravitating to Arch based distros.
20 • Trinity (by Cheker on 2020-03-02 18:26:32 GMT from Portugal)
I use Q4OS Trinity on my laptop held together by duct tape. I love it. In certain ways I think Trinity has surpassed KDE as my favorite DE (I realize it's a fork of KDE3). I currently have it set to resemble WinXP, which it already does a fair bit as it is. I hope it doesn't go away anytime soon.
21 • Trinity - TDE (by Andy on 2020-03-02 19:42:11 GMT from United States)
The Trinity Desktop, TDE, is a continuation of KDE3.5, updated and improved.
It is available in PCLinuxOS as a very polished community desktop project with frequent releases. PCLinuxOS is a systemd-free distro.
It is available in Q4OS.
The Exe GNU/Linux distro is Devuan based, previously Debian, with TDE as the desktop environment.
Trinity is alive and, hopefully, well. Viva TDE!
:-)
22 • @21 - Exe GNU/Linux (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-03 05:35:14 GMT from United States)
> The Exe GNU/Linux distro is Devuan based, previously Debian, with TDE as the desktop environment.
Exe GNU/Linux is also a Libre-Linux distro, which is a big plus. Also, it gives a very simple way of installing Devuan testing, which is a huge bonus.
23 • Comment on #6 (by cholo on 2020-03-03 20:06:34 GMT from United States)
I have to agree with most of what Bobbie was saying, KDE was my favorite DE, until 5. It seems they were taking more and more personalization away all the time. So I moved on to XFCE. It's lighter and you can still customize it the way I want. KDE moved down to almost the bottom anymore, along with Unity and Windows. Such a shame!
24 • Where to vent? Who is to blame? (by surrender on 2020-03-04 03:22:14 GMT from New Zealand)
Today I have reached the very end of my tether of patience with distros. Bling, UI bling, and half broken applications. I keep saying it, a distro has to just DO a job, production counts, playing sysadmin nanny is not an option.
The hero of today's misadventure is Inkscape. Under Extensions, Render, Barcode you can create EAN-13 and several others. Well, under Mint 19.3, you can't:
The fantastic lxml wrapper for libxml2 is required by inkex.py and therefore this extension.Please download and install the latest version from http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/lxml/, or install it through your package manager by a command like: sudo apt-get install python-lxml
Technical details:
No module named lxml
Is it Debian to blame, or Ubuntu, or Mint? I think the grenade lands closer to the root of the tree than the minty leaves. For crying out loud guys, this is 2020. Solus, works fine. Manjaro, work fine. What is up? I really want to understand why this is broken in a distro that has prided itself for over a decade with "everything just works". Is this Debian and down, and I must dump the whole family tree? So please post replies, I genuinely wish to understand before just throwing in the towel and just migrating for one dependency that was somehow skipped in the packaging.
25 • @24: Where to vent? Who is to blame? (by Titus Groan on 2020-03-04 06:48:27 GMT from New Zealand)
to be honest, you should first look further up the tree.
of course, to be absolutely sure, install Debian, and see if there is a problem there.
you have already explored some non-Ubuntu distros and discovered that the problem does not appear to exist in those linux branches.
you have already learnt your way around the ubuntu universe of doing things.
maybe it is time to throw in the towel and learn some non-ubuntu ways of doing things.
so many things to try: gentoo and friends, arch and friends, the RPM clan and of course The Slackers.
if I missed someone, it was unintentional.
and desktops too, why limit yourself to just Mints offerings, after all, pure Gnome, Budgie, Pantheon and all the rest are available, who knows you might just like them all!
26 • @ 24 where to ask... (by OstroL on 2020-03-04 07:24:52 GMT from Poland)
"Well, under Mint 19.3, you can't:"
Well, go ask in the Mint forums.
27 • @24 (by Debian User on 2020-03-04 12:38:56 GMT from Canada)
You're right, libxml2 is not in the Debian repos. Why? You can find the deb packages here https://pkgs.org/download/libxml2 I assume the Ubuntu packages work in Mint.
28 • Oh yes it is (by anticapitalista on 2020-03-04 13:56:59 GMT from Greece)
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libxml2&searchon=names&suite=all§ion=all&sourceid=mozilla-search
29 • @24 (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-04 17:21:24 GMT from United States)
Both libxml2 and python-lxml are in the Debian Buster repo.
My bigger concern with Debian is the age of many of their packages in the stable and testing repos. For example, they are running a version of KDE packages that's a couple years old. If I want the latest PDF editing features from okular, I can't get it without switching to Debian Sid unstable and pulling in all the newer KDE packages, or using a flatpak okular package that is crippled and cannot print and cannot save most changes.
30 • systemd release (by knightly koders on 2020-03-05 01:45:40 GMT from Australia)
There's a major update of systemd (245) coming out soon, with even more control tools. so it looks like the complaints against it are falling on deaf ears. it seems to be living up to its reputation as being a feature-creep software that is typical of monolithic OSs.
31 • Issue raised in comment #30 (by Barnabyh on 2020-03-05 12:45:05 GMT from Germany)
It's all a concerted effort to bring GNU/Linux and open source to heel and make it more 'manageable' for the powers that be with backdoors and surveillance. A multi-pronged approach to manage it from the inside.
If you also consider the changes at the Linux Foundation with several ex-MS employees now in inportant positions
http://techrights.org/2020/03/05/lf-leadership/
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Linux_Foundation
and that Let's encrypt is obviously owned by the security services and just had to revoke more than 3 Milion certs http://techrights.org/2020/03/04/lets-ask-lets-encrypt/ it all adds up. Embrace and extinguish. Still not sure that the unique MachineID generated by systemd is that harmless either.
The days of changing over to BSD draw ever closer (for me).
32 • systemd(isaster) (by Renan Figueiredo on 2020-03-05 13:51:39 GMT from Brazil)
@30: * it seems to be living up to its reputation as being a feature-creep software that is typical of monolithic OSs. *
@31: * The days of changing over to BSD draw ever closer (for me). *
Yes, knightly koders and Barnabyh, you are right. Red Hat became powerful enough to dominate everything, from kernel to userland. The days of community-controlled Linux development are numbered. The dream is over!
I'm now flirting with NomadBSD (on the desktop) and OpenBSD (on the server) trying to get rid of those increasingly "pestilent" Linux distros. I prefer to be a "masturbating monkey" than a slave of any evil corporation.
33 • Gave it a chance. (by Garon on 2020-03-05 14:33:11 GMT from United States)
I went to the website techrights.org, even tho it's not a secure connection, and had a look around. It is more or less a conspiracy theory site. It's not all bad but it's not all good either. Was reading an article titled "THIS IS ETHICS*!" and had to just stop when I read the statement, "Eric Raymond, whose essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ served as a call to arms for what he began to term the ‘open-source’ software movement, accompanying the release of his open-source operating system Linux."
Wow! That's when I stopped reading. How can you be so wrong about something? I wonder what else they're totally wrong about? Not saying they are bad people or trying to mislead, but just not always correct.
Back on topic. It seems that Solus with the Budgie environment is what people really have problems with. Otherwise it's not a bad distro.
34 • systemd/bsd/evil empire etc (by Otis on 2020-03-05 19:20:16 GMT from United States)
..and why would bsd be not in the sights of these neferious spies from Microsoft?
35 • systemd/bsd/evil empire etc (by Marcos Pereira de Sousa on 2020-03-06 00:22:59 GMT from Brazil)
@34 - "..and why would bsd be not in the sights of these neferious spies from Microsoft? "
Of course they are, as anything that is *open*...also known as "no secrets to spy here, only open source software..."
36 • Cynic (by Cynic on 2020-03-06 16:28:14 GMT from Ghana)
Given the number of choices this site alone has to offer, I am a bit surprised at the number of people saying they're going to stop using a kernel based on a distribution's choices.
Imagine if X11 was rejected simply because someone had a philosophical disagreement over a Window managers design or implementation.. it makes no sense.
While I do have a passion for the BSDs, until the hardware support and app availability improves, I (sadly) have little use for it. It is possible that many who wish to switch to BSD are also simply fans of the "underdog" which isn't really that bad (as it will help the project develop), but it should not be done without at least making the differences clear to those who may expect full compatibility.
If you are looking for a Linux which has (always) remained pure to the UNIX philosophy, not the SystemD-to-rule-them-all monolithic monstrosities, do the reading and use Slackware. Hopefully new distros will start to consider that solid base in the future.
37 • @36 Cynic (by Friar Tux on 2020-03-06 21:49:18 GMT from Canada)
While I agree 100% with your BSD opinion, I do have a problem with Slackware and Slackware derivatives - they simply DO NOT WORK (some don't even instal (some sort of error)). And I've tried them all. In fact of the hundreds of distros I've played with only the ones with systemd worked out-of-box. And of those Linux Mint was the most consistent. To me the number one priority to having an OS is that it WORKS when and the way I need it to work. I have copious notes on all the distros I tested:- most non-systemd distros did not work out-of-box - with the exception of MX linux, though it needed a bit of fiddling to find the wifi; none of the grandad distros worked (SUSE, Slackware, Fedora, Debian, etc.). So, while most of the opinions here are great reading, the final straw is that, whatever you choose, it has to work. (Unless, Linux really is just a hobby OS for you and you have the desire and time to fiddle with it.)
"Given the number of choices this site alone has to offer, I am a bit surprised at the number of people saying they're going to stop using a kernel based on a distribution's choices.
Imagine if X11 was rejected simply because someone had a philosophical disagreement over a Window managers design or implementation.. it makes no sense."
I'm as surprised as you, Cynic. It does make no sense.
Number of Comments: 37
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