 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 872, 29 June 2020 |
Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
When entering into the world of free and open source software it can be difficult to understand how open source licenses work. When one is accustomed to dealing with closed source software, controlled by one company, being introduced to an environment where anyone can modify and redistribute an operating system's components can seem quite foreign. This week we explore the topic of who controls access to the Linux kernel and its code in our Questions and Answers column. We also try to clear up some questions about open source library licensing with regards to popular desktop toolkits like Qt and GTK. First though we talk about GoboLinux, an unusual distribution that tries to reorganize the Linux filesystem and do away with the need for a traditional package manager. What do you think of GoboLinux's modular approach to filesystem organization? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. Then, in our News section, we discuss WireGuard support coming to OpenBSD and UBports starting to run on more mobile devices. We also talk about KISS getting new features and Fedora selecting a new default text editor and filesystem. We are also pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we're seeding. We wish you all a superb week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: GoboLinux 017
- News: OpenBSD adopts WireGuard, UBports coming to more devices, Fedora plans to set a default text editor, KISS getting new package manager
- Questions and answers: Controlling access to the kernel and understanding software development licenses
- Released last week: Linux Mint 20, Grml 2020.06
- Torrent corner: Bluestar, EasyOS, Grml, KDE neon, Linux Mint, Live Raizo, Nitrux, Q4OS, Redo Rescue, Rescuezilla, Robolinux
- Upcoming releases: Tails 4.8, openSUSE 15.2
- Opinion poll: The filesystem layout
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (19MB) and MP3 (14MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
GoboLinux 017
The GoboLinux project develops a distribution with an unusual goal: reorganizing the operating system's filesystem. The project introduces itself as follows:
GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy. In GoboLinux you don't need a package database because the filesystem is the database: each program resides in its own directory.
In other words, instead of a package manager placing executable files in /usr/bin, libraries in /usr/lib, and other resources in /usr/share, a program's files are all stored in one tree, such as /Programs/Firefox or /Programs/LibreOffice. This way the user, and package utilities, can remove software by deleting a single directory rather than keeping track of where individual files have been installed.
GoboLinux uses the the Awesome window manager, which provides a lightweight graphical interface. Version 017 of Gobo removes Python2 in favour of Python3, and also removes GTK2 for GTK3 on the ISO. Audio management is now handled by PulseAudio.
Gobo makes available one edition of the distribution for 64-bit (x86_64) computers. The download is 1.9GB in size. Booting from this media brings up a series of text-based menus. These menus ask us to select one of six languages from a list, then select our keyboard's layout. With these questions answered we are presented with a text console where we are automatically logged into the root account. A message appears above the command line prompt which lets us know we can run "startx" to open a graphical user interface. The text also explains how to launch the system installer from either the command line or from the Awesome window manager.
Opening the Awesome environment places a panel at the top of the screen. We can find an application menu in the upper-left corner and the system tray in the upper-right. The wallpaper is mostly black with abstract designs drawn on it. The background appears to be dynamically drawn rather than a fixed image. The volume icon is interesting in that clicking on it changes the colour of the icon (toggling between green and red) and this appears to mute audio.
The application menu in the live environment contains very few entries. Most of these manage or adjust the Awesome session. I feel it worth noting that to customize Awesome we need to edit a text file, there isn't any point-and-click settings panel. There is a menu entry to open the Awesome manual. Trying to access the manual caused a window to open for a second, then immediately crash without showing the requested documentation or an error.
GoboLinux 017 -- The Awesome window manager
(full image size: 162kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
There are also some utilities such as the GParted partition manager and a terminal. I will talk about the included software more later, but almost everything included in the menu is intended to either manage Awesome or get the system ready to install Gobo on the hard drive.
Installing
The Gobo installer, when launched from Awesome, is a graphical desktop application. The installer does not have a method for managing partitions and if the installer cannot find a suitable partition for the operating system, the installer will ask us to launch a tool such as GParted or cfdisk to set up a new partition for it.
Assuming the installer finds a suitable partition it will ask which partition it should use for the root filesystem and if the partition should be formatted. Gobo appears only support the ext4 filesystem. We are given the option of creating a swap file. I skipped this step as I have a dedicated swap partition, but the installer does not provide an option for using the existing swap space. This meant I started my trial without swap space, but had the option of manually adding it later. The installer also does not appear to support keeping users' home directories on a separate partition.
The installer next lists all the packages that will be installed. We can uncheck boxes to exclude items we do not want. The list is quite long and it probably is not practical to go through it item-by-item. Most packages have a brief description next to them to help us figure out what we want, but a few do not. I opted to simply install all the packages which is the default behaviour.
The installer next walks us through installing the boot loader (and choosing where it should be placed), confirming our keyboard layout, the boot theme, and our clock's settings. Then we make up a root password and create one (or more) additional user accounts. I like being able to make multiple user accounts up front. The installer then showed me detailed progress reports as it copied files to my hard drive and reported it had successfully finished a short time later.
Early impressions
Gobo boots to a text console where we can sign into our account. The default approach with Gobo is to use the command line. While this will not be appealing to many people, it is light on resources. Users can access a graphical desktop by typing "startx" from the command line.
The console environment uses the zsh shell by default and includes the usual UNIX-style command line utilities. The man program is included but there are no manual pages, making it hard to get local help with the command line.
Included software
Once we launch the Awesome window manager we have access to a small collection of desktop software. Programs such as the Firefox browser, Audacity media player, and vim editor are on hand. Some system tools like GParted and the Htop process monitor are included too. While zsh is the default shell, others are available. The bash shell is included by default and other shells are in the project's software repository. The sudo utility is provided to help users perform administrative tasks. In the background we find Gobo uses the SysV init software and version 5.6.10 of the Linux kernel.
GoboLinux 017 -- Running the Firefox web browser
(full image size: 634kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)
Hardware
When Gobo is running just a text console it is pleasantly light on resources. The CPU pretty much sits idle and the system consumes 50MB of RAM. Even when logged into Awesome, the distribution uses a mere 150MB of memory and very little of the CPU. A full install takes about 6GB of disk space, which seems like a lot considering how few desktop tools are included. However, I believe much of the space is consumed by build tools as Gobo builds new software from source code. (More on installing software in a minute.)
I started running Gobo in a VirtualBox environment and, for the most part, the distribution ran well. It was a little slow to boot, but after that ran quickly. Sound, networking, and the desktop environment all worked. My one serious issue was I could not get the Awesome interface to resize. It was stuck at a low resolution and would not resize dynamically with the virtual machine's window. Awesome also does not appear to have a built-in tool to adjust the screen resolution which hampered my use of Gobo in the virtual environment.
Things went better when I switched over to running Gobo on my laptop. Audio and wireless networking functioned smoothly. The desktop used my full screen resolution. The distribution was still a little slow to boot, but ran well after that - with one exception which I am about to share.
Software management
The distribution uses a tool called Compile to download source code, build it and install it into a directory tree. Compile uses supplied build instructions, called recipes to figure out how to download and build software. According to the documentation, we can typically use "sudo Compile <package name>" to install new software. Building new packages from source code makes the process very slow as each package and its dependencies needs to be built from scratch. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a search feature built into Compile and I had to browse recipes on-line to find out what software was available.
Compile appears to clone an on-line repository of recipes like a ports tree on other distros. It took a long time just trying to get a copy of the repository. There was no sign of progress, even when Compile was run in verbose mode.
After trying six times and never getting a copy of the repository, despite having an active (and fast) Internet connection, I found Compile would always hang on cloning the Git repository. No data was being downloaded after the initial Git files were created. Even after several minutes, no new data was added to my repository tree. This doesn't doesn't appear to be an issue with Compile specifically as using the git command line tool would also hang trying to get the Recipes repository, and always stopped after downloading 112kB of the 474MB repository.
I tried downloading the git repository from another computer on the same network and the Recipes repository downloaded without any problems in a minute, so the issue was not the GitHub server or the local network.
Next I tried manually copying the recipes from my other computer to the Gobo system. With the recipes repository manually installed Compile no longer tried to download it. However, Compile would still hang when instructed to install software and it still showed no messages when run in verbose mode. In addition, there was no activity on the disk or network. The process monitor showed no activity from Compile. I tried installing multiple packages, all with the same result - nothing would happen and no error message was given.
On a related issue, when exploring large directories or sub-directories, my shell used a lot of disk activity just doing simple things like using cd or running pwd. This only happened in directories with many entries like /Programs or /Data/Compile/Recipes. When exploring directories with few entries the shell was immediately responsive and used almost no resources. I found this issue only happened when running the default zsh shell. Switching to bash removed the lock-up in large directories.
I had hoped running Compile again from bash would provide a solution to my package management problem, but it did not. Trying to run Compile, or git, on data that included a lot of files, caused the shell to hang.
Filesystem organization
Gobo's claim to fame isn't software management exactly, it is filesystem organization. Traditional Linux filesystems contain directories such as etc, usr, and home. Gobo names directories differently and the root filesystem contains directories called Data, Mount, Programs, System, and Users. This is nice in that it is more obvious what directories contain which resources.
Technically, the directories usr, etc, and so on still exist on a Gobo system. These legacy entries are simply hidden from the user. We can still cd into them, but do not see them in directory listings. Typically, the contents of these locations are symbolic links to Gobo's custom locations, though not always. For example, the /etc/passwd file, containing user account information still exists. However, the /etc/zshrc file is a symbolic link to /Programs/Scripts/Settings/zshrc. This hiding of traditional locations means the filesystem looks cleaner and is organized in a way which makes the contents of directories clearer to newcomers.
The irony here, to my mind, is only advanced Linux users are likely to ever use Gobo because it requires a more technical knowledge and experience to run. However, the people who will benefit from the reorganization of directories into clearly named modules are almost exclusively Linux newcomers.
Conclusions
Renaming directories is not the only strength Gobo offers. Modularly stored programs can be useful. It means we can easily see what programs are installed, which versions are available, and deleting programs is as easy as deleting their directory. In theory this makes the filesystem itself our package database. This is, to my mind, a neat idea.
However, I see a few issues with this approach. One, on the practical side, is I could not get the Compile tool to actually download and install any software. However, let's assume this is a rare quirk on my end and usually Compile works perfectly. Then we still have three main issues, as I see things.
First, Compile builds packages from source code and this is very slow. Most users do not want to wait around for a few hours while their web browser updates just so their underlying filesystem can be organized more modularly. I'm not saying the modular approach isn't appealing, just that the cost (compiling everything from scratch) is expensive. If Gobo had pre-built packages this would no longer be an issue.
Second, most modern package managers (such as DNF, APT, and pacman) do a good enough job that users are probably just as well off with them as with a modular filesystem that acts as a package database. These tools make running searches, removing old packages, and checking dependencies relatively painless and accomplish about the same result as Gobo's layout. There is an argument to be made that package managers add complexity to the system and removing them in favour of a new filesystem layout is better (more in line with the KISS philosophy). And I would agree with that idea, in theory, but I'm not sure Gobo's approach is practically better because....
Third, modern Linux distribution deal with tens of thousands of software packages. Gobo's modular approach (the filesystem is the package database) makes sense in small scale environments. But I'm not so sure it works practically on a system with 50,000 packages. There is no way I'm going to hunt down individual packages manually, modularly organized or not, on a modern distribution. The directory is too large. At best, I will use a command line string like "find /Programs -type d | grep -i falkon" to see if the Falkon browser is installed. At the end of the day, is that any better or worse than "dpkg -l | grep -i falkon" on a Debian-based system? Is "find /Data/Compile/Recipes -type d | grep -i supertux" really better than running "apt search supertux" from the user's perspective? I can see technical arguments for both sides, but ultimately, as a user, I want the tool that makes my life easier and my system faster to use.
All in all, I think what Gobo is doing is interesting. If nothing else it is an appealing experiment that provides an alternative approach and something to think about. Plus it makes the filesystem look cleaner and less arcane for newcomers. In my case, I found it was not a practical tool (at least when it came to package management), but I do like that the Gobo developers are thinking outside the box and offering a way to overhaul package management and the filesystem hierarchy.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a de-branded HP laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: Intel i3 2.5GHz CPU
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 700GB hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Wired network device: Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast
- Wireless network device: Realtek RTL8188EE Wireless network card
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Visitor supplied rating
GoboLinux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 4.3/10 from 3 review(s).
Have you used GoboLinux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
OpenBSD adopts WireGuard, UBports coming to more devices, Fedora plans to set a default text editor, KISS gets new package manager
Jason Donenfeld has announced that he and Matt Dunwoodie have added WireGuard, a small, fast VPN service, to the OpenBSD kernel. The new WireGuard implementation is expected to be available in OpenBSD 6.8. "I'm happy to announce that WireGuard has been merged into the OpenBSD kernel, with integration into userland as well. Matt Dunwoodie and I have been working on this for quite some time now, with at some point Matt even showing up at my door in Paris to push the effort further. This marks the culmination of quite a bit of effort, and certainly a multi-year project for Matt. I should also note that the upstreaming process to OpenBSD was extremely pleasant. We did three patch revisions, with useful feedback on each one and a very supportive community. I imagine that this work will ship with OpenBSD 6.8."
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People wishing to run a GNU/Linux operating system on their mobile devices are a little closer to that goal as UBports is making progress on multiple fronts. The project's latest newsletter mentions some work being done on specific ports: "Alfred reported progress with porting. A lot of new devices keep appearing. Builds are now on the server for many although with graphical support in the form of the installer not as yet. Galaxy Note 4, Xperia Performance and others are now up. Instead of individual branches under the names of those porting devices, everything now appears in a single channel. It is also immediately clear which version and architecture are involved, so it is much easier to understand and use. Erfan has done a lot more. Android 9 device names show up correctly on the push server. Kernel patches have been implemented to remedy the missing battery charge indicator on some devices. Brightness, time settings and other indicators have all seen fixes. Notkit has developed a working port for the F(x)tech device with the sliding keyboard! Marius has UT 'running' on his PineBook Pro although it is not usable at all at the moment. There is for example no mouse at all..."
There has also been progress in running UBports on a generic system image (GSI) which would open up possibilities for running UBports on many Android devices. A post on xda-developers discusses how a generic base can allow UBports to run on multiple devices.
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The Fedora distribution does not currently set a default text editor, leaving which editor to use up to either the user or whichever program is being run. This can result in some awkward moments when a tool, such as git, needs to pick a default editor for us when none is provided. Ben Cotton explains: "Fedora does not currently have a default terminal text editor, because
the $EDITOR environment variable is unset by default. But a common scenario where users wind up in a terminal text editor is when using 'git commit'. By default, git picks vi. You need to spend time learning how to use it, for even basic editing tasks. This increases the barrier to entry for those who are switching to Fedora and don't know how to use vi." The proposal suggests making Nano the default terminal editor as it is relatively straight forward to use and offers on-screen prompts.
Another proposal indicates Fedora 33 may ship with Btrfs as the default filesystem. This would allow users to make snapshots of their system prior to upgrades and expand storage across multiple disks with minimal effort.
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The KISS project is in the process of making some significant changes. The project is experimenting with a new package manager (written in C, rather than shell script), and two new desktop environments have been ported to KISS: "Dilyn Corner has successfully ported KDE to KISS! I mentioned this last month though it only recently reached a usable state. This is wonderful to see! LXQt comes to KISS: This is still in its early stages though Eudald Gubert Roldan has begun the work in porting LXQt to KISS." The KISS project is also being ported to ARMv7 which should allow the operating system to run on a range of low-power ARM devices.
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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) |
Controlling access to the kernel and understanding software development licenses
Protecting-the-kernel asks: I know that most Linux kernel development is done by large, for-profit companies. Who gets to decide whether a patch gets approved in the mainline kernel? It seems critical to me to prevent big corporations from driving the kernel towards their own interests. Linus Torvalds can't be approving every single patch that lands in the kernel so who controls access?
DistroWatch answers: There are a few answers to this question. The Linux kernel is huge, featuring millions of lines of code. No one person really audits the whole thing. Instead, components of the kernel are usually maintained by certain key, long-term developers. Generally a patch will get submitted by a developer (or company) to whomever is considered the maintainer for that section of the kernel. The maintainer will look it over, suggest changes and, if everything seems to be in order, will accept the change into their copy of the kernel's source code. Changes then tend to make their way up through the hierarchy.
The official Linux kernel, the one that gets published at kernel.org, is Linus Torvalds' version of the kernel source code. That doesn't mean he goes through every line or change personally, but he does have final say over what he publishes as the official kernel. If something doesn't look right or there is a dispute between developers, Torvalds gets to decide what goes into his official Linux source code and what does not.
However, that is only part of the answer. Since Linux is open source, Torvalds' kernel is just one version of the Linux source code. What Torvalds chooses to put in his kernel only matters if you download and install your own kernel from the official Linux repository at kernel.org. If you are running a kernel provided by your distribution, then the package maintainer is the one who decides what patches or modules get included and what gets stripped out.
This means that the official kernel.org version of Linux, the version that ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the version in Ubuntu, the Android kernel, and the deblobbed kernel in Trisquel GNU/Linux are all slightly different. They may all be variations of Torvalds' kernel, but they will have different feature patches, enabled drivers, and security fixes applied. These changes are decided by whomever builds the kernel package for your distribution.
In short, while Linus Torvalds ultimately decides what is officially Linux, due to the project's open source nature the person who has final say over what is in your copy of the Linux kernel is whomever compiled it for you.
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Building-software-with-a-toolkit asks: In case one wants to develop closed sourced software, then I think a developer must buy a Qt license and they can then distribute (Qt and their application) as closed source. Please confirm.
How does this work for GTK/GNOME? How can closed source software be developed and sold using the GTK toolkit for GNOME/Xfce or KDE?
DistroWatch answers: The Qt development toolkit is (mostly) open source and is available under an open source license. Specifically Qt is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3. This is a big part of why Qt software is popular in the Linux and BSD communities. Particularly with the KDE, Lumina, and LXQt projects.
The Qt software is also available under a commercial license which allows developers to build and distribute closed source software. You can learn more about how Qt handles this dual licensing on the Qt licensing page.
The GTK library is also open source and licensed in a very similar way. According to the GTK website the library is available under the GNU Library General Public License version 2. While GTK is typically used to create open source applications, it is not a requirement of the license and a developer does not need to do anything special to create and distribute closed source programs with GTK. The license sums up the situation fairly simply:
A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
While it is technically and legally possible to create closed source applications using either Qt or GTK, most developers see the benefit of sharing their source code and encouraging people to tweak and improve their software. This keeps the software ecosystem healthier and helps fix bugs faster. This is why it is relatively rare to see closed source GTK or Qt applications in the wild.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Grml 2020.06
Michael Prokop has announced the release of Grml 2020.06, a new version of the project's Linux distribution designed for system administrators, based on Debian's "testing" branch: "Grml - new stable release 2020.06 available. This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian testing ('bullseye'). As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release. Important changes: the default mount point for the live system was changed; tools like grml2usb, grml-paste and grml-x have been ported from Python 2 to Python 3 - we no longer support Python 2 in our tools; the live system no longer uses a custom Grml kernel - instead we switched to the 'linux-image' packages provided by Debian. New features: cloud-init support - a standard multi-distribution method for cross-platform cloud instance initialization; qemu-guest-agent support - this daemon exchanges information between the host and guest system; network information in grml-quickconfig - hostname, cloud-init, IP addresses and zeroconf/avahi information...." See the release announcement and release notes for a detailed description of this new release.
Linux Mint 20
The Linux Mint team have announced the release of Linux Mint 20. The new version is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and provides five years of support. The new release is available in three flavours: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Linux Mint 20 offers support for different scaling on HiDPI displays, includes a new tool called Warpinator for sharing files on the local area network, and the welcome window provides quick access to changing the desktop colour theme. "The star of the show in Linux Mint 20 is a new application called Warpinator. 10 years ago, Linux Mint 6 featured a tool called "Giver" which could share files across the local network. Without any server or configuration, computers would automatically see each others and you could simply drag and drop files from one to another. When the Giver project was discontinued it had to be removed from Linux Mint and we've been missing that functionality ever since. Warpinator is a reimplementation of Giver. Server configuration (FTP, NFS, Samba) is overkill for casual file transfers between two computers, and it's a real pity to use external media (Internet services, USB sticks, external HDDs) just to share files when there's a local network which could do just that." Further information can be found in the project's release announcements (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) and in the release notes (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce).
Linux Mint 20 -- Running the Cinnamon desktop
(full image size: 861kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,042
- Total data uploaded: 32.4TB
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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 filesystem layout
In this week's review of GoboLinux we mentioned an alternative filesystem layout. Typically GNU/Linux distributions arrange their filesystems in a way which places executable files all together in one place, libraries together in another, and other resources in a third location. This keeps types of resources together. GoboLinux takes another approach, packaging all the files associated with a specific package in one directory tree. This results in more directories (one for each package), while keeping the resources of each program separate from the resources of other packages.
We would like to hear which approach you think is better. Do you like the idea of each program having its own modular directory, or all similar resources (programs and libraries) being stored in one big directory together?
You can see the results of our previous poll on distributions supporting multiple init systems in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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The filesystem layout
| I prefer all similar resources in one directory: | 429 (36%) |
| I prefer modular directories for each program: | 363 (30%) |
| I prefer another approach: | 43 (4%) |
| I have no preference: | 372 (31%) |
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| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
Distributions added to waiting list
- Emperor-OS. Emperor-OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution which includes hundreds of packages that can be used for programming and data science tasks.
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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, 6 July 2020. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1021 (2023-05-29): rlxos GNU/Linux, colours in command line output, an overview of Void's unique features, how to use awk, Microsoft publishes a Linux distro |
| • Issue 1020 (2023-05-22): UBports 20.04, finding another machine's IP address, finding distros with a specific kernel, Debian prepares for Bookworm |
| • Issue 1019 (2023-05-15): Rhino Linux (Beta), checking which applications reply on a package, NethServer reborn, System76 improving application responsiveness |
| • Issue 1018 (2023-05-08): Fedora 38, finding relevant manual pages, merging audio files, Fedora plans new immutable edition, Mint works to fix Secure Boot issues |
| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Issue 993 (2022-11-07): Static Linux, working with just a kernel, Mint streamlines Flatpak management, updates coming to elementary OS |
| • Issue 992 (2022-10-31): Lubuntu 22.10, setting permissions on home directories, Linux may drop i486, Fedora delays next version for OpenSSL bug |
| • Issue 991 (2022-10-24): XeroLinux 2022.09, learning who ran sudo, exploring firewall tools, Rolling Rhino Remix gets a fresh start, Fedora plans to revamp live media |
| • Issue 990 (2022-10-17): ravynOS 0.4.0, Lion Linux 3.0, accessing low numbered network ports, Pop!_OS makes progress on COSMIC, Murena launches new phone |
| • Issue 989 (2022-10-10): Ubuntu Unity, kernel bug causes issues with Intel cards, Canonical offers free Ubuntu Pro subscriptions, customizing the command line prompt |
| • Issue 988 (2022-10-03): SpiralLinux 11.220628, finding distros for older equipment and other purposes, SUSE begins releasing ALP prototypes, Debian votes on non-free firmware in installer |
| • Issue 987 (2022-09-26): openSUSE's MicroOS, converting people to using Linux, pfSense updates base system and PHP, Python 2 dropped from Arch |
| • Issue 986 (2022-09-19): Porteus 5.0, remotely wiping a hard drive, a new software centre for Ubuntu, Proxmox offers offline updates |
| • Issue 985 (2022-09-12): Garuda Linux, using root versus sudo, UBports on the Fairphone 4, Slackware reverses change to grep |
| • Issue 984 (2022-09-05): deepin 23 Preview, watching for changing to directories, Mint team tests Steam Deck, Devuan posts fix for repository key expiry |
| • Issue 983 (2022-08-29): Qubes OS 4.1.1, Alchg Linux, immutable operating systems, Debian considers stance on non-free firmware, Arch-based projects suffer boot issue |
| • Issue 982 (2022-08-22): Peropesis 1.6.2, KaOS strips out Python 2 and PulseAudio, deepin becomes independent, getting security update notifications |
| • Issue 981 (2022-08-15): Linux Lite 6.0, defining desktop environments and window managers, Mint releases upgrade tool, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 980 (2022-08-08): Linux Mint 21, Pledge on Linux, SparkyLinux updates classic desktop packages, Peppermint OS experiments with Devuan base |
| • Issue 979 (2022-08-01): KaOS 2022.06 and KDE Plasma 5.25, terminating processes after a set time, GNOME plans Secure Boot check |
| • Issue 978 (2022-07-25): EndeavourOS 22.6, Slax explores a return to Slackware, Ubuntu certified with Dell's XPS 13, Linux running on Apple's M2 |
| • Issue 977 (2022-07-18): EasyOS 4.2, transferring desktop themes between distros, Tails publishes list of updates, Zevenet automates Let's Encrypt renewals |
| • Issue 976 (2022-07-11): NixOS 22.05, making a fake webcam, exploring the Linux scheduler, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Issue 975 (2022-07-04): Murena One running /e/OS, where are all the openSUSE distributions, Fedora to offer unfiltered Flathub access |
| • Issue 974 (2022-06-27): AlmaLinux 9.0, the changing data of DistroWatch's database, UBports on the Pixel 3a, Tails and GhostBSD publish hot fixes |
| • Issue 973 (2022-06-20): openSUSE 15.4, collecting distro media, FreeBSD status report, Ubuntu Core with optional real-time kernel |
| • Issue 972 (2022-06-13): Rolling Rhino Remix, SambaBox 4.1, SUSE team considers future of SUSE and openSUSE Leap, Tails improves Tor Connection Assistant |
| • Issue 971 (2022-06-06): ChimeraOS 2022.01.03, Lilidog 22.04, NixOS gains graphical installer, Mint replaces Bluetooth stack and adopts Timeshift, how to change a MAC address |
| • Issue 970 (2022-05-30): Tails 5.0, taking apart a Linux distro, Ubuntu users seeing processes terminated, Budgie team plans future of their desktop |
| • Issue 969 (2022-05-23): Fedora 36, a return to Unity, Canonical seeks to improve gaming on Ubuntu, HP plans to ship laptops with Pop!_OS |
| • Full list of all issues |
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