 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 881, 31 August 2020 |
Welcome to this year's 35th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Choosing the proper operating system settings is always a balancing act between features, security, and performance. Do we want powerful desktop environments with all the bells and whistles or a minimal window manager? Do we want slick, graphical configuration tools or to manage everything through efficient text files? Should a filesystem be fast and simple, or robust and offer lots of options? These are choices developers and users need to make on a regular basis. We begin this week with a look at a distribution called BunsenLabs Linux that takes a minimal approach, combining a minimal Debian base with the lightweight Openbox window manager. Read on to find out how BunsenLabs performs. In our News section we share a link to DragonFly's new ePUB version of the operating system's Handbook along with news of openSUSE's Jump edition. Then we report on Fedora and FreeBSD making updates to their filesystems, with both focusing on new features through the advanced ZFS and Btr filesystems. What do you think of Fedora's move to shift from the classic ext4 filesystem to the more advanced Btrfs? Let us know in our Opinion Poll. A few weeks ago we discussed the benefits and drawbacks of dynamic linking applications versus statically linking libraries. In our Questions and Answers column we take a deeper dive into the storage space required to hold applications using these two approaches to linking. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and link to the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: BunsenLabs Linux Lithium
- News: Fedora plans to make Btrfs the default filesystem, FreeBSD imports new OpenZFS code, DragonFly BSD publishes documentation in ePUB format, openSUSE presents Jump edition
- Questions and answers: More information about dynamic versus static linking
- Released last week: Tails 4.10, Parted Magic 2020_08_23
- Torrent corner: Bluestar, ExTiX, MidnightBSD, KDE neon, Nitrux, Raspberry Pi OS, Septor, Tails
- Opinion poll: Fedora adopting Btrfs as the default filesystem
- 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 Jesse Smith) |
BunsenLabs Linux Lithium
BunsenLabs Linux is a distribution offering a lightweight and easily customizable Openbox desktop. The BunsenLabs distribution is based on Debian's Stable branch which gives the project access to a vast collection of software packages.
Bunsen's latest release is called Lithium (the project uses element names in place of version numbers) and is based on Debian 10 "Buster". Lithium now automatically updates the application menu when new software is installed and includes a range of Broadcom wireless drivers to help users get on-line. The distribution now ships with a dark theme by default and the project's welcome window script has been streamlined to get the system up and running faster. Bunsen should now work with Secure Boot systems.
BunsenLabs is available in two builds. One is a 1.2GB ISO file for 64-bit (x86_64) computers while the other is a 651MB ISO for 32-bit systems. The second ISO is quite a bit smaller in order to allow it to fit on a CD. Booting from the project's install media brings up a menu asking if we would like to boot into a live desktop environment or launch the system installer. The live mode is available in three flavours (normal, failsafe, and running from RAM) while the installer can be launched in graphical or text mode.
Taking the live option brings up a graphical desktop, powered by the Openbox window manager. Once we arrive at the desktop a welcome window appears. This window gives us a few quick tips on using desktop shortcut keys, provides us with the live environment's password, and tells us how to use the command line to change our keyboard's layout. We are also told we can quickly access the application menu by right-clicking on the desktop. Finally, we are told that to run the system installer we need to restart the computer and select an install option from the boot menu; the installer is not available through the live session.
BunsenLabs Lithium -- The initial welcome window
(full image size: 128kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Exploring the Openbox interface we find a Conky status panel to the right of the screen. This panel shows us some system statistics such as our CPU usage, memory consumption, and uptime. A list of desktop shortcuts is also shown toward the bottom of the panel and these provide us with quick access to popular applications and actions. Another panel, placed along the bottom of the screen, hosts the application menu, task switcher, and system tray. The desktop is mostly dark and uses blue or white text on a black background in most situations.
Installer
After playing around with Bunsen's live mode a bit to confirm it was generally working as expected, I restarted the computer and launched the graphical installer. BunsenLabs uses Debian's installer and, as far as I can tell, there is no practical difference between what Bunsen uses and what Debian ships. I covered Debian's install process last year. The installer walks us through the usual steps of picking our preferred language, our location, creating a user account, confirming our time zone, and partitioning the disk. We can use manual or guided partitioning from within the installer. The manual option is quite flexible, if a bit cumbersome. The guided option will set up an ext4 root filesystem and a swap partition. Once the installer finishes copying its files to our hard drive it automatically reboots the computer.
Early impressions
When BunsenLabs boots it brings up a graphical login screen. Signing into our account launches Openbox and brings up a second welcome window. This new window beings with a greeting and then offers to walk us through customising the operating system. Our first step is to provide our password for sudo/administrative access. Then we are asked if we want to download package upgrades. In my case there were 36 updates, totalling about 136MB in size. We are then given the chance to enable backports repositories in order to gain access to newer versions of applications.
BunsenLabs Lithium -- Customising the operating system through the welcome window
(full image size: 117kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The welcome window then offers to enable Bluetooth support, install Java, install Flash plugins, and install Dropbox. We are also given the chance to install optional development tools. The welcome window concludes by showing us links to on-line assistance and shows us the command we can use to run the welcome script again.
The welcome window does not take particularly long to get through and offers some useful options. I think, perhaps, it would have been nice if the script had collected all my answers first and then performed its tasks at the end, that way I would not need to wait while new packages were fetched. However, other than that, the script does its job well. Each step is explained clearly and provides a simple yes/no prompt.
Hardware
I tested BunsenLabs in a virtual machine first, trying it out in VirtualBox. The distribution performed well, operating smoothly and quickly in the virtual environment. My only issue was the Openbox interface would not resize dynamically with the VirtualBox window and the display configuration tools did not seem to be able to work with higher resolutions.
When I switched to running Bunsen on my workstation the system performed well. My screen's full resolution was used, the distribution ran quickly, and the interface was responsive. Media keys worked on my keyboard, which was nice. There were a few times when the distribution paused while starting up or shutting down, but it always worked itself out eventually.
BunsenLabs Lithium -- Running the Firefox web browser
(full image size: 135kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Bunsen was relatively light on resources. The distribution consumed 375MB of RAM when logged into Openbox, and took up 3.8GB of disk space. The distribution generally did not use much of my CPU, making it pleasantly lean.
Included applications
Digging through Bunsen's application menu we find a large, sprawling tree of options. There are a lot of sub-menus and then sub-sub-menus. Some applications are listed under their name while other entries describe a task. For instance, there are entries for a Web Browser and File Manager, while other programs are listed as LibreOffice or HexChat. There are several menu entries listed as simply "File Manager". A few of these open the Thunar manager while one opens the program's settings panel. Another quirk of the menu is a number of items are listed with a BunsenLabs (BL) prefix. These are not BunsenLabs-specific applications, so I'm unsure why they get the special prefix. For example, "BL Media Player" is the popular VLC player while "BL Text Editor" is the Geany editor.
BunsenLabs Lithium -- The application menu listing multiple File Manager entries
(full image size: 101kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
There are a surprisingly large number of entries, though a fairly small number of applications. I found the Firefox web browser, the Transmission bittorrent client, the HexChat IRC client, and the Xfburn disc burning software. LibreOffice and the Evince document viewer are installed for us, along with the VLC media player. Geany is available to edit text files and Htop is present to monitor system resources. There is a menu entry called Mail Reader, though no e-mail client is installed. In the background Bunsen uses the systemd init software and runs on version 4.19 of the Linux kernel.
Bunsen ships with a lot of little configuration tools. These items help tweak the look of the desktop, change themes, adjust the number of virtual desktops (the default is two), and adjust the panel. The configuration tools sometimes have short, cryptic launcher names, such as "Tint2" and "gmrun". This can make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the names of specific desktop components to find what they want to adjust.
BunsenLabs Lithium -- Two of the distribution's settings modules
(full image size: 109kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
The application menu also contains a bunch of shortcuts that just install extra applications. For instance, there are launchers which will download additional pieces of the LibreOffice suite, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and the Chromium web browser, among others. These one-off launchers can be useful shortcuts, I suppose, though they seem like an awkward alternative to a software manager.
Software management
Speaking of managing software, Bunsen ships with the Synaptic package manager. This classic package manager helps us download, remove, and upgrade packages. It can also enable remote repositories and filter search results. Synaptic is quite powerful and works quickly. It is not particularly streamlined or modern, but it gets the job done. For those of us who like working from the command line, Bunsen provides the APT command line tools.
Conclusions
After playing with BunsenLabs a bit I arrived at a couple of thoughts. The first is that the distribution generally does what it sets out to do. It's basically Debian with the Openbox interface and some nice customization scripts. As far as missions go, it may not be particularly glorious, but I always like it when a distribution does what it advertises, whether its goals are big or small. Bunsen is probably ideally suited for low-resource environments, particularly where CD install media or 32-bit processors are being used.
While Bunsen does accomplish its goals, I am not certain that I can pinpoint a good audience for the distribution. As I mentioned above, Bunsen probably most appeals to low-resource environments or people running older hardware. However, the same could be said of Debian, or other low-resource derivatives. I'm not sure if there is anything specific to BunsenLabs which really sets it apart.
Don't get me wrong, I like Bunsen's welcome script and I like Openbox, and I like the stable Debian base. However, there are other distributions, even other Debian-based distributions, which use about the same amount of resources and have more modern or more beginner friendly interfaces. Just about any Debian-based project with, for example, the LXDE or Xfce desktops will use about the same amount of RAM, CPU, and disk space while offering a less cluttered menu and more friendly configuration tools.
I'm not suggesting Bunsen is bad - it's doesn't really do poorly at anything it sets out to do. However, I do think there are other distributions which accomplish similar goals with friendlier interfaces. So what I'm suggesting is that Bunsen probably really appeals, almost exclusively, to people who like minimal window managers and who like Debian. It can be useful in other situations, but this seems to be the project's niche.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
BunsenLabs Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.1/10 from 24 review(s).
Have you used BunsenLabs Linux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Fedora plans to make Btrfs the default filesystem, FreeBSD imports new OpenZFS code, DragonFly BSD publishes documentation in ePUB format, openSUSE presents Jump edition
The Fedora distribution is planning to switch the default filesystem used in its desktop editions, migrating from ext4 to Btrfs. The change is currently planned for Fedora 33, which is scheduled to be released in October 2020. "User data is the most important thing on a computer. Whether it's source code for the next big release, family pictures, a music library, or anything else, you want it to be safe. Changing the default file system is not a change to make casually. The Fedora Project is changing the default file system for desktop variants (Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE, etc), for the first time since Fedora 11. Btrfs will replace ext4 as the default filesystem in Fedora 33." The move comes about two years after Fedora's sponsor, Red Hat, dropped support for Btrfs.
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In the recent past the reference implementation for the ZFS advanced filesystem shifted from Illumos to the Linux on ZFS project. More active work was happening in the Linux branch of ZFS and developers have largely agreed to shift focus to using the Linux on ZFS code as the common upstream base. The FreeBSD team is in the process of migrating from their previous implementation to the new OpenZFS code. "Work on merging FreeBSD support in to what was at the time ZFS on Linux began in August 2018. I first publicly proposed transitioning FreeBSD to (new) OpenZFS on December 18th, 2018. FreeBSD support in OpenZFS was finally completed in December 2019. A CFT for downstreaming OpenZFS support in to FreeBSD was first issued on July 8th. All issues that were reported have been addressed or, for a couple of less critical matters there are pull requests in progress with OpenZFS. iXsystems has tested and dogfooded extensively internally. The TrueNAS 12 release is based on OpenZFS with some additional features that have not yet made it upstream." Further information can be found in the change's log message.
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The DragonFly BSD project has a Handbook which provides useful information on the use and care of DragonFly BSD systems. Vincent Defert has converted the existing documentation, along with various helpful tips, into ePUB format. The two documents in ePUB format have been posted on-line for the community to read.
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The openSUSE team has published new alpha builds of the distribution's Jump edition. Jump is an effort to bring the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE code bases and packages closer together. "The prototype project openSUSE Jump is now available for Alpha phase testing. Jump is an interim name given to the experimental distribution in the Open Build Service as developers have been trying to synchronize SUSE Linux Enterprise binaries for openSUSE Leap. The efforts are trying to bring the codes of Leap and SLE closer together, which was previously mentioned in an article titled New Prototype Builds Bringing Leap, SLE Closer Will be Available Soon." The new Jump builds for supported architectures are now available for download.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Oded Arbel) |
More information about dynamic versus static linking
Regarding the ongoing discussion on the pros and cons of operating systems using dynamic linking of application provided vs static linking - Jesse Smith in the DistroWatch Q&A addressed most of the concerns I had with the original article, by Drew DeVault, that sparked this discussion, but I think the question of the disk space still needs to be addressed more fully. So:
Wouldn't statically linked executables be huge?
Not necessarily so - would they be larger? Sure - the original article does some hand-waving about how many dynamically loaded symbols are directly referenced by a linking executable and concludes that as on average applications directly reference only 4.6% of symbols exported from the libraries they consume, and modern compilers are good at eliminating code that isn't used, the size difference can't be that significant.
So lets look at an example: the cURL program is available on many operating system as it is useful tool to interact with the Internet. It is a good example, in my opinion, as while it has a rather simple facade, it has a lot of internal complexity as it attempts to handle anything the Internet might throw at you (and not only with HTTP, it supports FTP, IMAP, SMB and more). It also uses a fair amount of features from external libraries from OpenSSL to SQLite.
Drew's symbol analysis code from the above referenced article reports /usr/bin/curl on Ubuntu 20.04 to be using 6.8% of the symbols exported by the dynamic libraries it is linking with, so it is still in the ballpark of what you'd expect if you'd read Drew's article.
The problem with that analysis is that it assumes that counting the number of directly referenced symbols maps well to the additional code size that will be required in the application if we bundle the libraries into the executable: 6.8% use translates to 6.8% (of the size of all libraries) executable size increase. But this is very likely not true! The reason libraries are even a good idea, in and of itself (regardless of the discussion of dynamic vs. static linking) is that they hide a lot of complexity behind a small API. Usually libraries handle all that internal complexity by being made out of a lot of small pieces that call each other to implement complex logic. My application may only call into a library in a couple of places, but those functions will call other functions inside that library (and in other libraries) to do what I want them to do.
How can we even measure that? We'd need to build a tool that traces not only which exported symbols my application uses, but also what symbols those symbols use, and what those other symbols use, and so on and so forth - recursively to each leaf of the tree. Fortunately - such a tool already exists! We call this tool "a compiler". As asserted in Drew DeVault's article, a modern compiler walks through the tree of symbols an application uses and only includes what code it needs to make sure everything needed is available, trimming out everything else. So lets just get down to it - if we compile cURL statically, how large would it be? Because cURL uses quite a few libraries (45 on Ubuntu 20.04) and each and every one of them has to be built statically to be able to build cURL statically, and I'm pretty lazy, I would answer that by looking at Stali Linux - a completely statically linked Linux operating system, whose completely built "root filesystem" can be downloaded or browsed from their GitLab repository. By the way, the Stali FAQ spends quite a bit discussing the space efficiency of static linked executables, including memory consumption - which is a whole new can of worms that I will not be getting into here, but is worth exploring when considering a modern workstation operating system.
On Stali Linux, the cURL executable is 2.8MiB in size - that is quite a bit more than the same executable on Ubuntu 20.04, where it is only 236KiB in size. This is of course not the whole story as in Ubuntu 20.04 cURL requires an additional 45 dynamically loaded libraries weighting in at a total of 19.8MiB [1]. Assuming that cURL under Stali uses has the same set of features (which it doesn't - mostly because Stali hasn't seen an update in over 3 years and its current version is using the - even older - version 7.48 of curl, but it also doesn't use a lot of features you do get on Ubuntu such as support for IDN, HTTP2, SSH, Kerberos and others). I'm going to ignore that for now (but we'll get back to it much later) and just conclude that Stali's cURL executable is 14% more space efficient than Ubuntu installation. That is more than twice what you'd expect from the symbol analysis! The actual figure, excluding all the libraries that the Ubuntu's cURL uses and Stali's doesn't is actually 21%.
This shows that the analysis of directly referenced symbols does not provide a good estimate of the size efficiency of statically executed binaries as to make the application work, the compiler has to grab a lot more than just those directly referenced symbols from the application.
So to summarize:
- Question: Wouldn't statically linked executables be huge?
- Answer: Yes, they would - often ten times larger or much more. They will still be smaller than the sum size of a dynamically linked executable and its libraries - but not by as much as you'd expect - maybe a fifth.
But, you might be asking, wouldn't that still make it a net benefit to have the entire operating system statically linked? I would like to save 80% on my disk space bill.
Well, the thing is - as we've just shown - most of the bulk of a dynamically linked executable is in the libraries, the executable itself is just a tiny part of the code size of a dynamically linked executable. While cURL is 236KiB, Firefox - if we take another example - which does almost everything that cURL does and oh so mmmuuuccchhh more has an executable that is 688Kib on Ubuntu 20.04 - just 450 more KiB for a massive graphical interface, virtual machines, databases, sandboxing, etc. It is all in the dynamically linked libraries - which are shareable! And re-use of dynamic libraries actually pays back very well. cURL is actually a good example of such re-use: most of the cURL logic is in its shared library - libcurl - and there are quite a few application that use it to support cURL-like features for getting and pulling stuff off of servers with all the weird and exciting complexity of the Internet. Looking at my system, I can see [2] that libcurl is used by 22 OS-provided applications, other than cURL itself - which puts it in the top 20% of most used dynamic libraries on my system. Using the above 21% as a guideline, having a library used by five executables will a net disk size reduction compared to statically linking, and libcurl definitely passes that threshold - so building and using cURL dynamically saves a lot of disk space.
But how does this apply to the entire operating system? According to Drew DeVault, "Over half of your libraries are used by fewer than 0.1% of your executables" - so do benefits like we get from cURL apply system wide? Taking the 21% "less space than statically linking" for building cURL statically I wanted to see what might happen if all OS provided executables were delivered as statically linked executables and all the dynamic libraries removed - would we gain or lose space and how much?
The results on my system [3] are that dynamic libraries being used by executables weight in at 1.43GiB, while the suspected estimated to apply 21% of that cost to each using executable would be 7.29GiB. So re-use of dynamic libraries serves about five times reduction in disk space!
As we discussed Stali Linux before, as an example of a completely statically linked operating system, then another way to look at the same question is to just do a straight up comparison of how much does a Stali Linux installation takes vs. an installation of a dynamically linked operating system, like Ubuntu. It is not really an apples to apples comparison as Stali is much more minimal than most operating systems. Still, it is worth noting that:
- Stali's rootfs bin directory has 212 files weighing 50.2MiB for an average of 242KiB per application.
- The buntu:20.04 docker image (which is supposedly similarly minimal to a Stali installation) has 385 executables in its OS application directories [4] with 68.2MiB between bin, sbin and the library directories (that contain things other than dynamic libraries, but I decided not to bother with filtering those out) for an average of 171KiB per application.
This is not as pronounced a difference, but still clearly shows that dynamic linking is a considerable net disk space positive - 30% saving in the above test, not taking into account that amount of extra functionality that a minimal Ubuntu provides over Stali.
P.S. Yet another point for dynamic linking
Something else worth noting about the advantage of dynamic linking: it is much better for downstream developers. If I'm developing an application that uses libcurl on Ubuntu, the development package includes just the things that I need: some header files and a tiny static library that just causes the compiler to link with the dynamic libcurl library. After building I know for a fact that whatever I do with libcurl I'll get identical results to running cURL on the command line, making it easier to debug problems with my code (if the behavior is different compared to the cURL command line, then my code is doing something incorrectly). On Stali Linux there are no development packages, but if I imagine that there are, it would likely be a complete source dump of the curl repo (which it kind of is) where I would first need to build the library locally and when my application behaves differently than the cURL command line - who knows why? it could be because I'm doing something wrong, or because my build process is somewhat different than Stali's, or because we are not using the same version - it is impossible to tell without a lot more additional testing.
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Scripts
1) ldd $(which curl) | perl -nle 'm,=> (/\S+), and push @libs,$1; END{ foreach $lib (@libs) { @st=stat $lib; $sum+=$st[7]; } print $sum/1024/1024;}'
2) find /usr/bin -type f -executable | while read file; do ldd "$file" 2>/dev/null | grep -q libcurl && echo $file; done | wc -l
3) find /usr/bin -type f -executable | xargs ldd 2>/dev/null | perl -nle 'm,=> (/\S+), and $libs{$1}++; END{ foreach my $lib(keys %libs){ @s=stat $lib; $actual+=$s[7]; $cost+=($s[7]*0.21*$libs{$lib}); } print "Actual total size: $actual"; print "Expected total cost: $cost";}'
4) for dir in /usr/bin /usr/sbin; do find $dir -type f -executable; done | wc -l; du -ks /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/lib* | perl -nle 'm/^(\d+)/ and $sum+=$1; END { print $sum/1024; }'
License
Licensed under CC0 license: To the extent possible under law, I hereby waive all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this article.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
Tails 4.10
Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. The project's latest release, Tails 4.10, fixes support for Atheros USB wi-fi devices and USB tethering from iPhones. There have also been a number of package updates, including the kernel, which improves hardware coverage. The release announcement reports: "Changes and updates: Update Tor Browser to 9.5.4. Update Tor to 0.4.3.6. Update Electrum from 3.3.8 to 4.0.2. Update Linux to 5.7.10. This should improve the support for newer hardware (graphics, wi-fi, etc.). Hide the welcome message when starting Thunderbird. Fixed problems: Fix support for USB wi-fi adapters with Atheros AR9271 hardware. Fix USB tethering from iPhone. For more details, read our changelog."
Parted Magic 2020_08_23
Parted Magic is a small live CD/USB/PXE with its elemental purpose being to partition hard drives. The project has published an update which begins the distribution's migration to phase out 32-bit editions. "This version has some major changes that might be a big deal to some people, but I don't think it will be a problem for most users. I was forced to drop the 32-bit kernel after finding out syslinux has an initramfs size limitation. I will include an old version with a 32-bit kernel. You can download it from your file list. 32-bit was going to be dropped in the near future anyway. 32 and 64 was dropped from the boot menus. If you have a custom boot menu or PXE configuration, please make a note of this change. For example, m64.img was renamed to m.img. Parted Magic no longer uses Aufs. The conversion to Overlayfs was nearly 100% done by D.L.C. Burggraaff. This means kernel updates will no longer be delayed waiting for an Aufs patch." further information, including a list of updated packages, can be found on the distribution's news page.
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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: 2,117
- Total data uploaded: 33.5TB
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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) |
Fedora adopting Btrfs as the default filesystem
One of our news stories this week was about the Fedora distribution switching its default filesystem from ext4 to Btrfs on Workstation spins. Btrfs offers a lot of extra features, including built-in multi-volume support, compression, and snapshots. What do you think of this move, are you excited to run Btrfs on Fedora?
You can see the results of our previous poll on running commercial or community projects in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Running Fedora on Btrfs
| I plan to run Fedora on Btrfs: | 165 (11%) |
| I do not plan to use Fedora on Btrfs: | 128 (9%) |
| Have not decided yet: | 99 (7%) |
| I am not a Fedora user: | 1045 (73%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 7 September 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 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
| • Issue 1044 (2023-11-06): Porteus 5.01, disabling IPv6, applications unique to a Linux distro, Linux merges bcachefs, OpenELA makes source packages available |
| • Issue 1043 (2023-10-30): Murena Two with privacy switches, where old files go when packages are updated, UBports on Volla phones, Mint testing Cinnamon on Wayland, Peppermint releases ARM build |
| • Issue 1042 (2023-10-23): Ubuntu Cinnamon compared with Linux Mint, extending battery life on Linux, Debian resumes /usr merge, Canonical publishes fixed install media |
| • Issue 1041 (2023-10-16): FydeOS 17.0, Dr.Parted 23.09, changing UIDs, Fedora partners with Slimbook, GNOME phasing out X11 sessions, Ubuntu revokes 23.10 install media |
| • Issue 1040 (2023-10-09): CROWZ 5.0, changing the location of default directories, Linux Mint updates its Edge edition, Murena crowdfunding new privacy phone, Debian publishes new install media |
| • Issue 1039 (2023-10-02): Zenwalk Current, finding the duration of media files, Peppermint OS tries out new edition, COSMIC gains new features, Canonical reports on security incident in Snap store |
| • Issue 1038 (2023-09-25): Mageia 9, trouble-shooting launchers, running desktop Linux in the cloud, New documentation for Nix, Linux phasing out ReiserFS, GNU celebrates 40 years |
| • Issue 1037 (2023-09-18): Bodhi Linux 7.0.0, finding specific distros and unified package managemnt, Zevenet replaced by two new forks, openSUSE introduces Slowroll branch, Fedora considering dropping Plasma X11 session |
| • Issue 1036 (2023-09-11): SDesk 2023.08.12, hiding command line passwords, openSUSE shares contributor survery results, Ubuntu plans seamless disk encryption, GNOME 45 to break extension compatibility |
| • Issue 1035 (2023-09-04): Debian GNU/Hurd 2023, PCLinuxOS 2023.07, do home users need a firewall, AlmaLinux introduces new repositories, Rocky Linux commits to RHEL compatibility, NetBSD machine runs unattended for nine years, Armbian runs wallpaper contest |
| • Issue 1034 (2023-08-28): Void 20230628, types of memory usage, FreeBSD receives port of Linux NVIDIA driver, Fedora plans improved theme handling for Qt applications, Canonical's plans for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1033 (2023-08-21): MiniOS 20230606, system user accounts, how Red Hat clones are moving forward, Haiku improves WINE performance, Debian turns 30 |
| • Issue 1032 (2023-08-14): MX Linux 23, positioning new windows on the desktop, Linux Containers adopts LXD fork, Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ form OpenELA |
| • Issue 1031 (2023-08-07): Peppermint OS 2023-07-01, preventing a file from being changed, Asahi Linux partners with Fedora, Linux Mint plans new releases |
| • Issue 1030 (2023-07-31): Solus 4.4, Linux Mint 21.2, Debian introduces RISC-V support, Ubuntu patches custom kernel bugs, FreeBSD imports OpenSSL 3 |
| • Issue 1029 (2023-07-24): Running Murena on the Fairphone 4, Flatpak vs Snap sandboxing technologies, Redox OS plans to borrow Linux drivers to expand hardware support, Debian updates Bookworm media |
| • Issue 1028 (2023-07-17): KDE Connect; Oracle, SUSE, and AlmaLinux repsond to Red Hat's source code policy change, KaOS issues media fix, Slackware turns 30; security and immutable distributions |
| • Issue 1027 (2023-07-10): Crystal Linux 2023-03-16, StartOS (embassyOS 0.3.4.2), changing options on a mounted filesystem, Murena launches Fairphone 4 in North America, Fedora debates telemetry for desktop team |
| • Issue 1026 (2023-07-03): Kumander Linux 1.0, Red Hat changing its approach to sharing source code, TrueNAS offers SMB Multichannel, Zorin OS introduces upgrade utility |
| • Issue 1025 (2023-06-26): KaOS with Plasma 6, information which can leak from desktop environments, Red Hat closes door on sharing RHEL source code, SUSE introduces new security features |
| • Issue 1024 (2023-06-19): Debian 12, a safer way to use dd, Debian releases GNU/Hurd 2023, Ubuntu 22.10 nears its end of life, FreeBSD turns 30 |
| • Issue 1023 (2023-06-12): openSUSE 15.5 Leap, the differences between independent distributions, openSUSE lengthens Leap life, Murena offers new phone for North America |
| • Issue 1022 (2023-06-05): GetFreeOS 2023.05.01, Slint 15.0-3, Liya N4Si, cleaning up crowded directories, Ubuntu plans Snap-based variant, Red Hat dropping LireOffice RPM packages |
| • 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 |
| • Full list of all issues |
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