 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 856, 9 March 2020 |
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Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Many Linux distributions strive to provide accessible, newcomer-friendly experiences in order to entice new community members away from Windows and macOS. One family of distributions which has long been known for its beginner-friendly approach is Mandriva (formerly Mandrake Linux). Though Mandriva itself is no longer developed, it has spawned multiple community projects, including OpenMandriva. This week Robert Rijkhoff takes OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 for a spin and reports on his experiences with the project. Then we discuss the Ubuntu team making Snap package upgrades smoother and the Kali Linux team publishing new install media with fixes for the setup process. Meanwhile, iXsystems is planning to unite their commercial TrueNAS platform with the community-supported FreeNAS project. Plus we offer tips on sharing a home directory and data files between multiple distributions. Our Opinion Poll this week asks how many of you share a home directory between operating systems and, if you do, we would like to hear how you set up your shared space. We are also pleased to cover 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: OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 "Mercury"
- News: Ubuntu works on smoother Snap updates, Kali provides refreshed install media, FreeNAS unites with TrueNAS
- Questions and answers: Sharing a home directory between distributions
- Released last week: Linux From Scratch 9.1, Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0, DragonFly BSD 5.8.0
- Torrent corner: Arch Linux, AUSTRUMI, Container, DragonFly BSD, FuryBSD, Kali Linux, KDE Neon, Netrunner, NomadBSD, Obarun, Pardus, Porteus Kiosk, SparkyLinux, Zorin OS
- Upcoming releases: Tails 4.4
- Opinion poll: Sharing a home directory between distributions
- New distributions: Rescuezilla, Openxi
- 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 Robert Rijkhoff) |
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 "Mercury"
OpenMandriva Lx, which I will call OpenMandriva from here on, is an independent Linux distro. The project's roots go back to Mandriva Linux, which was a distro produced by Mandriva S.A. The company went under in 2011 but, as is typical for Linux, new distros rose from the ashes, including Mageia and OpenMandriva.
Unlike Mandriva, OpenMandriva is very much a community project. The distro's aim is to provide a free alternative to Windows and macOS and the distro relies on donations to cover expenses. It also appears to be a struggling project. I started my trial on the 4th February, and for pretty much the whole day the OpenMandriva website was down. I sometimes got a "Site under construction" message, while at other times I got a "gateway time-out" error. The next day the home page was showing a "Congratulations, you installed Discourse" message, and after that the site was again either "under construction" or throwing errors. As OpenMandriva 4.1 was released on the 2nd February the timing of the website troubles was unfortunate.
Installation
While the website was down I was able to grab an OpenMandriva ISO image from SourceForge. There are two ISOs: plasma.x86_64 and plasma.znver1. The latter image is optimised for current AMD processors (Ryzen, ThreadRipper and EPYC).
I later learned that SourceForge is the only location from where you can download the latest OpenMandriva version. OpenMandriva's download page does list various mirrors but none of them includes an image for the latest release. There is also a link to torrents, but there is again no torrent for version 4.1.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The live desktop environment
(full image size: 618kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
OpenMandriva can be run as a live environment and uses the Calamares installer. I do like Calamares. It looks clean and, for the most part, it works. If you just click "Next, Next, Next" and let the distro take over your entire disk everything will be fine. Calamares does, however, always seem to struggle with encrypting partitions. I had opted to encrypt my system and all seemed to go well. The installer started to perform its magic and I was presented with a little slide show made up of self-congratulatory marketing slogans:
- OpenMandriva, Everybody, Everywhere
- OpenMandriva is innovative
- OpenMandriva is fast
And then the install failed with the message "cryptsetup -s 512 --batch-mode --force-password --type luks1 luksFormat /dev/sda3".
After a bit of digging I found that the solution was to not use a swap partition. My second attempt was successful and I got to see the remaining slides. I learned that OpenMandriva is also "an exciting ground for users and developers", "stable", "mobile" and "unique".
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- Don't use swap and encryption in Calamares
(full image size: 450kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
First impressions
The boot process is far from flicker-free but I got to the login screen fairly quickly - and throughout my trial I would have no issues when it came to performance. I would have various other gripes, and one them is the sound clip that is played when you log in. I don't know why, but I found it annoying, and it didn't help that the clip is about ten seconds long. If you are a fellow opponent of sound clips, the feature can be disabled via System Settings > Notifications > Applications: Configure > Plasma Workspace > Configure Events > Login.
OpenMandriva's Plasma desktop uses a fairly standard layout. There is a taskbar at the bottom of the display with all the usual suspects: an applications menu, application launchers and a system tray. Open applications are displayed in two rows, which feels a little odd. After some poking in the settings I was able to organise the taskbar to my liking. I was even able to tidy up the rather overcrowded system tray.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- A slightly customised desktop with OM Welcome
(full image size: 520kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
I should also mention "OM Welcome", which is - surprise, surprise - a welcome application. OM Welcome is launched automatically when you log in and features a handful of tabs. The "Features" tab contains information about the kernel, the Plasma desktop and a few applications. The information is presented in a slide show, and each slide is displayed for three seconds. If you aren't proficient at speed reading, you can pause individual slides by putting your cursor on a slide's label.
The "Configure" tab provides shortcuts to various Plasma setting menus (of which there are many) and the "Applications" menu features a selection of curated software, which you can install with the click of a button. You don't get any progress information when you install an application but the software installer works - I managed to install GIMP and Scribus via the Welcome application.
Finally, the "Contribute" tab provides links to various resources, including the OpenMandriva forums and donate page. Four of the eight links on the tab result in a "page not found" error. I suspect that this is because various sections and pages on the website have moved elsewhere - I encountered lots of dead links on the OpenMandriva website as well.
What's cooking?
On the third day of my trial the OpenMandriva website had recovered, and I was able to read the release notes [PDF]. Apart from the usual version updates (Linux kernel 5.5.0, systemd 244, Plasma 5.17.5 etc.) there are a few interesting new features. There are two new tools: om-update-config can be used to configure automatic updates and om-feeling-like is a desktop theme switcher. Also, Zypper has been added as an alternative package manager.
I was missing some basic information in the release notes. It is unclear, for instance, how long OpenMandriva 4.1 will be supported and what the upgrade path from version 4 to 4.1 is.
om-update-config
om-update-config appears in the menu as "Update Configuration" and gives you three options for applying updates:
- Do not install updates automatically
- Download updates automatically, install manually
- Download and install updates automatically
The first option ("do not install updates automatically") is a little unclear, as it doesn't tell you whether or not updates will be downloaded automatically. You can deduce that nothing will be downloaded, as the option would otherwise be identical to "download updates automatically, install manually". Still, a description along the lines of "Manually manage updates" would have made more sense. You shouldn't have to deduce what an option does.
I did not get to test the tool. That is partly because I got very few updates during my trial, and partly because the tool was removed when I uninstalled DNF (I will get to that shortly). I do have a Top Tip related to the tool though: you can run om-config-update from the command line (as root). The utility takes one of three arguments: none, download or install.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The Update Configuration tool
(full image size: 442kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
om-feeling-like
om-feeling-like appears in the menu as Desktop Presets. Put simply, with the click of a button you can change the desktop theme. The available flavours are OpenMandriva (the default), Plasma (which is a stock Plasma desktop), Windows 7, Windows 10, Ubuntu and macOS. It is an idea that has been borrowed from Ubuntu MATE, which has a similar desktop layout switcher.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The om-feeling-like application
(full image size: 378kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
I tried two themes: macOS and Ubuntu. The macOS theme was fairly nice. I like having a global application menu and I liked the Latte dock. The overall experience wasn't great though. For instance, clicking the OpenMandriva icon opens the menu, which has a semi-transparent background. That might look pretty, but it becomes difficult to navigate the menu when another application is open in the background. When I tried (and failed) to find a setting to change the background I noticed that the global menu also doesn't work as expected: the menu of the Falkon browser would still be displayed when another application had focus.
The Ubuntu theme was much worse and, frankly, looks like a joke. The vertical dock overlaps the top bar and the "Default" button (which is named "Activities" in GNOME); the clock isn't centred properly and you can't open the activities overview using the Super key. The latter might actually be a good thing, as the activities overview looks dreadful.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The Ubuntu theme
(full image size: 857kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
I also found that most of the customisations I had made to the default desktop were lost when I switched back to the OpenMandriva theme. I am sure many users will enjoy om-feeling-like, but to me it felt like a beta application that should not have been pre-installed.
Zypper
OpenMandriva uses the DNF package manager, but you can now install Zypper. I felt a little nervous about this. In particular, I wasn't sure if Zypper could be installed alongside DNF, or whether it would be better to replace DNF with Zypper. Having two package managers installed just doesn't feel right.
I decided that it was my duty to take the plunge. As far as I can tell DNF and Zypper can live happily side-by-side (but please don't get angry with me if the experiment turns out to be a disaster for you). I also tested what happens if you uninstall DNF, and that didn't cause any obvious issues either. It is worth mentioning, though, that uninstalling DNF will also remove the above-mentioned om-update-config utility and dnfdragora, which is a graphical front-end for DNF. Removing DNF will also break the software installer in the Welcome application, as clicking on any of the applications executes the command "dnf install --assumeyes ".
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- Using Zypper to uninstall DNF
(full image size: 409kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
Software and the KDE experience
OpenMandriva ships with a fairly large collection of software. I got on well with most applications. The only real issue I encountered was that KMail was broken, but then I have never had much luck with KMail. This time I got the error "Could not convert value of setting 'AccountIdentity' to required type" when I tried to configure an e-mail account. That appears to be a Qt bug.
As an alternative I installed Trojitá. The e-mail client consistently crashed when I clicked on any of the headers in the messages pane (i.e. if you try to sort e-mails by date, sender or subject) but other than that I liked Trojitá. It's minimal, but does the job as an e-mail client on a spare laptop.
The default web browser is Falkon, which comes with a basic ad-blocking extension enabled by default. For some reason OpenMandriva uses a local file (/usr/share/mdk/indexhtml.html) as the default home page. That is odd, as the page redirects to the OpenMandriva website. When you open the browser it will show the local HTML file for a few seconds before you are redirected. Of course, that is easily fixed - Falkon is quite configurable.
The application I liked most was Elisa, which is one of four pre-installed media players. It looks nice and it strikes just the right balance between ease of use and functionality - at least for me.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The Elisa music player and digiKam photo manager
(full image size: 468kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
There were a few applications I was missing. Most of them were command line applications, such as pass, moc and newsboat. There were also a few graphical applications I would have liked, including a password manager and podcast player. I could work around these issues by installing pass from source and by adding podcast feeds to Akregator, which is another application I got on with very well.
Discover, which is KDE's software centre, worked better than expected. In the past I never cared much for Discover, but I feel it has improved quite a bit. It was easy to install and remove packages, and I like that it also lets you manage repositories and updates. There were a few bugs though. For instance, Firefox wasn't listed in the category "Web Browsers".
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- Available web browsers, according to Discover
(full image size: 269kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
In general, Plasma pleasantly surprised me. There were a few weird dependencies, such as Marble being tied to KMail. There were a few applications with toolbars on all four sides of the window (digiKam was a notable exception) and my volume keys worked on the login screen. For the most part, things worked and the desktop got out of my way - and when it didn't I was able to tweak the relevant settings.
Plasma on Wayland, which is an available session on the login screen, isn't quite in its prime yet. It mostly worked but there were various minor nibbles. The task switcher, for instance, didn't work. Using Alt-Tab would show me open windows, but I couldn't cycle through them.
Documentation and more website troubles
Even though the OpenMandriva website had recovered I wasn't able to find any useful information on the website. For instance, I was hoping to find some information about proprietary codecs (which seem to be installed by default) and Zypper in the wiki. Unfortunately, the SSL certificate for wiki.openmandriva.org had expired in late December. As they have set up a redirect to always use HTTPS the page could only be accessed by adding an SSL exception in my browser, which I tend not to do.
I wanted to report the expired certificate as a bug. It had been six weeks since the certificate had expired, and nobody seemed to have noticed the issue. The bug tracker, though, was also buggy. After entering my e-mail address I was supposed to be sent an account verification e-mail, but instead I got a blank page.
The wiki got a new Let's Encrypt certificate on the 8th of February. However, to my surprise the wiki was complete empty. The domain showed a "MediaWiki has been installed" message, and there was no content whatsoever. And on that same day I noticed that the SSL certificate for the "downloads" subdomain had expired on the 8th February. Whoever is looking after the website is having a difficult few weeks.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 -- The OpenMandriva wiki
(full image size: 472kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
There is another section on the website with documentation. However, it contains very little content and what documentation exists talks about OpenMandriva Lx 3, which was released in 2017. Like the project's website, the documentation doesn't get much love.
Conclusions
I did not like OpenMandriva very much. The project has quite a few issues with its infrastructure and the documentation is in a very poor state. My main issue, though, was that I found the OpenMandriva-specific features rather underwhelming.
That is an unkind conclusion, and I don't enjoy writing negative reviews. But then, the distro aims to be an alternative to Windows and macOS, and I honestly don't think OpenMandriva is that alternative. There are much better distros for both Windows / macOS refugees and KDE-lovers.
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Hardware used for this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Z570 laptop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Core i3-2350M, 2.3GHz
- Memory: 4GB of RAM
- Wireless network adaptor: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285
- Wired network adaptor: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E 05)
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Visitor supplied rating
OpenMandriva has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.3/10 from 75 review(s).
Have you used OpenMandriva? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu works on smoother Snap updates, Kali provides refreshed install media, FreeNAS unites with TrueNAS
Normally, when Snap packages are updated, the experience should be seamless. Assuming all goes well, the user will not notice the shift from one version to the next. However, there are situations when we do not want software to automatically update without warning and Snap packages will soon include the ability to hold back updates when the application is running. Igor Ljubuncic writes: "By design, snaps come with automatic updates, and by default, the update (refresh) frequency check is four times a day. Whenever new application versions are published, they soon become available and propagate to all end-user systems. Normally, the process is transparent and seamless, but there could be exceptions. For instance, if you have an app open and running, an update could be disruptive in the middle of your work. Some developers have asked for an option to inhibit refreshes of snaps while they are running, and this is now a new, experimental feature that you can enable and test on your system." Details on how to test inhibiting Snap updates can be found Ljubuncic's blog post.
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Last month the Kali Linux team published a new version, Kali Linux 2020.1, which introduced a number of important changes in the distribution's system installer. Some users reported problems with the new installer and the team has published new media with an updated installer. The fixed media carries the version number 2020.1a. "Just a quick update to the 2020.1 release we put out last month. We made some major changes to the installers, and some people had a few issues with some of the images we released. So, we made some slight alternations to smooth things out and make the install process easier for everyone." The project's blog post has more information about the updated media.
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The FreeNAS project, along with TrueNAS, are very closely related network attached storage platforms maintained by iXsystems. FreeNAS is a community-supported NAS solution while TrueNAS receives commercial support from iXsystems. The two projects have been growing closer together and will unite later this year. The iXsystems team plans to call the newly merged platforms TrueNAS. FreeNAS will continue under the name TrueNAS CORE while TrueNAS will be referred to as TrueNAS Enterprise. "The only thing changing is the name. FreeNAS will take on the name of TrueNAS CORE. More than just a Free-NAS, TrueNAS CORE is enterprise-quality software-defined storage that can be used without restrictions or cost. It is also the core of the full-fledged enterprise edition, TrueNAS Enterprise, which provides the additional fault-tolerance, performance, and support that businesses and critical applications require."
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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) |
Sharing a home directory between distributions
Looking for a place to call home asks: Is it safe to share a home directory between distros? What are the best practises for maintaining one home with two or three or four distros?
DistroWatch answers: It is possible to share the same /home partition (or home directories) between Linux distributions. From a technical side of things there isn't anything which prevents one distribution from mounting the same /home partition used by another distribution [1].
Once the /home partition is mounted though there are some potential problems with sharing the same home folders between distributions. For instance, if your user account has a different identification number (UID) on each system you may run into permission problems. Most distributions start numbering user accounts at 1,000 and go up incrementally, but not all do. If your user IDs start at different points (for example, 500 versus 1,000), or you create your user accounts in a different order on each distribution, then the permissions will not be the same for each account and you may have trouble accessing your own files because they will be associated with different UIDs.
Another problem, and a more common one, is different distributions will have different default settings. They are also likely to run different versions of programs which may save their options in your home directory differently. This can lead to programs not working properly or desktop environments breaking when they do not recognize the settings saved by another version in the same directory. You may also end up overwriting your settings for one distribution when you are working in another.
To get around this, people will often maintain separate home directories for each distribution while maintaining one common space for data files and information that they wish to share between systems. This is typically done by settings up one large, common, shared partition that can be accessed by all distributions. We might call this partition /Data. Under /Data we might have directories like:
jesse/Documents
jesse/Downloads
jesse/Music
guest/Documents
guest/Downloads
In our home directory we can then make symbolic links to this shared /Data directory. Here I remove my distribution's Documents directory and link it to the shared equivalent space in /Data:
cd
rmdir Documents
ln -s /Data/jesse/Documents Documents
Now whenever I save a file in my Documents folder, it goes into the shared partition which can be accessed from each distribution. Meanwhile my configuration files for each distribution remain separate, in my local /home folder rather than in the shared space where they may conflict with my accounts on the other systems.
The key to this approach is making sure you create a large, shared data partition ahead of time, maybe when you install the first distribution. Then you can add as many additional distributions as you wish later, each one having its own home folders. Then each distribution can mount the shared data partition and users can link to the shared storage space.
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1. There is an exception. If you are using a non-standard filesystem or one that is not widely supported across distributions yet, such as ZFS, then it may not mount properly across all distributions. Standard Linux filesystems like ext2/3/4 and XFS are generally supported on all distributions.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Linux From Scratch 9.1
Bruce Dubbs has announced the release of Linux From Scratch (LFS) 9.1 and Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) 9.1, updated versions of the project's books that provides step-by-step instructions on how to build a base Linux system from scratch (using a standard Linux live system): "The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS version 9.1, LFS version 9.1 (systemd), BLFS version 9.1, and BLFS version 9.1 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to glibc 2.31, and Binutils 2.34. A total of 35 packages have been updated. A new package, zstd 1.4.4, has also been added. Changes to text have been made throughout the book. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 5.5.3. BLFS includes approximately 1,000 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch Version 9.1 book. This release has over 840 updates from the previous version in addition to numerous text and formatting changes." Here is the brief release announcement. The LFS and BLFS books are available for on-line viewing or they can be downloaded in HTML and PDF formats.
Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0
Porteus Kiosk is a lightweight Gentoo-based Linux operating system which has been downscaled and confined to allow the use of one application only - the Firefox web browser. The project's latest release, Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0, offers several package updates and user interface improvements. "I'm pleased to announce that Porteus Kiosk 5.0.0 is now available for download. Major software upgrades in this release include: Linux kernel 5.4.23, Google Chrome 80.0.3987.122 and Mozilla Firefox 68.5.0 ESR. Packages from the userland are upgraded to portage snapshot tagged on 20190908. Short changelog for 5.0.0 release: Added support for setting mouse speed (acceleration) in the system. Its possible to set different number of seconds for every browser tab which is displayed on the kiosk screen. Added support for viewing TIFF files in the Firefox browser. TIFF files are converted to the PDF format first so its possible to open them directly in Firefox. This function requires 'enable_file_protocol=yes' parameter present in the kiosk config. System clock is fetched every day from remote NTP server. It helps the kiosks which are not rebooted for a long time (e.g. 6 months) to retain correct system time." Further information can be found in the project's release announcement.
DragonFly BSD 5.8.0
The DragonFly BSD team has published a new release, version 5.8.0 of the server-oriented operating system. The new version makes it easier for users to compile their own repository of binary packages from ports, addresses some glitches in low-memory situations and improves video driver support. "Big-ticket items: dsynth(1) written and added to base, making it more convenient for users to build their own binary repos for DPorts(7). dsynth is used to build some or all of the DPorts collection, over 25000 third-party packages. It's also working as an informal performance measure, with many of the changes in this release to speed up DragonFly when building multiple dependent packages. Many ports these days seem to assume a greater degree of signal safety for libc function, particularly for malloc(). We have implemented a low-overhead signal masking feature that now allows us to make malloc*() and other related functions signal-safe. A ton of bug fixes, stability work, and usability work has gone into this release. Many niggling little annoyances, such as Chrome/Chromium stuttering when system memory is low, have been fixed. DRM (GPU) support continues to improve slowly but steadily. Significantly improved paging algorithms reduces or eliminates UI/browser glitches in low-memory situations." Further details can be found in the release announcement.
Zorin OS 15.2
Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed especially for newcomers to Linux. It has a Windows-like graphical user interface. The project has published a new release, Zorin OS 15.2, which provides both updated hardware support and newer versions of desktop applications. "Today we're introducing Zorin OS 15.2. With this new release, we've focused on refining the foundation of Zorin OS: its core technologies and software stack. This allows us to provide you with an even faster, more secure, and powerful computing experience. Stronger security and hardware compatibility: Many of the built-in system technologies have seen improvements for better security, compatibility, and performance. Zorin OS 15.2 is now powered by Linux Kernel version 5.3, which introduces new security patches, so you can have the peace of mind knowing that you're using the most secure version of Zorin OS ever. In addition, support for even more hardware has been included, such as: AMD Navi GPUs, including the Radeon RX 5700, Intel 10th generation processors, Newer MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards and touchpads." Further details can be found in the project's release announcement.
Zorin OS 15.2 -- Running the Xfce desktop
(full image size: 926kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
NomadBSD 1.3.1
Marcel Kaiser has announced the release of NomadBSD 1.3.1, an updated build of the project's FreeBSD-based, desktop-oriented operating system featuring the Openbox window manager. This release brings various improvements, but also an increased size of the decompressed image: "We are pleased to present the release of NomadBSD 1.3.1. Changes since 1.3: the base system has been upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p2; the automatic network interface setup has been improved - this includes better hardware detection and support for IPv6; the NomadBSD image size has exceeded the 4 GB mark - a Flash drive of 5 GB and above is now required; due to the bigger image size, Claws-mail could be replaced by Thunderbird; the NomadBSD setup now locks all kernel module packages to prevent users from running into problems when upgrading their packages; nomadbsd-chusr, which is a graphical tool for modifying user accounts, has been added; nomadbsd-sysinfo, which is a shell script to collect information about the running system, has been added; Zeroconf via avahi and mdns has been added...." Read the rest of the release announcement for further details. As usual, NomadBSD is available in the form of IMG files for amd64 and i386 architectures as well as Apple computers.
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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: 1,862
- Total data uploaded: 30.8TB
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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) |
Sharing a home directory between distributions
In this week's Questions and Answers column we talked about sharing a home directory between distributions and some issues to consider when setting up shared storage space. We would like to hear whether you share a home directory on your main computer. Let us know how you share files between operating systems in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on the desktop editions of Solus in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Sharing a home directory
| I share one home directory between distributions: | 73 (5%) |
| I keep separate home directories for settings but share data files: | 259 (18%) |
| I maintain completely separate home directories: | 361 (25%) |
| Other: | 27 (2%) |
| I run only one distro on my computer: | 749 (51%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Rescuezilla. Rescuezilla is a revival of the Redo Backup & Recovery distribution, now under a new name and with a new maintainer. The project still uses Ubuntu as a base and strives to provide powerful backup and restore options for hard drives and partitions.
- Openxi Linux. Openxi Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution featuring the GNOME desktop environment.
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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, 16 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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1 • Share Data files but separate Home files (by Mike on 2020-03-09 00:27:01 GMT from Australia)
I use Linux Mint and Mint LMDE version. It is handy to have a spare distro as a test bed and also to access my data files if something disaster befalls my regular distro. The only problem I have found is that I set up a common Thunderbird mailbox but if I access it with the LMDE version then Mint will fail to access it. The 2 Mints use different versions of Thunderbird but fortunately I can easily restore my Mint configuration. A similar problem appeared today with Firefox which I have not yet had time to investigate; it s weird because when running one distro the /home folder of the other distro is not even mounted.
I would recommend using a separate partition for Data even if you only have 1 distro on your computer. It makes backups so much easier.
2 • Mandrake/Mandriva's legacy (by randomly generated entity on 2020-03-09 00:31:24 GMT from United States)
As someone that keeps versions of most of the major distros (19 of 'em! no MS anything for years now) installed and updated, using one or another as daily driver for a few weeks or months then moving on to something else for a while, the Mandr(ake/iva) branch of the distro family tree has always intrigued me. I can even recall paying for Mandriva back in maybe 2010-2011. It worked well, was easy enough for my even now limited skills, and looked good with my still preferred DE (KDE).
These days it seems that only Mageia is relatively close to the original in terms of quality and community, with only PCLinuxOS (which I consider to be a different beast in too many ways) also in the running. ROSA seems to have virtually disappeared (in popularity anyway) after having made some rather unfortunate changes to the plasma UI, and now we learn via this review that OpenMandriva - if one is to draw any conclusions from its web presence - is barely clinging to life.
The odd thing is, while I like Mageia (I run cauldron, the constantly updated bleeding-edge version) and it seems remarkably stable, I rarely find myself actually using it. Not even sure why that is... Maybe the somewhat outdated, only partially useful-anymore, once-a-huge-selling-point Control Center thing just doesn't seem as special any more (btw, no mention of that in the review? I assume it's there...)?
Anyway... just wanted to ramble and reminisce a little about this still viable (barely) corner of the Linux distro world, a world now overrun with Debian/Ubuntu and Arch variants. As a parting aside, where are all the openSUSE or Fedora variants? I know there are/have been a few. Just seems like there should be more, especially for openSUSE, which has such a rich infrastructure
3 • Home directories (by Romane on 2020-03-09 01:14:16 GMT from Australia)
Having a number of systems on my beastie, this quickly became an issue early in the piece.
Every install includes its own /home partition, with living under that. All settings and system-specific/user-specific live in that directly. For the rest, all my data files live in one completely separate directory. Links into the running systems native /home/ are placed into this.
Seems to work a charm mostly, but invariably there are permissions issues to be resolved before this setup become functional. Once the permissions are sorted, all is good.
I don't like directly mounting my /home/ partition directly in each system due to the conflicts which sometimes arise between the distro-specific steeings and files in each distro. Doing it this way means that these are kept completely separate from each other while all the data is shared commonly across all installed distros.
4 • OpenMandriva, non-systemd options (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-09 02:40:54 GMT from United States)
Like @2, I was also surprised not to see anything written in the review about the Control Center. That used to be the big selling point of Mandrake and all of its forks over the years. It's like reading about opensuse without seeing any comments about YaST.
OpenMandriva is another systemd distro to my knowledge. I wish more distros offered a non-systemd option like MX does. I really don't have much interest in trying systemd distros anymore, which seriously limits the amount of distro hopping I'm willing to do.
5 • @3 home directories (by Titus Groan on 2020-03-09 07:04:09 GMT from New Zealand)
likewise I found out that a shared home directory could have unusual consequences.
now, always separate / and /home and shared data disks and partitions between multiple systems
6 • Sharing a home directory between distributions (by multios user on 2020-03-09 09:45:00 GMT from Bulgaria)
I maintain completely separate home directories.
Different distros are not born equal and have different apps versions resulting in different settings. Additionally I use both linux and bsds on one computer, linux in sytemd and sysv variants too. It would be a severe blunder and a complete mess to mix home settings for different distros and oses, if possible at all provided that linux & bsd use different file systems mostly incompatible for file write operations. I'm amused by the creators blindness of the forthcoming 'great' systemd-homed thing.
7 • openmandriva (by no_cool on 2020-03-09 11:15:41 GMT from United States)
Roughly 20 years ago I began my linux journey with mandrake that was on the cover of a magazine. I too bought updates from them shipped to myself on cd with french stamps and postage (that intrigued my landlord at the time).
I swapped it for slackware (also of the cover of a magazine) while at version 10ce - this had problems for myself and I have not gone back to mand*.
Yes the control centre is somewhat outdated or outmoded - good in the day not so much now.
I dont even like using pclinuxos as it reminds me too much of mand*; and I have decided after all my struggles with rpms and dependencies that rpms are too much to deal with.
Long live the past...
8 • OpenMandriva (by Barnabyh on 2020-03-09 12:39:05 GMT from Germany)
One of the selling points of OpenMandriva was that it is compiled with musl if I remember correctly and supposed to be a tad faster in operation due to this.
However, I could not find any notable difference in daily operation and went for Mageia in the end which ran here last year for 6 months on one machine. Despite systemd, currently trying a few of them after having given it a wide berth for so long. Only for evaluation though.
Availability of packages was also a problem with OM. It seemed too restricted to me to make it worthwhile for daily use. They should just join up with Mageia. There are already three more descendent distros of Mandrake/Mandriva which had not had that many users for a long time before it went. From a resources point of view it would be smarter to bundle them instead of splitting the little man power available. And woman power, sorry!
9 • /home and Mandriva (by Friar Tux on 2020-03-09 12:45:23 GMT from Canada)
I use only one distro on my working laptop. I DO, however, have a 'testing' laptop to test/play with other distros. My version of distro hopping is to play with them on my 'tester' and, if they pass, they get saved on a flash drive. I actually don't have that many saved distros as only a very few pass the testing - all the Mint flavours, Q5OS, and MX-19_x64 (the only MX that worked). The rest had too many issues to be useful. My priorities are install the distro, and go to work. No post-install messing about to get things running, and for that matter, no pre-install messing about, either. Also, if it can't install itself from a flash drive I consider it a bust. (I'm picky that way. This IS the 21st century, after all.)
OpenMandriva, Mageia, and PCLinuxOS were all a bust for me. When I first tried them, they all show the same issues. It was when I checked what the parent distro was that I realized why. (I actually bought and ran Mandrake 3.1, way back when, but found it didn't work - it scared me back to Windows.)
10 • OpenMandriva (by Jesse on 2020-03-09 13:44:24 GMT from Canada)
@8: "One of the selling points of OpenMandriva was that it is compiled with musl if I remember correctly and supposed to be a tad faster in operation due to this."
OpenMandriva does not use musl (a C library). It builds packages with Clang (a compiler), rather than the more commonly used GCC. This is not intended to give a performance boost, instead it provides better debugging information to the developers.
11 • Partition size (by Ganesh on 2020-03-09 14:09:52 GMT from India)
How big do you suggest the partitions should be if you use root, home and data partitions?
12 • OpenMandriva (by Dave Postles on 2020-03-09 14:37:16 GMT from United Kingdom)
I too was an adopter of Mandriva in my early experience with Linux. I bought the USB stick with OM running live, which must have been pioneering at the time. It's not a great distro now, I think.
On another matter, for Linux newbies in Europe, distros will need to have the following automatic attributes:
1 LibreOffice Base has all elements, including java runtime and hsqdlb integrated;
2 VLC has gstreamer and libdvdcss integrated.
In which case, a distro developed in Europe is probably the answer for Linux newbies in Europe.
13 • @12 linux newbies in Europe (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 16:09:36 GMT from Sweden)
What are you talking about?
Personally, I disagree with both libreoffice and vlc. A distro should only provide the bare minimum, the user should decide which office suite and media player he/she wants.
For myself, I don't even want a desktop environment installed but, that maybe a bit too much for a newbie. Although, you never know, some learn fast.
14 • @13 newbies vs experts (by curious on 2020-03-09 16:26:34 GMT from Germany)
While I don't quite understand why java runtime and hsqdlb must be integrated in LibreOffice Base, it is clear that your personal needs are quite different from a newbie's. An expert knows what different software is available and - more importantly - which codecs are necessary for stuff to work.
Especially the gstreamer packages are named in such a way that many people do not understand which package they need to get the expected multimedia playback functionality.
So, more important than which specific multimedia player is used, it should include all the stuff needed to play back the usual suspects - i.e. mp3, various common video formats, and DVDs. Many distros actually do provide this functionality - or at least an easy one-click way to install the missing stuff.
15 • @14 newbie vs. expert (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 16:40:59 GMT from Sweden)
I would agree with you but, the things you mention are only a ddg/google search away.
I'm afraid that in the near future (now) most of the default installs will be heavily bloated.
Hopefully some basic installs will remain for those of us who prefer it like that.
16 • Mandrake/Multiple Distros (by Gary on 2020-03-09 18:12:13 GMT from United States)
I was given a copy of Mandrake 7.0 I believe it was by my Uncle who had learned about computers in the USAF using DOS. Me, not so much, and I struggled to get anything done. After about a decade (self-taught) I started again with Linux.The last time I used Windows was in 2013 when Windows 7 wouldn't recognize a large external HD and Linux would. Haven't looked back. I prefer a distro that does what I want and not one that makes me do it only the distro's way (MS). I use several desk-top and Notebook computers, most of them older. I'm guessing that the cause of distros using RPM running so much slower is because of the older hardware, but Debian and Arch-based distros run with little-to-no problems. The Desktops have 2-4 distros running and I keep the home directories synchronized in case of a problem.
17 • newbie vs expert (by Ram on 2020-03-09 18:41:41 GMT from India)
@15 I think, in respect to GNU Linux,
For newbie the clear winner is KDE Neon (user edition) or Ubuntu Studio and register in the Ubuntu Forum or Ask Ubuntu.
For newbie server managers the go to system is RHEL or CentOS and read their documentations and start searching the Internet.
For experts go to Arch or Gentoo or Nix or LFS+BLFS.
Actually, experts can play with any system; newbies matter. Just keep in mind, systemd/GNOME based systems are not good choice for tinkering.
18 • newbie vs expert (by voidpin on 2020-03-09 19:05:58 GMT from Sweden)
@17 Thanks for the tip but, I'll just stick with my laptop running NetBSD with spectrwm.
19 • Partitions (by Cheker on 2020-03-09 19:07:32 GMT from Portugal)
My two OS' have their own home folders, but they both have access to a separate partition (HDD) that contains most things. Come to think of it, the things you'd find in a typical home folder are there too, because I didn't want it taking space up on the SSD, where the OS' are installed.
20 • Shared data and applications (by PhilippE on 2020-03-09 19:50:47 GMT from France)
I have several distros installed on my PC and I need to access to my user documents from each one, but I want to keep separated config files. That's why I use separated $HOME but I share directories such Documents, Music, Images, Downloads, etc.
In addition I share /opt (where are firefox and Libreoffice) and a AppImage directory. This permits to share some applications and to upgrade them only once.
21 • poll question (by randomly generated entity on 2020-03-09 21:27:55 GMT from United States)
19 distros... how many separate home directories? 19! Mainly for config files and such, which do evolve over time as an OS/DE matures. Takes up so little space that there's no real reason to share ~ between distros for me.
I also have several storage drives used for data, to which I symlink from those directories.
The only non-standard thing I do is use the mozilla-provided binary of Firefox, which goes into the /opt folder of each distro. Saves me a lot of download bandwidth (19 dl's from the respective package managers adds up) and keeps me immediately up to date. I can even use the same profile for all of 'em (just copy the ~/.mozilla directory), saving configuration time and sync bandwidth.
22 • / and /data partitions (by M.Z. on 2020-03-09 23:41:58 GMT from United States)
I've been running a /data partition for years and multibooting distros in their own combined /root and /home partitions. No issues, though I understand trying to share /home causes issues with hidden config files that often start with a .dot.
@11 -'how big Q?'
The how big question depends entirely on how many programs you plan on installing & how big your drive is. If you're going to separate out a /data partition you may want to combine /root & /home for simplicity sake, though there may be some reason to separate them even with a /data partition I'm not aware of.
At any rate, I filled up at least one 30ish GB /root/home partition on an SSD when I was adding lots of programs from a Debian based distro once (a previous version of LMDE). I'd gues if you wanted a light distro & only a few programs you could squeeze by on less than 20GB, but if you want a fair number of big programs, you may want 50GB+ on /root/home.
Personally I do several 500MB /boot partitions, a like number of40 to 60GB partitions for /root/home on various distros, and then leave a few hundred GB at the end for /data, because I may never fill it up with my files, but It's nice to have extra space.
A helpful link on the process of setting it all up:
https://www.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/08/painless-linux.html
23 • Home (by Rich on 2020-03-10 00:18:10 GMT from United States)
With multiple distros on the same machine, after efi, swap and root partitions, I leave the rest of the drive for a home partition where all the home directories go. What I do is create different user accounts per distro, for example rich-ubuntu, rich-manjaro, rich-fedora etc....
24 • KDE Neon (by Dark Man on 2020-03-10 12:17:56 GMT from United States)
@17 For the user who wants a "minimalist" distro, KDE Neon is an excellent choice. It comes with few apps installed. Extremely lean. Although for that reason, I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie. Something like Kubuntu would be better.
25 • Feature story - review OpenMandriva (by Val on 2020-03-10 17:24:03 GMT from Canada)
And again there is no real info about system performance...
No RAM consumption, no boot time...
26 • Home (by Mike C on 2020-03-10 21:54:13 GMT from United States)
I dual-boot Windows 7 and Mint on several machines. Those all have a 'Common' partition formatted for NTFS. Why Windows 7? Simple, Linux doesn't have the drivers for my Lexmark color printer (4079PS2) or my scanner. Also, I use TurboTax which doesn't support Linux (and next year won't work under Windows 7 - may have to upgrade to Windows 10).
The printer cost over $3,000 new a long time ago and I have several hundred dollars worth of ink cartridges. It does an excellent job and I see no reason to quit using it. I use a black & white laser printer for everyday printing and it is supported under Linux. I know Windows 7 is a security risk but it is no longer configured to use WiFi nor Ethernet - it is isolated when in use. I use Common to store anything I want to print and simply re-boot into Windows 7 for the print job(s). This is a pain in that I have to stop doing everything else while I print and I would like nothing more than to get the appropriate driver for the printer so I could just stay in Linux. The scanner can be easily and cheaply replaced with something more current...but why spend the money when I have to maintain Windows 7 just for the printer?
27 • @25 (by Andy Prough on 2020-03-11 02:56:43 GMT from United States)
> And again there is no real info about system performance...
> No RAM consumption, no boot time...
Didn't seem necessary. When a distro is in poor shape and not terribly useful, performance, or lack thereof, is much less relevant.
28 • Home, printer (by Angel on 2020-03-11 03:38:59 GMT from Philippines)
@26, Not sure if this is of interest: That's quite an old printer, but if it connects by USB you can use a Windows VM for TurboTax and the Lexmark and avoid the dual-boot. Also, a VM can be copied and used in any of your PCs. Of course, you may need a Windows license for the VM. I had a Brother printer where I had to keep reinstalling the Linux driver. The Windows VM worked well, and could even be connected to it's own WiFI by using a dongle. (BTW, you still should be able to upgrade to WIn 10 for free.)
@23, I also use slightly different users in a common home partition to avoid conflicts, but I also have a separate partition where data from all distros is shared.
29 • Directiories (by Jim on 2020-03-11 11:43:18 GMT from United States)
I dual boot Ubuntu Mate and Parrot. I do not share directories as I use Ubuntu Mate for common things, and Parrot for privacy and security reasons. This is a question I have asked other places, and it has never been answered.
If I dual boot, and a cryptolocker attacks, can it encrypt the part of the drive that is not mounted? If it encrypts partition one that is mounted, does unmounted partition two also get encrypted?
If partition two does not get encrypted, that would be a reason to not share directories. An answer from someone more knowledgeable than me will be appreciated.
30 • Sharing "Home" directories (by OstroL on 2020-03-11 11:54:36 GMT from Poland)
When you install a Linux distro, it creates a home directory, usually. But, no one is asking the user to save every file or folder to that directory. If you have multi Linuxes are installed, and you need to have your personal files/folders in a separate partition? If that partition is formatted ntfs, anything in that can be accessed from Linux and Windows. All you have to remember is to close Windows fully. If you are dual booting with Windows, fast start-up would be disabled any way.
31 • @29 (by Jake on 2020-03-11 17:30:07 GMT from United States)
It depends on the malware. I have heard of ransomware that looks for networked backups to encrypt (NAS or Samba shares) but not all strains do. It's an interesting question I have wondered myself but I'm sure it comes down to amount of effort versus benefit gained. Linux malware is generally low for that reason versus Windows or Android.
32 • /home (by Murdock2525 on 2020-03-12 15:46:35 GMT from Costa Rica)
Hard drive space is cheap these days(not as cheap as many Linux users) so I run a /Data-copy of dropbox and all photos and leave each distro and /home on its own partition.
33 • Sharing a home directory (by homedir on 2020-03-13 13:45:40 GMT from Portugal)
To those who don't like to see the arrow at the bottom corner of linked icon folders:
don't remove the distribution's Documents directory and:
instead of
ln -s /Data/jesse/Documents Documents
do
sudo mount --bind /Data/jesse/Documents /home/jesse/Documents
Number of Comments: 33
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| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Full list of all issues |
| 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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| Random Distribution | 
Linux Live Game Project
LLGP was a Knoppix-based live CD that makes it easy to play games on Linux. It includes a solid collections of free and open source games, such as TuxRacer, Cube, Egoboo, FreeCiv, Pingus, Chromium, Foobillard, Frozen Bubble, Power Manga and many others.
Status: Discontinued
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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!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
| 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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