 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 866, 18 May 2020 |
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Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
The Fedora Linux distribution is a cutting-edge project that is often used as a testing ground for new technologies. The latest compilers, development tools, desktop environments, and systemd features often appear in Fedora before arriving in other fixed-release distributions. This week Joshua Allen Holm takes us on a tour of Fedora's latest Workstation release and explores some of the features and improvements available in Fedora 32. In our Questions and Answers column we share reasons distributions tend to build their own software packages, such as web browsers, instead of redistributing binary packages from their upstream source. Where does your web browser package come from? Let us know in the Opinion Poll. In our News section we talk about Fedora's Silverblue project along with new features coming to the UBports mobile operating system. Plus we say farewell to the TrueOS project as it officially shuts down. Then we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the distribution torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Fedora 32 Workstation
- News: UBports status report, TrueOS shuts down, an overview of Fedora Silverblue
- Questions and answers: Why distros offer custom builds of packages
- Released last week: Proxmox 6.2 "Virtual Environment", Q4OS 3.11, Kali Linux 2020.2
- Torrent corner: 4MLinux, Android-x86, ArcoLinux, BackBox, Bluestar, Finnix, Kali Linux, Manjaro 20.0.1, KDE neon, Plamo, Q4OS, Zevenet
- Upcoming releases: OpenBSD 6.7
- Opinion poll: The source of your web browser package
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (16MB) and MP3 (12MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Joshua Allen Holm) |
Fedora 32 Workstation
In late April, the Fedora project released Fedora 32. This release, like all recent Fedora releases, is available in several different editions. Workstation and Server are the two main editions, and there are three emerging editions: Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Silverblue, and Fedora IoT. There are also several spins that feature alternate desktop environments and labs that serve specific purposes. For this review I will be focusing on Fedora Workstation, which uses GNOME as the desktop environment, but many of the enhancements made in Fedora 32 are available in all the Fedora editions.
Installing Fedora Workstation
I began by downloading the 1.8GB Fedora 32 Workstation x86_64 ISO and copying it to a flash drive. Then I rebooted the computer and booted from the flash drive. Fedora booted quickly and I was soon looking at a GNOME desktop with a prompt asking me if I wanted to "Try Fedora" or "Install to Hard Drive". Because I already knew that my hardware (except for the fingerprint scanner on the touchpad) worked with Fedora's previous release, I picked the install option.
Fedora 32 -- Live desktop with Try or Install options
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The first part of Fedora's installation process is handled by Anaconda. The only things that are configured during this part of the process are keyboard layout, time & date, and selecting/partitioning the disk Fedora will be installed on. The partitioning option does provide advanced customization options, but I opted for the defaults. This worked fine for the most part, but I did notice that on my new Fedora installation the volume group name for the LVM volume group created by Anaconda was "fedora_localhost--live". Because Anaconda has no option for configuring networking or setting the hostname, and because I did not use any other method to change the hostname of the live image, this name carried over to the volume group during installation. For comparison, the hostname changes from "localhost-live" on the live image to "localhost" on an installed system. The hostname gets adjusted if no hostname is set, but the volume group retains the "-live" suffix. Changing the hostname on the live image before running Anaconda solves this problem, but it is not very intuitive to have to go into GNOME Settings or use another method to change the hostname of the live image to properly set the volume group labels. Of course, this only applies when selecting the default partitioning option; when using the custom option, the volume group names can be configured by the user.
Fedora 32 -- The Anaconda installer
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The next step of the installation process is handled after the new Fedora installation is booted for the first time. GNOME Initial Setup handles creating a new user and configuring a few privacy settings. This new user has administrator privileges and the root account is disabled. Installing additional users can be done using the GNOME Settings application. The root account can be enabled by using "sudo passwd" to set a password for the root account.
Fedora 32 -- Creating a new user during the initial setup
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Fedora Workstation's default GNOME desktop and software
Fedora 32's GNOME desktop is very close to GNOME's default settings. The only GNOME extension enabled by default is one that shows "Fedora" in the lower right corner of the background, but Fedora does provide a "Classic" login option that enables more extensions and provides a desktop experience closer to, but not exactly like, GNOME 2. If you like GNOME, Fedora Workstation is an excellent choice, but if do not like the GNOME way of doing things, one of Fedora's spins or a different distribution entirely might be a better choice. Personally, I really like GNOME as is, so I do prefer Fedora's take on GNOME, but I know not everyone feels the same way.
Fedora 32 -- The default software selection
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The default selection of software that comes pre-installed with Fedora 32 consists of Firefox, the Calc, Impress, Math, and Writer components of LibreOffice 6.4 , and a selection of GNOME applications and utilities. There is no e-mail application installed by default, but in the age of web-based e-mail that is understandable. The default audio player is Rhythmbox, the default video player is GNOME Videos, and the default image viewer is Image Viewer, but GNOME Photos is also installed.
Fedora 32 Workstation's GNOME 3.36 desktop environment works extremely well. Earlier versions of Fedora and GNOME would occasionally slow down or freeze up entirely on the laptop I used for this review, but nothing like that occurred so far with Fedora 32. Part of this is thanks to improvements made to GNOME, and part is due to the inclusion of EarlyOOM, which makes Fedora handle low memory situations much better than it did in earlier versions.
Installing additional software
Like most Fedora releases, the bulk of the change log is "new version of [some programming language or development tool]". Most of these packages do not come pre-installed, but can easily be installed using the DNF package manager. Fedora has up to date packages for Go, GCC, Pascal, Python, Ruby, and a wide selection of other options, which makes Fedora a good choice for developers. Python 2.7 is end of life, but there is still a python27 package available.
In Fedora 32 DNF feels much, much faster. Packages install faster than they did in Fedora 31. Given the network congestion caused by everyone working from home right now, it is not possible for me to properly benchmark DNF's Fedora 31 and Fedora 32 performance, but it is snappier enough to be noticeable. The "command not found" feature on the command line also works better. It still takes a while to return information the first time it runs in a session, but after that it seems to behave much better and quickly provides the option to install a package that provides the entered command or state that the command was not found if no package provides that command.
Fedora 32 -- GNOME Software
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The graphical option to install additional software is GNOME Software. This application provides a selection of GUI applications from Fedora's RPM repositories and from Fedora's own Flatpak repository. Fedora's RPM repository contains a lot of packages, but the Flatpak repository is very, very small. The Flatpak repository contains mostly games and GNOME applications. Most of these Flatpak applications are already packaged as RPMs, so, at present, the Fedora Flatpak repository does not provide much value. GNOME Software does allow the user to enable a selection of "Third Party Repositories", but this option only enables a Copr repository for PyCharm, a repository for Google Chrome, and Steam and NVIDIA drivers provided by RPM Fusion. Despite using RPM Fusion for two packages, there is no automatic way to enable the full RPM Fusion repositories. There is the same issue for Flathub, which contains way more packages than the Fedora Flatpak repository. Enabling Flathub would be helpful, but it is not an option presented by GNOME Software. If a user wants to use Flathub, they must enable it themselves by going to the Flathub website and following the instructions. While there are understandable legal issues around providing RPM Fusion and Flathub by default, it is unfortunate that the optimal Fedora experience requires knowing that RPM Fusion and Flathub exist.
One minor frustration with GNOME Software is that it keeps displaying an error message stating that it is "Unable to install English as not supported". Fedora 32 changed the way language packs are installed, but GNOME Software seems to have some issues with the changes. The English language tools seem to be installed properly, and are working just fine in LibreOffice and other applications, but GNOME Software keeps displaying the error every time I open it.
Final thoughts
If you are already a Fedora user, Fedora 32 is something you should upgrade to immediately. Fedora 32's improvements far outweigh the few minor issues (e.g. GNOME Software complaining about being unable to install English). If you are currently using a different distribution or if you are new to Linux, I still recommend Fedora 32, but with the caveat that you need to know about RPM Fusion and be able to follow the instructions on the RPM Fusion website to install the repositories and install the multimedia codec packages to have an experience on par with other distributions. While not as crucial, it also helps to enable Flathub, which provides a much larger set of packages than Fedora's own Flatpak repository, including many applications that are not available as standard RPM packages. There are valid reasons for a Red Hat sponsored project not enabling those things by default, but it does make the Fedora installation process and user experience more complicated that it could be. Even with the extra work needed to set everything up, Fedora 32 Workstation is a great choice for general desktop computing, development work, or for learning the ins and outs of how Red Hat-style distributions work.
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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
Fedora has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.3/10 from 465 review(s).
Have you used Fedora? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
UBports status report, TrueOS shuts down, an overview of Fedora Silverblue
The UBports team has published an update on work being done to their mobile operating system. The team has reported improvements in compatibility with the PinePhone and upgrades to the user interface. There have also been improvements to the Morph web browser: "OTA-12 includes the very last version of Unity 8 (now Lomiri) that Canonical ever prepared. It has finally been brought out of mothballs. There are better contrasting colours across the whole OS, thanks to Cibersheep. The keyboard edit overlay now operates by swiping up, instead of the long press on the space bar. Double tap now works to control it. With Morph improvements, apps can now utilise it to download files. Deleting cookies is now possible! Yes, that should have been in there before but everything takes time... Devices equipped with multi-colour LEDs now show charging status properly. [white/green = charging, green = charged, orange = battery low]. Also some translations have been tidied up and now appear correctly in system settings and elsewhere." Additional details can be found in the project's Q&A post.
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The TrueOS project has been dormant for several months and the team has now announced that the project is officially being discontinued. "With a heavy heart, the TrueOS Project's core team has decided to discontinue the development of TrueOS for the foreseeable future. We'll still be heavily involved in other Open Source projects like FreeNAS & TrueNAS CORE. We're incredibly proud of the work we put into TrueOS and its predecessor, PC-BSD. TrueOS source code will remain available on GitHub for others that may want to continue the work that we started so many years ago." People who are interested in rolling release varieties of FreeBSD and desktop flavours of FreeBSD may be interested in exploring the closely related GhostBSD project.
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Fedora Silverblue is an interesting branch of the Fedora project which presents the core operating system as a set image. Modules can be added on top of Silverblue, but the base operating system is intended to stay as a single, atomic foundation. Nick Hardiman dives into some of Silverblue's features: "The libostree project supplies the goods for managing Silverblue's file system. It is an upgrade system that the user can control using rpm-ostree commands. libostree knows nothing about packages - an upgrade means replacing one complete file system with another complete file system. libostree treats the file system tree as one atomic object (an unbreakable unit). In fact, the forerunner to Silverblue was named Project Atomic. The libostree project provides a library and set of tools. It's an upgrade system that carries out these tasks: Pull in a new file system, store the new file system, deploy the new file system." Hardiman's post further explores managing software on Silverblue.
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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) |
Why distros offer custom builds of packages
Looking-at-the-label asks: Back when I was hopping around for which distro to stick with (thanks to DistroWatch for being my guide), I noticed that the About page for Firefox usually said "Firefox for <distro name>". What are the differences between a "distro specific" Firefox build and the "generic" Firefox build from Mozilla? Why do distros (the ones I've tried, at least) prefer to have their own build rather than use the "generic" build?
DistroWatch answers: There are a handful of reasons a project might want to make their own, custom build of Firefox rather than just install a generic build from Mozilla.
One is customizing locations of files or making Firefox fit better with the distribution's filesystem layout. A distribution might want to shuffle things around to keep resources, icons, or libraries organized more consistently.
A second option is the distribution has security patches which they apply to their build which might not yet be available upstream. Similarly, maybe there aren't any patches at the moment, but doing a custom build means it is easier to insert patches later if they are needed. It is more straight forward to add a patch to a source build than to re-write the packaging routine from using a generic build to then incorporate a patch.
Building a custom package for Firefox, or any other software, allows the distribution to introduce compile-time improvements. These can include code optimizations to make the software faster, security features that make the browser harder to exploit, debugging information to help developers find problems. A lot of little tweaks can be made during the build that make a big difference in program size, speed, and security.
Branding can also play a role. Some projects may want to put their name on the browser, or adjust the browser's identification slightly to make their distribution show up in website statistics. It also lets users know where to report bugs. If you run into a problem with Mozilla's build of Firefox it should be reported to Mozilla. If you run into issues while running Ubuntu's build of Firefox it should be reported to Ubuntu.
Building from source code will often produce warnings or errors which developers can address and fix. This can result in potential problems being addressed early rather than waiting for Mozilla (or another upstream team) to notice the issue and address it.
There is also the issue of reproducible builds. Some projects want to make sure that the binary package they are providing can be reproduced. In other words, they want to confirm the binary they share with their users was built using the corresponding source code and that fact can be verified. Shipping a pre-made, generic binary, does not allow a distribution to confirm their software builds are reproducible.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Proxmox 6.2 "Virtual Environment"
Proxmox is a commercial company which offers specialized products based on Debian. The company has launched Proxmox Virtual Environment version 6.2 which is based on Debian 10.4 "Buster". The release announcement covers the highlights of the new version which include updates to the kernel and ZFS support. "We are proud to announce the general availability of our virtualization management platform Proxmox VE 6.2. It's built on Debian Buster 10.4 and a 5.4 long-term Linux kernel, QEMU 5.0, LXC 4.0, ZFS 0.8.3, Ceph 14.2.9 (Nautilus), and ZFS 0.8.3. This release brings a built-in validation of domains for Let's Encrypt TLS certificates via the DNS-based challenge mechanism, full support for up to eight corosync network links, support for Zstandard for Backup/Restore, and a new LDAP sync for users and groups and full support for API tokens. Countless bugfixes and smaller improvements are included as well, see the full release notes." Further information on the new version and upgrade instructions can be found in the release announcement.
Q4OS 3.11
Q4OS is a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed to offer classic-style user interface (Trinity) or the more modern Plasma desktop. The project's latest version, Q4OS 3.11, offers several package upgrades and introduces new dedicated installers for the Firefox and Palemoon web browsers. The release announcement offers further details: "A significant update to Q4OS 3 Centaurus LTS is immediately available for download. The new 3.11 series receives all the fixes and goodies from the recent Debian Buster 10.4 update, critical security and bug fixes and brings several Q4OS specific improvements. Most importantly, the Q4OS Software centre applications list has got a bunch of new items. National keyboard layout configuration has been enhanced. In addition to the above, Q4OS 3.11 brings other exciting enhancements, such as dedicated installers for Firefox 76 and Palemoon browsers as well as cumulative upgrade covering all changes since the previous stable version of Q4OS 3 Centaurus."
Kali Linux 2020.2
Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution with a collection of security and forensics tools. The project's latest release makes it easier for users to access PowerShell, updates themes for KDE Plasma, and the size requirements for the distribution's ARM-build SD cards has been increased from 8GB to 16GB. "A while ago, we put PowerShell into Kali Linux's network repository. This means if you wanted PowerShell, you had to install the package as a one off by doing 'sudo apt install -y powershell'. We now have put PowerShell into one of our (primary) metapackages, kali-linux-large. This means, if you choose to install this metapackage during system setup, or once Kali is up and running (sudo apt install -y kali-linux-large), if PowerShell is compatible with your architecture, you can just jump straight into it (pwsh). PowerShell isn't in the default metapackage (that's kali-linux-default), but it is in the one that includes the default and many extras, and can be included during system setup." Additional information and screenshots of the new KDE Plasma themes can be found in the distribution's release announcement.
Kali Linux 2020.2 -- The live desktop
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Finnix 120
After a 5-year hiatus, the Finnix distribution has come to life once more with a release of version 120. Finnix is a Debian-based live Linux CD made for system administrators and designed to manipulate hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, and rebuild boot records. The new version is the project's first release for the x86_64 architecture: "Finnix 120 released. That's right: after a 5-year hiatus, Finnix - the live CD for system administrators and the oldest live CD in production - is back to celebrate its 20-year anniversary in 2020 with Finnix 120. Finnix 120 is a complete overhaul, with a number of major changes (as well as too many minor changes to enumerate): Finnix 120 is now a native 64-bit amd64 userland and kernel system; both BIOS and UEFI booting are now available, with Secure Boot; hundreds of new utility packages have been added; automatic setup attempts of complex block device layouts have been removed in favor of management via udisksctl with tab-completion; other legacy features and boot modes have been discontinued or are no longer supported, in favor of core USB/CD booting...." Read the release announcement and release notes for more information.
UBports 16.04 OTA-12
The UBports team has published an update to their mobile operating system. The new version, 16.04 OTA-12 introduces a new version of the Lomiri (formerly Unity8) user interface and Mir now supports working with Wayland clients. "The headline feature of this new release is our import of Canonical's final changes to Unity8. This is a transition that started in April of 2019 and has brought many new features. As an Ubuntu Touch user, you'll be seeing the effects of the revision right away -- the Ubuntu Touch 'home screen', the Unity8 Dash, has now been replaced by a blank background, with the Drawer serving as the new app list. The new version of Unity8 performs extensive self-tests, helping us to avoid introducing new bugs or triggering old ones again. Unity8 is now called Lomiri, though the code naming is only being updated slowly to reflect this. Most importantly for us, we upgraded from Mir 0.24, released back in 2015, to Mir 1.2, released in 2019. This newer version of Mir features support for Wayland clients!" Further details can be found in the project's release announcement.
BackBox Linux 7
BackBox Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed to perform penetration tests and security assessments. The distribution's latest release is BackBox 7 which is based on Ubuntu's 20.04 long-term support release. The distribution now features version 5.4 of the Linux kernel and Xfce 4.14. "The BackBox Team, ten years after its first release, is happy to announce the new major release of BackBox Linux, version 7. As usual, this major release includes many updates. These include new kernel, updated tools and some structural changes with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. What's new: Updated Linux Kernel 5.4. Updated desktop environment. Updated hacking tools. Updated ISO Hybrid with UEFI support." Further details, including minimal system requirements, can be found in the project's release announcement.
BackBox 7 -- Running the Xfce desktop
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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: 1,979
- Total data uploaded: 31.8TB
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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) |
The source of your web browser package
In our Questions and Answers article this week we talked about why distributions would provide their own builds of Firefox rather than simply redistributing Mozilla's binary package of the web browser. Many packages, particularly popular ones like Firefox, can be installed through several methods and we would like to know how you get your web brwoser installed.
Do you install your web browser through your distribution's traditional package manager or through a portable package like Flatpak or Snap? Do you build your browser from source code, use a PPA, download the browser as a binary from its upstream website?
You can see the results of our previous poll on using screen sharing applications in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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The source of your web browser package
| My distro's default repository: | 1395 (76%) |
| A third-party/PAA repository: | 159 (9%) |
| A portable package (Flatpak/Snap): | 41 (2%) |
| Generic binary from upstream: | 138 (8%) |
| I build it from source code: | 32 (2%) |
| Other: | 51 (3%) |
| Unsure: | 23 (1%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 25 May 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 • Fedora 32 (by Mike on 2020-05-18 00:24:15 GMT from United States)
Montana State University puts out Montana Linux (no, not Hannah Montana Ubuntu ), but a remix of Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux. It reminds me of the old Korora Project as it has a lot of extra repo's available by default such as Chrome, wine, Adobe, Rawhide, RPMFusion, etc. It's the first Fedora distro I've used since Korora went belly-up and it's
my daily driver now and I've been distro hopping and testing various distros since Debian 2. It's worth taking a look at. Available at https://img.cs.montana.edu/linux/montanalinux/
2 • Fedora (by Andy Prough on 2020-05-18 01:19:59 GMT from United States)
Ever since the convergence of Fedora and Ubuntu on a single DE and systemd, there's been hardly anything to differentiate them, except that Ubuntu has more and better apps and has ZFS. I'm trying to think of a use I would have for it. I tried it a few years ago and kind of liked it, but battling with Gnome which kept killing the extensions I needed for a sane desktop was not worth the trouble.
3 • Fedora (by César on 2020-05-18 01:42:23 GMT from Chile)
Hello!
I install Fedora 32 in my PC, but with Mate Desktop, and works good, stable and 600 Mb RAM in idle, with Opera use 900 Mb RAM +-, DNF Dragora for the packages management. I install Visual Studio Code (PHP & HTML) and XAMPP (MariaDB) for development, without problems or freezes.
Works fine, stable and fast.
In other hand, i really sad for the bad news of TrueOS, i remember when born as PCBSD, with the goal of make FreeBSD usable and friendly, but their project is discontinue, really sad.
Greetings from Santiago de Chile.
4 • trueos shutdown (by john on 2020-05-18 01:47:35 GMT from Republic of Moldova)
Now it is clear why project trident switched to void,
they were flying a sinking ship,
it is sad though that ghostbsd wasted time to switch from freebsd base to trueos,
will they still be on truenas, or will switch to freebsd ?
5 • Browser source (by DaveW on 2020-05-18 02:24:21 GMT from United States)
My normal browser is Firefox, the default version from the OS. However, I also occasionally use Brave, which is maintained from their repository.
6 • Fedora Jam (by the Marquis de Sade on 2020-05-18 02:39:27 GMT from United States)
For all the musicians out there, I'd like to give a quick shoutout to Fedora Jam. Was in danger of being dropped from the Fedora Labs list, but Erich Eickmeyer (the guy who saved Ubuntu Studio) gave it life and is promising more for F33.
Not sure what happens with Red Hat deprecating KDE, but I'm feeling good about what Erich and his team are doing. It's nice for Linux-based audio and video artists to have a RPM option.
Want to also give props to Planet CCRMA. We're lucky to have so many choices.
7 • Thoughts on Fedora (by randomly generated entity on 2020-05-18 02:47:55 GMT from United States)
I've been running Fedora for years now on my test-bed machine, though rarely for anything but testing as I'm not a Gnome person. Also, as the owner of an almost-obsolete Nvidia graphics card (GT 240), I've found that Fedora has been the leader in completely dropping support, while most other distros have not. It was always a pain to set up via RPM Fusion or Copr, but it's been impossible now for a few versions, which I find unfortunate for a distro that has the resources that Fedora does.
It's a fine distro overall though I suppose, especially if one likes Gnome and has relatively new hardware and a speedy internet connection. While DNF is powerful and versatile, it uses curl, which does not play nicely with throttled wifi, as my Verizon plan becomes once I burn through the first 15GB/month. Lots of timed-out tries and fails retrieving packages, sometimes forcing me to use wget to manually grab 'em and put 'em in the correct slot in the maze of DNF's /var/cache folders. This could so easily be fixed, couldn't it? Arch also suffers from this but recovers more gracefully, wasting less bandwidth (and can be configured to use wget or aria2 easily).
One last gripe, related to this week's poll: if you use Mozilla's "generic" binary for Firefox, as I do, you'll have trouble using the Gnome extensions web site to install extensions. Maybe this happens even with their package, I'm not sure, but even with all hoops jumped through you'll get a native host connector error unless you manually symlink /usr/lib64/mozilla/native-messaging-hosts to /usr/lib/mozilla/native-messaging-hosts. A known bug apparently, never fixed for this specific scenario at least. It's rather important too, as Gnome Software no longer lets you search and install extensions.
So... Fedora's not my cup of tea. Maybe it would be if I liked Gnome, fit their use case better hardware and preference-wise, and didn't need so many extensions to make it bearable. On the other hand, I've had great experiences in the past with the KDE spin, back when I could use the Nvidia driver anyway. Nouveau just ain't there yet, not on this hardware. Hard lock-ups every time, just when you least expect 'em.
8 • Fedora 32 (by crimson_king on 2020-05-18 03:38:17 GMT from Brazil)
With the GStreamer H.264 plugin available since Fedora 31, we can play .mp4 videos without needing to add RPM Fusion. It doesn't work with Firefox, as Firefox doesn't use GStreamer, but it works with GNOME Web, which is what I use when I need to play such videos online.
I couldn't reproduce Joshua's language tools problem. I use Portuguese (Brazil) and English (US). Only the localization packages for Brazilian portuguese were not installed automatically, so I had to install them myself with GNOME Software.
With only 120 GB of SSD storage, the automatic partitioning Anaconda performs makes my home partition too small (~30 GB), while the root partition is too big (~60 GB). I always run out of space on the home partition with this setup. However, after discovering Anaconda's manual partitioning functionality, it was easy to customize it, while leaving everything else from the automatic setup untouched. I even changed the LVM group name while at it.
I like its vanilla GNOME approach, I think it's more beautiful and consistent. Once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts or gestures, it's much faster than switching between icons on a sidebar/taskbar. To be efficient with GNOME you have to make heavier use of workspaces, to avoid cluttering your current workspace with too many windows.
Last, but not least, I can install things like 'composer', 'nodejs' (LTS) and 'youtube-dl' from the repository. Unlike Ubuntu, Fedora updates its packages regularly.
9 • TrueOS (by Дмитрий on 2020-05-18 06:08:34 GMT from Russia)
I hope TrueOS takes Lumina with it.
10 • @ Fedora 32 (by crimson_king) (by whoKnows on 2020-05-18 12:36:54 GMT from Switzerland)
"With only 120 GB of SSD storage, the automatic partitioning Anaconda performs makes my home partition too small (~30 GB), while the root partition is too big (~60 GB). I always run out of space on the home partition with this setup."
That was highly probable done on purpose so one can add a second user account if needed.
An installer can't predict how much space different users will actually need and often not even a system administrator can do it.
One could change the size of partitions once the OS is installed and one's missing space, but there is much easier way to get extra space if suddenly needed: simply make a new “archive” folder in root, take the ownership and set the needed permissions and make a symbolic link in your home. Done.
11 • Browser choice (by namemandatory on 2020-05-18 12:49:09 GMT from United States)
No matter as long as the browser browses. Right now Firefox from the repositories, Chrome and Opera from their PPAs.
12 • OS branded firefox (by Pikolo on 2020-05-18 13:24:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
Distrowatch missed the key reason for distro-specific builds of firefox - search engine revenue! This is the main source of income for most distros, as they get paid by... Yahoo(Linux Mint had a long term deal with them) or duckduckgo to be the default in a certain distro
13 • Fedora (by systemdfanboy on 2020-05-18 13:33:56 GMT from United States)
"Ever since the convergence of Fedora and Ubuntu on a single DE and systemd,"
What drugs are you on, I want some! No wait...
14 • Fedora (by systemdfanboy on 2020-05-18 13:39:12 GMT from United States)
@2 post @13 was directed for you, I forgot to reply in the comment.
15 • Vote (by Friar Tux on 2020-05-18 13:52:52 GMT from Canada)
I voted the distro's default as it really doesn't matter to me so long as the browser browses (@11). I do use Brave browser occasionally (*.deb install version). While I don't mind the Flatpak versions, I find a lot of them seem to be missing options/actions that are available in the repository, or *.deb versions. (I also find, in most cases, that the AppImage format seems to work better, and be more complete, than either Snap or Flatpak, but that may just be me (or my dumputer). Anyway, I use Firefox as my main browser and Brave as my secondary. That combo seems to work beautifully for me.
16 • Browser source (by Jesse on 2020-05-18 14:08:32 GMT from Canada)
!2: "Distrowatch missed the key reason for distro-specific builds of firefox - search engine revenue!"
You don't need to build the web browser from source to add branding and customize search engine settings. This is a run-time configuration, not a build-time configuration. Distros don't need their own Firefox package to set up search engine deals.
17 • @13, and Brave and other browsers (by Andy Prough on 2020-05-18 14:58:04 GMT from United States)
@13 "systemdfanboy" - I'm assuming yours is a joke post? Ubuntu developed and supbsequently gave up on both upstart init system and Unity desktop, and moved to systemd and Gnome some years ago.
Separately, regarding Brave, Waterfox, Vivaldi, Palemoon, and other browsers, MX Linux offers a one-click install for them from the MX Package Installer. There's no reason to go out and get installers from websites, as MX either builds each browser or optimizes its installation.
18 • browser choice (by harbl on 2020-05-18 15:41:24 GMT from Philippines)
The only time I noticed Firefox being different in the official repository was when I tried Linux Mint, where it takes extra steps to add Google to the browser's search engine integration. Even then, I still went with the repository anyway because it was less trouble installing it that way. However, the one time I needed to install a browser using the binaries from the website was for Seamonkey. I use Seamonkey as a secondary browser for niche cases where the site I visit happens to have Flash content, and I don't want Flash active on my primary browser. For some reason, the Seamonkey from the repository couldn't load Flash content, but it works with the binary from the website, so that's the setup I rolled with. Looking at Jesse's response in this article, I guess what I should've done was leave a feedback on the distro's forums or something where they might've been able to fix it.
19 • BackBox Linux 7 (by DistroScreens on 2020-05-18 16:07:58 GMT from Singapore)
BaxBox Linux is good as a penetration testing distribution & as an daily driver operating systems. Everything works out of the box with a decent Xfce experience.
20 • Browser builds (by barnabyh on 2020-05-18 16:09:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ubuntuzilla's .deb files for repackaged Mozilla builds of Seamonkey and Firefox.
I have to second the Firefox / Brave combo. Since being weaned of Chromium as it's always out of date in Debian and related distro repositories I discovered Brave as the better Chrome based browser. Does everything Chromium does without the syncing and more privacy features. Although with all the suppressive add-ons I had in Chromium not sure that matters. It was pretty locked down, to the extent that many sites would not work anymore.
21 • @1 - Montana Linux (by OstroL on 2020-05-18 16:41:38 GMT from Poland)
Thank you for the info. Found the distro creator's web site. Quite interesting. Downloaded Fedora release 33 (Rawhide) KDE version, default of the Montana Linux. The most interesting thing is that the creator of it doesn't name it as Montana Linux, but leaves the Fedora name. Only the iso is named as ML-F33-0506. He also includes scripts to create your own live iso. I'll download other DEs check the rest. The KDE version is excellent. Firefox starts practically immediately, for example. And, Chrome too!
Thank you again.
22 • Browsers (by Cheker on 2020-05-18 17:27:23 GMT from Portugal)
I use Brave on both Manjaro and Q4OS. On Manjaro it's actually brave-bin, which comes from AUR. I think the reason for this was that I felt the main one was too far behind. On Q4, it comes from it's own repo/PPA
23 • Browsers (by Dan on 2020-05-18 20:01:15 GMT from United States)
I'm probably in the minority, but the browser I use the most is Epiphany (WEB). My favorite desktop environment is Gnome, and Epiphany is the default browser for Gnome.
24 • Browsers (by hotdiggettydog on 2020-05-18 20:23:29 GMT from Canada)
I use mostly third party repositories and the default repositories for Firefox.
I used to like Seamonkey but have no need for the suite.
I like Brave and Vivaldi. Both have available ppa.
Min browser is pretty sweet and fast. Sadly no ppa.
TrueOS folding? That's too bad. Found it quite useable for a BSD.
25 • Browsers & Fedora (by M.Z. on 2020-05-18 21:41:24 GMT from United States)
I always go with the version of Firefox shipped by my distro for most of my browsing. I do use often use Vivaldi I got from their website via a .deb, so repos + upstream binary = other for me.
As for Fedora, well I don't really want to try it again given how it tended to get buggy on my the last couple of times I ran it. In my experience Mageia is a much more reliable RPM cousin of Fedora & if I want something a bit more cutting edge it's close cousin PCLinuxOS fits the bill well enough for me.
26 • Fedora 32 (by penguin386 on 2020-05-18 22:12:09 GMT from United States)
I tried Fedora 32 on my older Dell laptop. I considered using as the main OS on my laptop, but I ran into problems with the Synaptics touchpad. No driver support. Older versions of Fedora had Synaptics touchpad support, but not this one. The mouse/touchpad cursor would jump around at times making it difficult to use. It was especially noticeable with scrollbars. So, I gave up and switched to LMDE4 as my main laptop OS.
I also tried the Fedora 32 LXDE spin in a KVM/QEMU virtual machine. It works very well and it's fast. No touchpad problems running it in a virtual machine. So for now, I'll be running Fedora 32 virtually instead of natively.
27 • @7 and wireless ISP (by RJA on 2020-05-18 22:54:05 GMT from United States)
This problem appears to be common, despite an indication of bars, possibly even with still a strong enough signal, the OS reports having no internet at all and that would cause a failure.
I see that a lot with my phone! Chrome would keep saying that I have zero internet.
-RJA
28 • Browser package (by Arthur on 2020-05-18 23:25:08 GMT from Australia)
I use the SUSE Firefox package, it does some magic to make it use the KDE file picker which has image thumbnails which firefox usually lacks on Linux.
29 • Deepin, Extix 20.5 (by namemandatory on 2020-05-19 00:09:27 GMT from United States)
For anyone interested in the newest Deepin and would like to try it live, Extix 20.5 is quite good. Even runs well on VBox, which is not easy with DDE. Note that once it's installed it identifies itself on the boot-splash as UOS, which is China's hope for a Windows-less future. It's based in Wuhan, so beware of viruses.:-)
30 • TrueOS (by Mr.Bob on 2020-05-19 00:39:44 GMT from Mexico)
This will get a lot of hate but.....I'm glad that the dumpster fire known as TrueOS is finished. What an absolute debacle and mess of a once great OS. Adios muchacho.
Plenty of other BSD's, real BSD's to take its place and do a much better job. There is no place for sentimentality in the Linux/Unix world.
As for which browser? I use IceCat....free of the telemetry B.S. which Firefox has in it.
31 • browsers (by zephyr on 2020-05-19 01:25:36 GMT from United States)
@ 23 Dan: Epiphany is a great choice for a lightweight and stable browser. Used default in the install of CROWZ and STAR Linux with Devuan.
32 • Tried installing Fedora 32 (by Reuben on 2020-05-19 01:47:28 GMT from United States)
I tried to install Fedora 32, but got frustrated with the partitioning. First, what exactly does automatic partitioning do? It wasn't clear from the installer, so I selected custom. It crashed a couple of times. The crashes seemed to happen when I removed a mount point. Then it was insisting that I have a bios partition even though I have a UEFI system.
33 • the strange choices distros make (by Jake74 on 2020-05-19 02:12:33 GMT from New Zealand)
Interesting that Linux Mint had a deal with Yahoo on the search. I had been wondering why of all search engines, they would default to Yahoo. I anyway post-install first customize FireFox with add-ons for privacy and the search / homepage settings. I guess most people don't and that is what they counted on.
So mainly I'm a Mint user, but Manjaro is nice. Very nice, especially with the community edition Cinnamon. Something went wrong with the latest 20.0 release because I tried to install it and it went nowhere. Then I recalled seeing a set of all new ISOs tagged 20.0.1 - and that worked great.
And then in Manjaro I found an unexpected oddity. Under "Office" there was no LibreOffice at all, but a lone entry for "Microsoft Office Online." In a LINUX? Really? First thing I killed (with great zeal I must admit).
And then LibreOffice had 6.3 and 6.4, which was confusing, but why run last week's model? 6.4 it was.
34 • TrueOS and GhostBSD (by Ankleface Wroughlandmire on 2020-05-19 04:23:46 GMT from Ecuador)
@4 Good point about GhostBSD and their TrueOS base. But it looks like it's a non-issue:
https://forums.ghostbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=1610
> We still continue the current direction we are on right now, there is no major change coming. GhostBSD does not depend on TrueOS since 19.09. The project that we depend on is FreeBSD and OpenRC.
35 • Fedora Workstation (by Kanwar on 2020-05-19 05:06:49 GMT from Australia)
I know this is a flame-bait of sorts (it always is) bit all these "workstation" distros should be desktop-agnostic unless they customize the default desktop offering heavily.
For instance, whether it's Ubuntu or Fedora, the default GNOME is basically stock GNOME with a theme pasted on it. So why is it necessary to bake one in? During installation, the user can choose the desktop of choice, isn't it?
It baffles me that despite open-source being about choice, it is being limited by more and more distributions.
36 • @35 (by Arky on 2020-05-19 07:33:55 GMT from France)
@35 simple enough, the installation process is already tedious as it is. Desktop environments can take time to download, and if they're all included, the iso might be heavier. Better choose before the download.
If you have fiber connection, it may comes in split seconds, but remember most of the world is yet to get 1Gb in the course of 5-10 minutes if the moon is aligned with the sun and Earth.
37 • the strange choices distros make (by James on 2020-05-19 10:07:51 GMT from United States)
33 • the strange choices distros make
I don't know for sure, but I don't see the choices as all that strange. Developers need to make money, and that is not always easy with open source. When is the last time you donated to a project? How much did you donate? The same as buying some closed source software would have cost you?
I understand why they make deals with companies like Yahoo. MONEY!
38 • TrueOS Shuts Down (by bruce on 2020-05-19 16:29:13 GMT from United States)
I hate to see a project die, but I can't say I'm surprised. The BSD community seems pretty antagonistic to desktop use, and it's not easy to swim against the current.
The biggest problem with Unix has always been the luddites. Between 1980 and 2000 I worked in several *ix shops that migrated to WindwsNT just so we could modernize. These days, I expect that they switch to Linux for much the same reasons.
39 • Iceweasel (by sananab on 2020-05-19 16:30:30 GMT from Canada)
Remember Iceweasel, when Mozilla decided that their source code was open but their trademarks needed to be protected?
40 • @35, @36 (by Mr. Opinionated on 2020-05-19 18:33:38 GMT from United States)
@35, @36 Another reason to prefer desktop-at-download is to inform the distro builders which environment is actually wanted. Gnome 3 has given me the screaming heebie-jeebies every time I have tried it, yet that seems to be the one most promoted.
I want them to know that I like the straightforward simplicity of Xfce. They don't get that sort of feedback with a take-Gnome-now-and-add-what-you-actually-want-later environment.
41 • Browsers (by cykodrone on 2020-05-19 22:11:09 GMT from Austria)
I am so sad now, I just new tab--'about:config'---searched 'telemetry' in TB, you would think they would shut that off in what is supposed to be the most private browser on the planet. There is no pure privacy anymore, even if you try to open a social media account anonymously, eventually they will hold it hostage until you cough up something that definitely ties it to you, like a phone number, etc (that is their ultimate goal, rope you in to using their app, so they can data-mine your smartphone, major sites despise PC browser users now, especially those that frequently clear their history and cookies). The days of opening sock-puppet accounts with disposable email addresses are long gone. If you truly want to stay anonymous, don't use ANYTHING that connects to the internet.
I answered default repo for the poll question, but it may be time to dump Spyrefox again. Oh, before now, I used a combo of downloads, foreign repos, and default repos. Add 'combo' to future poll questions if it applies?
42 • choices, (by isitjustme on 2020-05-19 23:56:37 GMT from United States)
@35 Distrowatch shows 277 active distros, with several of offering choices of desktops, etc. But inevitably, someone will be complaining about the lack of choices. Just another day in LinuxWorld.
Strictly, a workstation is a type of PC. A workstation distro is meant for such machines, as is. It's not a DIY project. Regardless, if what you want is a net installer or a humongous ISO providing all possible available desktops with whatever packages and features you desire, why are you looking at Fedora, or Ubuntu? And why do you expect them to provide you with something just because you wish it? There are plenty of distros providing plenty of choices. What's wrong with those? They don't call themselves workstations?
@40 The easiest way of inform developers what environment is wanted is to download and use a distro providing such an environment. Look at the top 10 ranked distros on DW will tell. Yep, people like those. You don't even need to be a developer to figure that out.
43 • Web browser (by Francesco Turco on 2020-05-20 11:54:34 GMT from Italy)
I use qutebrowser on Gentoo Linux, so I could have selected both "My distro's default repository" and "I build it from source code".
44 • Browsers (by Wally on 2020-05-20 16:30:22 GMT from United States)
I package palemoon and Waterfox browsers for my distros' package managers for myself. I also use my distro's Firefox builds. And unfortunately, I've had to start using Chromium because webrtc stuff really only works in that browser.
45 • Browsers (by aguador on 2020-05-20 20:41:56 GMT from Spain)
I prefer using my distro's build of browsers as I trust the care the Mageia packager put into building everything from source. However, with the changes in Firefox that have rendered iit less useful for me, I have resorted to installing the binary of Basilisk which has all the features I need except, at the moment, sound WebRTC support, for which I guiltily use the non-free Vivaldi for its privacy and interface features.
It is a shame that Mozilla chose to dumb down the FF interface or it would still be my daily driver.
46 • Fedora, DWW opinion poll (by Stefan on 2020-05-21 21:47:54 GMT from Brazil)
I stay within the 9 or 10% of DWW readers who install Web-browsers from third-party repositories. By the way, I do not touch Firefox anymore, always replacing it by "Waterfox Classic", a lighter and faster version of that application. Being much inferior to Waterfox, even less configurable than it, Firefox does not make sense as the default browser of just about every Linux distro under the Sun.
In my opinion, some developers did a very bad software selection. They chose "mainstream" applications instead of "suitable" applications. Another example is Thunderbird instead of Claws-Mail or Sylpheed. Sometimes, WICD is preferable to the ubiquitous Network-Manager. But I know it's impossible to please everybody...
As for Fedora 32, I cannot emit an opinion since I still use version 31, which is less buggier than version 30. In reality, my main distro is MX Linux, because I hate systemd, but Fedora XFCE is my wife's distro; so I like to test it in a USB-connected HDD just to please her. (O.K., just to find bugs and tell her: "Look! Do you really wanna keep using this f***ing system?" :)
47 • Waterfox, @46 (by Nickthenose on 2020-05-21 23:56:08 GMT from United States)
Curiosity took me to the Waterfox site, where I came across this:
"If you’d really like to help Waterfox out, please consider using the default search (Bing) with adblock disabled on it, it would be such a huge show of support! The default search is fairly privacy friendly."
Are they kidding? Searching with Bing is like driving with eyes closed. No adblock? Not on your life! I might take it for a spin just to see, but they ain't getting that kind of support.
48 • Waterfox browser and Bing search engine (by Stefan on 2020-05-22 00:28:55 GMT from Brazil)
@47 (Nickthenose):
If you are so afraid of Bing spying on your online activities, simply use another search engine... I also do not use Bing. My choice is DuckDuckGo (or Google, when DuckDuckGo fails to find out what I'm searching for).
In what concerns to Waterfox, I'm pretty sure you will love it. That browser is a gem. And maybe it's not a bad idea to use Bing sometimes "with adblock disabled" just to help Waterfox devs to make some money. They deserve every dollar they can get!
49 • Waterfox and Bing @48 (by Nickthenose on 2020-05-22 00:45:17 GMT from United States)
Not so much concerned with privacy. Just that Bing is really bad. Even DuckDuckGo seems to do better although it's searching blindly. But it does seem odd for a privacy focused browser to suggest Bing with no adblock and call it "fairly privacy friendly".
50 • Browsers and online security (by Stefan on 2020-05-22 01:20:46 GMT from Brazil)
@49 (Nickthenose):
You're wright for being cautious and not to blindly trust Waterfox developers. But I think that, nowadays, the biggest privacy issue is not the browser security configuration itself. Since the vast majority of websites require JavaScript, and use cookies to track us, we have almost no privacy at all. Look at YouTube, for example...
And worse: Due to the American antiterrorism laws, mail servers based in the U.S.A. (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) are scanned by agents at NSA and FBI. Even Skype is monitored... Yes, Big Brother is watching us!
51 • Firefox Security / Privacy Hardening Strategy & Tactics (by David on 2020-05-22 01:22:33 GMT from United States)
@41 @46 @47 @48
From GitHub - https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/ -
"Firefox Configuration Hardening"
"A user.js configuration file for Mozilla Firefox designed to harden browser settings and make it more secure.
This is a default template with every possible hardening measure enforced. See the relaxed branch for a variant providing more usability."
Also, two informative sites that offer instruction relative to disabling all telemetry, canvas fingerprinting, disk caching, prefetching, and many privacy settings that I never knew existed until I followed the instructions on both of these sites.
https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/firefox-hardening-guide/
For example -
"Disable ALL Telemetry Features – These are features that explicitly collect data.
To Disable All Telemetry – Type “telemetry” into the search bar. A large number of settings will pop up in the search. Search for the following and set them all to false:
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry
browser.pingcentre.telemetry
devtools.onboarding.telemetry-logged
media.wmf.deblacklisting-for-telemetry-in-gpu-process
toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.bhrping.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.firstshutdownping.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.hybridcontent.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.newprofileping.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.unified
toolkit.telemetry.updateping.enabled
toolkit.telemetry.shutdownpingsender.enabled
These changes prevent all kinds of metadata from being stored about your connection both locally and by Mozilla."
It takes a little time & study to figure out how extensively you want to take these steps...or not.
JMHO
52 • Firefox Security / Privacy Hardening Strategy & Tactics (by Stefan on 2020-05-22 01:39:41 GMT from Brazil)
@51:
Great tips! Thanks a lot, David!
Tomorrow, I will certainly change those configuration settings on Waterfox. Don't forget to disable WebRTC, too.
53 • Firefox Security & Privacy (by David on 2020-05-22 02:13:10 GMT from United States)
@52
Thanks to you, as well.
I used Waterfox briefly some yars ago, but I reverted to Firefox because of its support infrastructure & massive extensions library. I seem to recall that it was a one-man support & development team at the time.
I forgot to mention, for readers that are interested, these settings can be found within about:config.
WebRTC - Already disabled - just one of the many settings that I isolated & disabled with guidance from these sites. As I said, you'll find that you can disable settings that you may have never been aware of before.
I use Chromium as well. Much the same privacy & security hardening can be achieved with Chromium/Chrome within chrome://flags. The verbiage is different, and I've had to web search the terminology more carefully to get it right, but it's easier to correct a mistake with the "Reset All" button at the top of the page. Be sure to Relaunch after you change settings, to get an advisory of any changes that may compromise your security.
Lastly, I'd suggest that you check out an extension called Trace that offers a full suite of easily adjustable security settings., and it is available for both browsers.
JMHO
54 • Waterfox packaging @48 or anyone (by Nickthenose on 2020-05-22 03:02:21 GMT from United States)
Tried both Waterfox classic and current. Nice browsers, but don't see so much difference from Firefox, especially after hardening (Per @51, David). I prefer Brave as a compromise.
What I find interesting is the packaging. Downloading a tarball, I expected to have to compile it, but it works just by extracting the files in /opt and adding to the menu. (Ubuntu as well as Arch) I've been trying snaps and flatpaks. Snaps work better for me, but neither is very convincing. Yet this browser is a small download, and it works across different distros. I tried the appimage for Waterfox, but that was different and didn't work well. Do you, or anyone know what the packaging is?
55 • Bing (by OstroL on 2020-05-22 07:44:05 GMT from Poland)
I am not sure, if Bing is bad, any more. I bought a laptop for wife with Windows 10S, just because it has very nice screen and very light. I could change the Windows 10S to normal windows and install other web browsers. She'd been using Google as the search engine before on a Linux distro. I wanted to see how long she'd stay with Windows 10S and Bing. No complains, what so ever! She doesn't even remember/feel what OS and what web browser or what search engine she's using. This was done as an experiment, to see how far it'd go without complains. Few months going on now.
56 • bro (by fonz on 2020-05-22 09:00:58 GMT from Indonesia)
guess a ton of people prefer browsers from their repos, i voted for the upstream. my reasons for it is ive never had issues with generic builds from official sites. i also like having fewer updates and whatnots.
for those that like waterfox, id also suggest trying palemoon/basilisk as theyre trying hard to keep an updated browser that isnt really firefox anymore. waterfox may be dropped sooner or later, but palemoons still going strong. sure it may have a few bumps when dealing with sites that rely on gulag though. ive honestly dumped firefox ever since they went webaxed and honestly, sooner or later itll just become yet another chromium -_-
57 • Bing has its uses (by CS on 2020-05-22 15:57:27 GMT from United States)
Bing does a much worse job at filtering out torrent and putlocker search results than does Google. Bing is a great standby search engine for pirating stuff.
58 • Browsers, browsers, browsers... (by Stefan on 2020-05-22 20:34:37 GMT from Brazil)
@53 (David): "Lastly, I'd suggest that you check out an extension called Trace that offers a full suite of easily adjustable security settings., and it is available for both browsers."
__ Another very nice tip. Thank you, once again!
@54 (Nickthenose): "Tried both Waterfox classic and current. Nice browsers, but don't see so much difference from Firefox, especially after hardening (Per @51, David). I prefer Brave as a compromise."
__ Stability is paramount in Waterfox Classic. (I did not try the Current version, yet.) Brave was a little bit buggy when I tried it, almost two years ago. And neither Brave nor Firefox run as fast as Waterfox. Because I test software in a "pre-historic" PC based on an Intel Atom CPU with only 2GB of DDR3 RAM, I can feel a big difference between all those browsers in terms of speed. By the way, Otter Browser was the fastest, by far, and it renderizes graphics much better than the any other. Unfortunately, Otter cannot be used to see YouTube videos because it does not decode HTML5.
@56 (fonz): "for those that like waterfox, id also suggest trying palemoon/basilisk as theyre trying hard to keep an updated browser that isnt really firefox anymore. waterfox may be dropped sooner or later, but palemoons still going strong."
__ I have tried Pale Moon. Very good browser! But I use Waterfox just because it is more "Firefox-like" than Pale Moon. Some sites only decode HTML "correctly" when we use a browser based on one of these mainstream projects: Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. YouTube is one of those sites.
59 • Claws Mail (by cykodrone on 2020-05-22 22:39:26 GMT from Germany)
@46 Totally agree, I love Claws, and wish I had of tried it years earlier (was a Thunderbird sheeple), Claws is old school, it's to the point, and total USER control (the configuration options are insane, in a good way), lots of add-ons, etc. If you want bare bones, you got it, if you want pretty and flashy (and snoopy), you can have that too. THAT is the way all software should be. I so miss the days of yore, when everything wasn't ran through super computer servers running anti terrorism keyword sieves, and face recognition algorithms. :(
60 • @ 57 (by OstroL on 2020-05-23 05:59:12 GMT from Poland)
"Bing is a great standby search engine for pirating stuff."
Interesting! Could you explain how Bing pirates?
61 • @60 Bing and pirating (by Romulus on 2020-05-23 07:34:27 GMT from United States)
It's not that Bing pirates. It's that you get more results for pirated stuff when you search. Try it yourself. Search: "free downloads movies" in both Bing and Google and look at the results.
62 • Waterfox sold to System 1 (by Morton on 2020-05-23 09:57:48 GMT from Germany)
Waterfox is only a Firefox Quantum with the telemetry and 3rd party components stripped down or modified for their needs.
As here there are some people, who use the Waterfox because they consider it a better alternative to the Firefox, these people may be interested in the fact that Waterfox has been sold to 'System 1' company had previously acquired the search engine 'Startpage'. More on that here https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/14/waterfox-web-browser-sold-to-system1/ .
63 • Waterfox and AI algorithm (by Wicky Wox on 2020-05-23 16:14:25 GMT from Canada)
Waterfox, which one is true or false?
1) Is water over the fox?
2) Is a fox over water?
3) Is water evoparated?
4) Is fox running into the wood from the water-bank?
How the latest AI algorithm will gonna solve this.
64 • Basic browsing needs (by barnabyh on 2020-05-23 16:45:32 GMT from Germany)
For simple browsing there's also still browsers like dillo, links2 and various text mode browsers. For privacy, they filter a lot of shit out. Try them one day when you don't want Youtube and bells and whistles. Almost like Firefox in reader mode.
65 • waterfox - firefox hardening (by exomoon on 2020-05-24 14:54:31 GMT from Hungary)
@62 Thanks for the Waterfox news! system1.com lists waterfox; curious about what will come.
@51 Thx! Firefox Hardening looks useful.
Other:
Haiku and filesystems: ufs2, xfs (+ timeline set for Beta 2) - Waiting :)
66 • Faster Fox (by Verndog on 2020-05-24 15:16:20 GMT from United States)
Here's a link to make Firefox faster. I tried all the hacks. I like that Ghostery extension the best. Tells me what page is slowest to load. Disconnect is another interesting addon:
https://www.boxaid.com/blog/make-firefox-faster-by-editing-the-config-file/
67 • Firefox Privacy Settings & Browsers (by M.Z. on 2020-05-24 16:05:07 GMT from United States)
I like poking through Firefox on occasion to optimize my privacy, especially when setting up a new Distro install.
They've done a great job of building in some powerful tools which you can get to here:
about:preferences#privacy
I also recommend duck duck go privacy essentials, privacy badger, and uBlock Origin. I don't see why turning off anonymous data that Mozilla improve their browser does much good for the real problems, but you could turn telemetry off if you wanted to. The only other browser I've got much respect for is Vivaldi, but I don't like the Chrome based browser mono-culture that is starting to develop so I don't use them too much.
68 • TrueOS shuts down??!! (by dave the slave on 2020-05-24 16:28:43 GMT from United States)
Imagine my surprise!! Another confused project down the toilet. I predicted this the day they rebranded. So many devs bite off more than they can chew and there was zero reason for bogging themselves down with a custom desktop environment. What-- you're too good to use any of the zillion choices already available?? Gtfo here.
Number of Comments: 68
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| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
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| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
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| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
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| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
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DreamStudio
DreamStudio was an Ubuntu-based distribution containing tools to create stunning graphics, captivating videos, inspiring music, and professional websites. Some of the included and pre-configured applications include Cinelerra (a powerful non-linear video editor), Ardour (a professional digital audio workstation), CinePaint (a tool for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching), Blender (a 3D graphics application), Inkscape (a vector graphics editor), Synfig Studio (a vector-based 2D animation software), Kompozer (a complete web authoring system), and many others.
Status: Discontinued
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