 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 991, 24 October 2022 |
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Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
The news was dominated this week by the launch of a new, short-term support release of Ubuntu, along with the distribution's many community editions. New version of Ubuntu always send ripples through the open source community as new packages and technology make it into various respins and child distributions. One of these respins is Rolling Rhino Remix, a rolling release approach to working with Ubuntu. This project is undergoing key changes in its approach and we talk about this and the project's rebirth in our News section. We also report on a proposal to modernize the Fedora distribution's live media. The Fedora team wants to make it easier to build and use Fedora's live media and we share highlights below. First though we turn our attention to an Arch Linux-based project called XeroLinux. The XeroLinux project ships a rolling release distribution with a customized KDE Plasma desktop and various tweaks. Jesse Smith takes XeroLinux for a test drive and reports on his experience with the Arch-based project in this week's Feature Story. In the Linux community there are typically many ways to approach solving a problem. Linux distributions typically supply multiple desktop environments, compilers, web browser, music players, and package managers. One area where there is a lot of choice is in the realm of firewall management. In this week's Questions and Answers column we explore some firewall utilities and discuss when using particular tools might be useful. What software do you use to manage your firewall? Let us know in the Opinion Poll what works best for you. Plus we are pleased to share a list of the releases of the past week and share the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
XeroLinux 2022.09
XeroLinux is an Arch Linux-based distribution with KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. Some of the features of the distribution include the Calamares installer, various under-the-hood tweaks and optimisations, built-in support for community-built AUR packages as well as Flatpak packages, and the availability of various desktop and boot loader themes developed in-house.
The distribution offers one edition and its install media is 2.6GB in size. This install media can be booted in both Legacy BIOS and UEFI modes. However, users will soon notice the count down timer for the boot menu in UEFI mode beeps the PC speaker loudly every second for around 15 seconds. It's strong incentive to pick a boot option quickly.
XeroLinux's live media boots to the Plasma desktop. A medium-sized, transparent panel is placed across the top of the display. At the bottom we find a dock for launching and switching between applications. A CPU usage monitor sits on the dock.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- The welcome window
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The desktop contains no icons, however a welcome window opens and presents us with a few options. Two of the buttons in the welcome window offer to fix resolution issues we might have when running XeroLinux in a VMWare or QEMU virtual machine. Another button offers to update the distribution's repository mirror list, presumably to get faster download results. A fourth button in the window launches the Calamares system installer.
Installing
Calamares is an increasingly popular graphical installer which makes setting up a Linux distribution a streamlined and fairly easy process. We're quickly walked through the usual steps of picking our language, time zone, keyboard layout, and making up a username. The partitioning section provides an easy manual partitioning approach. We can alternatively take a guided partitioning option. If we do take the guided option, the installer defaults to making a single XFS partition with no swap space. Using options in the guided partitioning section we can alternatively use the Btrfs or ext4 filesystems instead of XFS. We also have the option of switching between no swap space, using a swap file, or using a swap partition.
In my trial Calamares worked well and everything ran smoothly during the setup process.
Early impressions
XeroLinux will, with its default settings, boot and automatically sign us into the Plasma desktop. We can choose instead to boot to a graphical login screen by toggling an option in Calamares.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- The FAQ section of the welcome window
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When Plasma first launches the welcome window appears again, though this time with a fresh set of buttons and options. One button offers to fetch software updates. Clicking this button opens a terminal and runs the pacman package manager to fetch software updates. On my first day there were 400MB of updates and most of the following days brought large batches of updated packages as well.
Another button offers to install video drivers. In the screen that handles fetching new drivers there are also buttons for installing alternative display managers: LightDM and SDDM. I'm not sure why the display manager options are mixed in with the driver options.
There is a button which is labelled "Fix GnuPG Keys". This button opens a terminal and appears to either fetch or generate a key, but the text goes by quickly and there is no explanation as to why or how we are fixing the keys.
There are buttons which will open the Firefox browser to show us the XeroLinux source code repository and forums. One button displays a list of ten questions, labelled FAQ, and we can click questions to open Firefox to show us a corresponding post on the XeroLinux support forum. There is another button for installing applications and I'll talk about it later.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- The application menu and virtual terminal
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Moving on from the welcome window, one of the first things I noticed about XeroLinux is its default desktop style uses a lot of transparency. The dock and top panel in particular are transparent, which I find makes it harder to read their content. Both the dock and panel auto-hide, though not always in a manner I found predictable. Sometimes they disappeared behind windows, other times they covered the top or bottom edges of windows. Sometimes dialog boxes would get stuck behind the dock if a window was near the bottom of the screen causing their buttons to be out of sight. This wasn't a big issue, but it did present a regular annoyance.
Whenever the user switches between active windows the desktop plays a little animation of the windows shuffling. This might be useful (or amusing) for some people. Personally, I find it more distracting than helpful. I also find it odd to see a shuffling animation when two windows are practically side-by-side and I'm switching back and forth between them.
The Plasma desktop has been set up with a unified menu bar built into the panel at the top of the screen. In some ways a unified panel can be useful in that it provides a fixed point and takes up less screen space than in-window menus. On the other hand it can mean more mouse travel back and forth between an application window and the top panel. Most of the time this unified menu bar worked for me and I did appreciate its fixed position. However, a few times during my trial the menu seemed to run into a glitch where it could show the previous application's menu instead of the current one. For example, if I opened the Konsole terminal window and then switched to Firefox, the Konsole menu sometimes remained in place. This confused me at first because many of the menu entries (File, Edit, Bookmarks, and Help) are the same across both applications. This bug didn't happen consistently, but it caused confusion when it did occur.
Hardware
When I started my trial I noticed XeroLinux was sluggish in VirtualBox. An examination of the process monitor showed the KDE window manager was constantly using at least 25% of my host's CPU, even when the desktop was idle. This seems to be a result of the transparent-heavy theme and other various bits of eye candy. When I was running XeroLinux on my laptop performance was notably better, but never really snappy. CPU usage was better on the physical hardware, but still at a constant 2% or more just to run the window manager. This is about 20 times more CPU than Xfce uses on the same machine when running MX Linux.
A fresh install of XeroLinux took about 7GB of my disk space, plus a swap partition. When signed into KDE Plasma the distribution took up 770MB of RAM when idle. This puts XeroLinux on the heavier end of the scale and makes it one of the larger KDE Plasma distributions I have used in terms of RAM consumption.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- The KDE System Settings panel
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XeroLinux worked well with my laptop's hardware. Networking, media keys, and display resolution were all handled correctly. The distribution, while a bit sluggish, also ran smoothly in VirtualBox.
Included software
Despite taking up about 7GB of my hard drive space, Xero doesn't ship with a lot of desktop applications. Firefox is included along with the Okular document viewer, a few text editors, KGpg for handling encryption keys, and Qt Designer. The KDE Connect software is present for connecting with smart phones and the KDE System Settings panel provides a great many customization options for the desktop.
On the command line we find the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU utilities, and manual pages. We also find the systemd software and version 5.19 of the Linux kernel. With the exception of the Qt Designer suite, it's a fairly standard collection of software.
What did stand out for me were the applications not present. There was no office suite, no e-mail client, and there were no multimedia applications. We can install these, through various methods, but I found myself intrigued at the idea of a distribution targeting software developers who avoid e-mail, listening to music, and watching videos.
Early on I installed the VLC media player and found it played audio files properly, but video files would show only the visual parts while not producing any sound. I switched to the Totem player and it was able to play both audio and video files perfectly.
Xero ships with several command line aliases, 84 in total. Some of these are helpful shortcuts while others interfere with common command line usage. I'm probably going to sound fixated on this issue, but lately I've found it frustrating how many distributions (particularly Arch-based projects) provide a lot of aliases. Some of them can be useful, but frequently they interfere with common command line programs, hijacking them or preventing them from running.
For example, running the cat command results in running bat which is a tool with a similar purpose, but different output. The free command is aliased to output memory statistics in megabytes which will cause the command to fail if the user specifies other units. There is an alias called mkfile (short for "make file") which simply calls the touch command. Lots of aliases conveniently shorten commands, but this one is odd as the alias is longer than the thing it redirects to using.
Just one more example and then I'll move on. There are aliases included in Xero which call commands which are not even installed. Typing yta-best for instance calls the yt-dlp command which is not installed by default.
Software management
Xero offers a few different approaches to software management. From the welcome window we can click a button to install new applications. This brings up a long list of software categories. Clicking on a category causes it to expand to show a tree of applications. Some of these are low-level packages, like different versions of the kernel, while most are desktop applications. By default, we are shown native, Arch packages pulled from the Arch and Xero repositories. There is a button we can click to switch the view and show Flatpak packages instead. In either view we can check a box next to the items we want and then click an Install button to fetch the selected items.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- Install packages from the welcome window
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When we are selecting traditional Arch packages to install, the download and install process is passed to Pamac, a graphical software centre. Pamac sorts out dependencies and offers to fetch recommended items. Usually this transition goes smoothly, but once one of Pamac's confirmation windows appeared behind the welcome window. As the welcome window was waiting for Pamac to finish its work, this gave the impression the process had frozen. Digging down through the windows to find the Pamac dialog fixed the issue.
When we select Flatpaks to install from the welcome window fetching the new software is handled by the Flatpak command line program in a virtual terminal.
XeroLinux 2022.09 -- The Pamac software centre
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A moment ago I mentioned Pamac, a graphical software centre. Pamac uses a three-tab layout: Browse, Installed, and Updates. Pamac is responsive and has a nice modern look. We can toggle items to download by clicking a button and queued items are downloaded together. I successfully installed several applications and had no trouble installing updated packages during my trial. I found Pamac would remove desktop applications, but not packages it found were dependencies for others. Attempting to remove, for example, cmake resulted in a warning saying other packages rely on cmake and it cannot be removed. There doesn't appear to be a way to resolve this, other than manually hunting down and removing the reliant applications.
We can also turn to the command line if we wish, using pacman and flatpak from the terminal. All of these approaches worked quickly and without any serious problems. My one complaint was Pamac would sometimes advise me to reboot the computer, usually after each new application was installed. This warning seems unnecessary, but it didn't cause any problems.
Conclusions
According to the XeroLinux website the distribution offers three main features which I'd like to share here, along with my impressions of each.
XeroLinux runs fast due to the many, many fixes and under the hood tweaks that will save you time and provide you with a better & smoother experience.
I didn't find this to be accurate. On my laptop XeroLinux offered performance that I'd consider to be normal or average. Not bad, but not faster than most other full featured Linux distributions. The CPU usage was higher though and caused my laptop to run a little hotter than usual. When I was running Xero in a VirtualBox instance the system was sluggish and a quarter of its CPU time was spent just drawing the desktop. I'm not sure what the "under the hood tweaks" are, but are not providing a practical advantage.
XeroLinux looks stunning out of the box. Using almost everything at our disposal from KDE making it look sexy without compromising performance.
I feel the first half the description here is accurate. XeroLinux is very colourful, vibrant, and has a strong cyber-punk feel to it that is appealing to some people. For people who like wobbling windows, window switching effects, and transparency XeroLinux offers a lot of eye candy. Personally, I'm not a fan of this type of modern, all-effects-enabled approach as it's more distracting than helpful for me, but I can see the appeal for people who like flashy interfaces. I will contest the idea that performance isn't compromised. As I mentioned above, my CPU was hit about 20 times harder than what I typically experience with a mid-weight desktop and memory usage is higher than is typical with KDE Plasma.
With built-in support for AUR and Flatpaks, as well as the topgrade T.U.I updater, XeroLinux gives you the power to shape your Linux system your way, the easy way.
This description of the project I agree with without reservation. The distribution ships with a relatively small number of applications. To balance this, the welcome screen provides easy access to both classic packages and Flatpaks. The Pamac software centre is quite responsive and easy to navigate. Having a wide range of software provided by Arch, the Arch Linux community, and Flatpak support out of the box is a good combination. I think the developers found a pretty good balance between offering enough features to be useful out of the box while also making it easy to add on components users want.
This was my first experience with XeroLinux and I feel that, in most key aspects, the distribution is doing well. It's fairly easy to set up, it worked with my hardware, and there are a few easy ways to acquire software.
However, I didn't like using XeroLinux. Sometimes this was due to little technical issues such as windows appealing behind the dock or the unified menu not switching to match the active window. These are minor problems which are more annoyances than show stoppers. My main issue when running XeroLinux was that the distribution always felt like it was trying to grab my attention, get underfoot, like a cat that is demanding to be fed.
The main focus of the distribution appears to be to look pretty, to be flashy, to draw the eye. Unfortunately, it succeeds. It is pretty, it does make heavy use of effects and transparency. Which is all well and good for a demo or for someone who is running a Twitch gaming stream. For someone like me who is trying to get work done, flicking between windows to compare code, writing articles, or updating spreadsheets, it's a low-level yet constant distraction. Transparency looks cool, but it makes it harder to read text. Auto-hide docks look neat, but keep hiding windows (or hiding behind windows when I want to access them). Window shuffling and wobbly windows look cool the first few times, but become a speed bump when moving regularly between a dozen open applications. Bright, vibrant themes look neat on the website, but bore into my eyes during a twelve hour day.
Sure, these things can be turned off, but then XeroLinux becomes just yet another Arch-based distribution set up with the Calamares installer and we already have a few dozen of those.
In short, XeroLinux does some stuff pretty well and only has a few problems, most of them minor. It's a decent distribution, especially for a young project. It's not to my personal taste, but it's a pretty solid, rolling release distribution. The project mostly accomplishes what it is designed to do. I don't feel it does anything especially wrong, though I also don't think it does much to set itself apart from many other Arch-based projects, some of them with similar neo-cyber-punk themes. I think Xero needs to find a niche or a special feature to set itself apart. Right now it's doing fine, but it blends into the crowd.
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Visitor supplied rating
XeroLinux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.6/10 from 12 review(s).
Have you used XeroLinux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Rolling Rhino Remix gets fresh start, Fedora planning to modernize live media, FreeBSD quarterly report
Rolling Rhino Remix is an attempt to make a rolling release flavour of the Ubuntu distribution. The Rolling Rhino project strives to keep Ubuntu constantly up to date and employs a handful of custom tools to assist with the process. We talked about the distribution and its custom tools back in June of this year. Rolling Rhino Remix has provided some technical challenges which has led its lead developer, and some other contributors, to rethink the project. A replacement, called Rhino Linux, is being planned, which will seek to address the issues. "Over time the current development model of Rolling Rhino Remix has become untenable. It really is a passion project with code that is not mature. I made it for fun, but it became too big, too quickly, and unfortunately the immature code that makes the distribution is still present today.
I have made teasers about what the team is working on next, and it is not a complete departure of our original aim, which was to provide a rolling release version of Ubuntu. I would like to introduce Rhino Linux, the official successor to Rolling Rhino Remix. This is a large undertaking that completely overhauls the fundamentals of Rolling Rhino Remix, and two new core developers have been added to the development team to help flesh this idea out.
Rhino Linux will be an Ubuntu-based, rolling release operating system with Ubuntu, Pacstall and Xfce at the core of the distribution."
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The Fedora team are currently looking at ways to improve the distribution's live media. The project's live media build process is, by modern standards, older and can be awkward to work with. To address this there is a proposal to update the live media build system and introduce new features, including easy to access persistence partitions. "This also gives us the opportunity to introduce new functionality for live media. New functionality was added to dracut and backported to Fedora so that we can retire the remaining usage of
'livecd-iso-to-disk.sh' and provide a better experience with our live media, particularly for portable backup and rescue environments by introducing the ability to automatically setup persistence on boot when unpartitioned space is detected on a USB stick on boot." If accepted, the change should take place for Fedora 38 in the first half of 2023.
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The FreeBSD project has published its quarterly report for the third quarter of 2022. The report shares work and progress happening in all corners of the FreeBSD project. The report includes information on updates drivers, FreeBSD running in cloud instances, and bhyve improvements. There is also an interesting section of using UFS with filesystem snapshots: "This project will make UFS/FFS filesystem snapshots available when running with journaled soft updates.
The UFS/FFS filesystem has the ability to take snapshots. Because the taking of snapshots was added after soft updates were written they were fully integrated with soft updates. When journaled soft updates were added in 2010, they were never integrated with snapshots. So snapshots cannot be used on filesystems running with journaled soft updates.
Snapshots became less important with the support for ZFS on FreeBSD since ZFS can take snapshots quickly and easily. However there remain two instances where UFS snapshots are still important. The first is that they allow reliable dumps of live filesystems which avoids possibly hours of down time. The second is that they allow the running of background fsck."
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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) |
Learning who ran sudo and setting up firewall
Guess-who asks: When I run a command using sudo is there a way for the program or script to learn who ran the sudo command?
DistroWatch answers: Yes, if you are running an interactive sudo session (for example, by running "sudo -i") or if you're running a script you launched with sudo, you can learn which user invoked the sudo command. The sudo program sets up a few environment variables which can be used to backtrack to see who launched the command.
The two main variables you are probably interested in looking at are SUDO_USER which contains the username of the person who ran sudo and SUDO_UID which contains the person's user ID. In the following example I launch an interactive sudo session and print the name of the effective user (root) and my original username (jesse):
$ sudo -i
[sudo] password for jesse:
# whoami
root
# echo $SUDO_USER
jesse
# exit
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Blocking-everyone asks: UFW is preferred by some distros and firewalld by others. How do they compare and what do you recommend?
When it comes to working with firewalls, something to keep in mind is that there are layers of tools involved. At the bottom layer we find cryptic, complicated, low-level utilities that are accessed via the command line and used to set up rules for how network traffic moves in and out of our computer. These low level tools are called iptables and nftables. Most people don't need to know anything about these low-level, cryptic utilities. If anything, it might be worth being aware that nftables is the successor to iptables and will probably gradually replace it in most situations.
Next we have the middle-level tools. These are command line programs which are designed to make working with iptables and nftables easier. Probably the best known mid-level utility is ufw, the uncomplicated firewall. Tools like ufw exist to translate simple English directives into the more complex, low-level commands used by utilities like iptables.
To understand why these mid-level tools are useful, let's look at an example. Here is how we would block access from any IP address to the OpenSSH service (on port 22) using iptables:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 --dport 22 -j DROP
iptables-save -c > /etc/sysconfig/iptables
Now here is the same instruction using ufw:
ufw deny 22
As you can see, the latter is a lot easier to read and much shorter to type. These two commands accomplish the same thing, but ufw acts as a friendly front-end to the experience. The firewalld equivalent is somewhere in between the two extremes:
firewall-cmd --remove-port=22/tcp
firewall-cmd --runtime-to-permanent
Of course, many people don't want to use the command line at all. They want to use a desktop application that makes the process point-n-click. For people who want to have a big picture, point-n-click experience and not mess about with the command line there is a third layer of utilities. These include tools like Gufw, a graphical front-end for ufw, and firewalld's graphical front-end which is called firewall-config.
These utilities are just attractive tools on top of the previous two layers which make managing the firewall an easier experience. The underlying tools are still nftables and iptables. I feel this is important because, in one sense, it doesn't matter which command line or desktop application you use to manage the firewall; underneath they use the same low-level technologies.
What does matter is your personal preference as to which command line (or graphical) utility you find the most convenient. The firewalld utility (both the command line version and the desktop application) have well deserved reputations for being flexible, powerful, and commonly deployed in business environments. You'll find enterprise distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux typically deploy firewalld. On the other hand, firewall tools like ufw and Gufw are praised for their simplicity and ease of use. It's hard to find a more straight forward way to set up a simple firewall than ufw which is why it tends to be popular in desktop-oriented projects such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint
In short, if you're looking to get into being a professional system administrator then firewalld and its companion firewall-config are good tools to learn. However, if you're looking for something simple, maybe something for home or a small office, then you'll be well served by ufw and its Gufw desktop companion.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
antiX 22
antiX is a fast, lightweight and easy-to-install Linux live CD distribution based on Debian's Stable branch. The project's latest release, antiX 22, substitutes a number of packages and rebuilds packages to avoid dependency on Debian's systemd package. "This is predominantly an update of our last release (antiX-21), but with a newer 4.9.0-326 kernel, latest 3 series IceWM, latest firefox-esr 102.3 (full), seamonkey 2.53.14 (base), improved localisation and fixed Deb archive keys. mps-youtube has been removed since it doesn't seem to work anymore. Sakis3G replaces modem-manager(GUI). Note: elogind, libpam-elogind and libelogind0 have also been removed. Instead we use seatd and consolekit. Many upstream core Debian packages have been rebuilt to remove a hard dependency on libsystemd0/libelogind0. These include apt, cups, dbus, gvfs, openssh, policykit-1, procps, pulseaudio, rpcbind, rsyslog, samba, sane-backends, udisks2, util-linux, webkit2gtk and xorg-server. Those using previous versions of antiX 21 do not need to download this new version. Simply upgrade via apt or synaptic." Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.
OpenBSD 7.2
Theo de Raadt has announced the release of OpenBSD 7.2, the latest version of the OpenBSD project's security focused operating system. "We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 7.2. This is our 53rd release. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install. As in our previous releases, 7.2 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system: New/extended platforms: Added support for Ampere Altra; added support for Apple M2; Added support for Lenovo ThinkPad x13s and other machines using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Various kernel improvements: Allowed bsd.rd and bsd/bsd.mp to boot on Oracle Cloud amd64 instances. Added support for switching from glass console to serial console on arm64 systems that default to glass console." Further details can be found in the release announcement and in the release notes.
Ubuntu 22.10
Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 22.10. The new release will be supported for nine months and carries the codename "Kinetic Kudu". "Ubuntu 22.10 delivers toolchain updates to Ruby, Go, GCC and Rust. OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received. This reduces the memory footprint of Ubuntu Server on smaller devices, VMs or LXD containers. Ubuntu 22.10 also comes with a new debuginfod service to help developers and admins debug programs shipped with Ubuntu. Debugging tools like gdb will automatically download the required debug symbols over HTTPS. Ubuntu 22.10 now supports MicroPython on a variety of microcontrollers, including the Raspberry Pi Pico W. rshell, thonny and mpremote are all available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu graphics stack transition to kms means developers can run Pi-based graphical applications using frameworks like Qt outside of a desktop session and without Pi specific drivers." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement and in the release notes.
Ubuntu 22.10 -- Running the GNOME desktop
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Ubuntu MATE 22.10
Martin Wimpress has announced the release of Ubuntu MATE 22.10. This release reportly offers a number of small, polishing changes rather than a lot of large, technical adjustments. Some of the desktop tweaks include the following: "The usual point release updates to MATE desktop and Ayatana Indicators have been included that fix an assortment on minor bugs. The main change in MATE desktop is to MATE Panel, where we've included an early snapshot release of mate-panel 1.27.0 along with a patch set that adds centre alignment of panel applets. This much requested feature comes from Ubuntu MATE community contributor Gordon N. Squash and allows panel applets to be centre aligned, as well as the usual left and right alignment. I'm sure you'll all join me in thanking Gordon for working on this feature. Centre aligning of applet icons will ship with MATE Desktop 1.28, but we're including it early for Ubuntu MATE users. We've updated MATE Tweak to correctly save/restore custom layouts that use centre aligned applets and all the panel layouts shipped with Ubuntu MATE 22.10 have been updated so they're compatible with center alignment of applets." Further details can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes.
Xubuntu 22.10
Sean Davis has announced the release of Xubuntu 22.10, which will receive nine months of security updates and support. The new release offers version 4.17 of the Xfce desktop. "Xubuntu 22.10, featuring the latest updates from Xfce 4.17, GNOME 43, and MATE 1.26. Xubuntu 22.10 features the latest updates from Xfce 4.17, GNOME 43, and MATE 1.26. The 'bleeding edge' Xfce 4.17 components are included as an early preview to the upcoming Xfce 4.18, expected later this year. You'll find that Xfce 4.17 includes many new features and usability improvements while using Xubuntu 22.10. While we've tested each component shipped in Xubuntu, new bugs and regressions are expected. Please be sure to report any bugs you find." The project's release announcement also highlights improvements to the Thunar file manager, Mousepad text editor, and the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin. Additional information can be found in the distribution's release notes.
Kubuntu 22.10
Kubuntu 22.10 has been released. The latest version of the official Ubuntu edition that features the KDE Plasma desktop comes with KDE Frameworks 5.98, KDE Plasma 5.25 and KDE Gear 22.08: "The Kubuntu team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 22.10 has been released. It features the 'beautiful' KDE Plasma 5.25, simple by default, powerful when needed. Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.19-based Linux kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.98, KDE Plasma 5.25 and KDE Gear 22.08. Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive. Krita, Kdevelop, Yakuake and many many more applications are updated. Applications for core day-to-day usage, such as Firefox, VLC and LibreOffice, are included and updated. PipeWire also replaces PulseAudio as the default audio server. Note - for upgrades from 22.04, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu release team enabling upgrades." See the release announcement and the release notes for further information.
Kubuntu 22.10 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
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Ubuntu Studio 22.10
Ubuntu Studio, an official variant of Ubuntu that comes pre-installed with a selection of the most common free multimedia applications available, has been upgraded to version 22.10: "The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 22.10, code-named 'Kinetic Kudu'. This marks Ubuntu Studio's 32nd release. This release is a regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months (until July 2023)." One of additions to this release is a new "feature uninstaller": "A new addition to the Ubuntu Studio Installer package is the Ubuntu Studio Feature Uninstaller which performs the reverse of the Ubuntu Studio Installer: removes groups of packages from the Ubuntu Studio installation as long as they aren't required by another group of packages. For example, if you have ubuntustudio-photography installed and ubuntustudio-graphics installed but wish to uninstall ubuntustudio-photography, you will still have gimp installed since it's part of the ubuntustudio-graphics metapackage. This method of uninstallation is safe and effective at making your digital studio yours." Read the detailed release announcement and release notes for more information.
Lubuntu 22.10
Simon Quigley has announced the release of Lubuntu 22.10, the latest version of the project's official Ubuntu flavour with LXQt as the preferred desktop environment: "Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 22.10 has been released. With the code name 'Kinetic Kudu', Lubuntu 22.10 is the 23rd release of Lubuntu and the ninth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment. Known issues and notable changes: a bug in LXQt results in duplicate menu entries for the Calamares installer; Lubuntu uses the Calamares system installer in place of the Ubiquity installer that most other flavors use; while we are ensuring 22.04 LTS' Calamares follows the upstream LTS cycle, we decided to get ahead of the curve by shipping Calamares 3.3 Alpha 2 in 22.10; an ongoing concern within the Ubuntu and Lubuntu communities has been the increased startup times for the Firefox web browser due to using the Snap package format instead of the traditional Debian-based package format used for the rest of the system...." Continue to the release announcement for further information.
Ubuntu Unity 22.10
Rudra Saraswat has announced the release of Ubuntu Unity 22.10, the project's first release as one of Ubuntu's official editions. Ubuntu Unity brings back the controversial Unity desktop used by Ubuntu as the default user interface until 2017; it had plenty of detractors, but seemingly also many fans: "The Ubuntu Unity 22.10 has now been released; it is the first stable release of Ubuntu Unity as an official flavor. It introduces a new toggle from the panel to switch between the dark and light theme, and between accent colors. It also replaces all the libadwaita apps with MATE alternatives. The ISOs much smaller, at 2.8GB. The RAM usage has also gone down significantly (around 650MB when idle). You can now install Ubuntu Unity on an existing Ubuntu installation by removing gnome-shell and other GNOME apps, and then installing the ubuntu-unity-desktop package (all the Ubuntu Unity packages are now in universe in the official Ubuntu archive, and no longer in a PPA). We're actively working on adding new features to Unity7, such as support for different refresh rates in unity-settings-daemon, and even replacing such old components and apps and the indicators with the ayatana-* packages. We are working on adding extension support to the Unity shell." Read the full release announcement for additional details.
Ubuntu Unity 22.10 -- Running the Unity desktop
(full image size: 724kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Ubuntu Budgie 22.10
The Ubuntu Budgie team have announced the release of Ubuntu Budgie 22.10 which offers nine months of supports. The new version includes Linux 5.19, software from GNOME 43, and the PipeWire sound software. "The new release has many new core updates as well as a bleeding edge version of budgie itself: The kernel is v5.19. GNOME 43 stack with Mutter 11. Pipewire for everything audio related. This replaces PulseAudio. budgie-desktop is 10.6.4 plus a whole suite of extra capabilities pending the v10.7 release due in the next few months. An overhaul of our default applications shipped in our distro. We also inherit hundreds of stability, bug-fixes and optimizations made to the underlying Ubuntu repositories." Additional information can be found in the distribution's release announcement and in the release notes.
Peropesis 1.8
Peropesis (personal operating system) is a small-scale, minimalist, command-line-based Linux operating system. The project's latest release, version 1.8, places a focus on offering development tools and their dependencies. "In the Peropesis 1.8 release, the GNU gcc and g++ compilers with the infrastructure they need were installed. New software installed: 1. GNU Binutils 2.39. Binutils are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. 2. GNU GCC 12.2.0. GNU Compiler Collection is a compilers suite that supports many languages, such as ada,c,c++,d,fortran,go,lto,objc,obj-c++. 3. GNU GMP 6.2.1. GNU MP is a library for arbitrary precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating point numbers. 4. ISL 0.24. isl is a thread-safe C library for manipulating sets and relations of integer points bounded by affine constraints. 5. GNU MPC 1.2.1. GNU MPC is a C library for the arithmetic of complex numbers with arbitrarily high precision and correct rounding of the result. 5. GNU MPFR 4.1.0. The MPFR library is a C library for multiple-precision floating-point computations with correct rounding. 6. Also libelf-0.187.so and libdebuginfod-0.187.so libraries from elfutils 0.187 software package and libfl.so.2.0.0 library from flex 2.6.4 software package were added." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
* * * * *
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: 2,783
- Total data uploaded: 42.5TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
|
| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Preferred firewall management tool
In this week's Questions and Answers section we talked about various firewall management utilities. These included low-level tools such as iptables and nftables, mid-level tools like ufw and firewalld, as well as graphical applications such as Gufw and firewall-config. What utility, either run from the desktop or command line, do you prefer when it comes time to set up your firewall? Let us know why you like to use your preferred firewall configuration utility in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on whether latest computer purchases included a copy of Linux pre-installed in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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My favourite firewall management tool is...
| firewall-config: | 40 (3%) |
| firewalld: | 88 (6%) |
| iptables: | 102 (7%) |
| Gufw: | 367 (26%) |
| nftables: | 37 (3%) |
| ufw: | 245 (17%) |
| Other: | 84 (6%) |
| I do not manage a firewall: | 469 (33%) |
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|
| Website News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- Gnuinos. Gnuinos is a libre spin of Devuan GNU/Linux (a fork of Debian without systemd). The distribution contains only free and open source software and documentation.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 31 October 2022. 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)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • My way! (by TexasJoe on 2022-10-24 01:13:48 GMT from United States)
I like to customize a distro. XeroLinux will be a challenge. I want to completely remove Flatpack.(Hate it) Then I plan to switch to the Xfce desktop. I may completely desroy Xero. Wish me luck.
2 • Calamares installer, etc ... not too well. (by Greg Zeng on 2022-10-24 01:50:56 GMT from Australia)
As usual, another distro is using the increasing popular Calamares. The old timers continue to use it. Only a few which do use it, fail to do so, properly.
Improper use means avoiding GPARTED. This is the only Linux application that correctly allows full & easy adjustment of the partitions.
Very few Linux systems allow easy use of a grub-customizer, even with Calamares. Most demand the installer clearly naming the Boot partition. Intelligent use of Calamaris will automatically detect the Boot (when it exists) and Swap partitions. Lite, Neon and the Mint range of operating systems use Calamaris properly.
Many users do or do not like the containers of AppImage (not many applications), snapd (more apps than AppImage) or flatpak. Using GDMAP, installation of snapd and flatpak uses so much disk space. This week's review of the Arch-based distribution as usual, avoids mentioning the disadvantage of Arch: needing to compile from source code the necessary applications; a slow & skilled process.
Why the difficulties with Calamares? So many Linux creators do not use it. When they attempt to use Calamares, they fail, imho.
The three Linux "containers" are not yet winning the hearts of Application developers. My preferred internet browser (Slimjet) is on Debian-based Linux and Windows. Like most of the good applications, it is not yet available in any of the three containers. Each container has failings & faults. Out of synchronization with user's settings, latest updates, and the brest applications not yet in their repositories.
3 • XeroLinux (by Guido on 2022-10-24 01:56:31 GMT from Philippines)
I am also using KDE at this moment. The high CPU load is probably also due to Baloo, which indexes all files. When that's done, it should fall off. A lot here reminds me of Garuda Linux. Also a spin from Arch and Manjaro.
4 • ubuntu unity (by dave on 2022-10-24 02:10:46 GMT from United States)
Figures I said something a bit ago about Ubuntu Unity not being an official Ubuntu distribution and now apparently, it is. (probably already was at the time I made the comment)
I find it sort of goofy that Canonical developed Unity, then kicked it to the curb, only to turn around and recognize its use in a derivative distro, developed by someone else. Enough to make a guy's head spin!
Or how about this-- anyone remember Unity Linux?? Even though I don't like Unity (the desktop environment) I always thought the "Unity Linux" name should've been recycled for a Unity (desktop) based distribution. If Canonical had any marketing sense, they would've taken over the monicker for use as the flagship distribution, for Unity development.. especially since they were gunning for the meme of having a 'unified' experience across desktop/laptop/tablet/phone.
..but then again, it was sort of a bad idea for a name to begin with, since there was already a popular game engine called Unity.
5 • @2, Calamares, and Xeroflash (by Justme on 2022-10-24 03:14:21 GMT from United States)
@2 Greg Zeng, I'm having trouble following you, I ran Arch-based distros for some years and never required skills to compile anything. Pacman is as capable and fast as Apt. For AUR packages, a helper like yay is like magic: Type yay -S xxxx on the terminal and go on with whatever you were doing while it does its thing. Never had issues with Calamares, and I also fail to see the connection to grub-customizer.
XeroLinux: There is "niche," and there are gimmicks. This distro seems just gimmicky. As @3 posts, Garuda does the same kind of thing, only they have options other than just flash. I remember early Compiz, when it was all about spinning cubes, wobblies, exploding windows and such. I played with it for a while for kicks, then went back to simplicity. I still like a good looking desktop, but I prefer for it to sit still and behave.
6 • rule-based firewalls (by Trihexagonal on 2022-10-24 04:34:50 GMT from United States)
I've been a fan of rule-based firewalls since using ConSeal PC Firewall on Win98 and have carried over a block port 0 rule from that ruleset into the pf ruleset I'm using right now on this FreeBSD box.
### Block to and from port 0
block quick proto { tcp, udp } from any port = 0 to any
block quick proto { tcp, udp } from any to any port = 0
On Linux I use ufw and feel safe enough using it. I don't have any services running and don't allow myself remote access. If I could use pf on my Linux boxen I would, but would do a lot of things if I only could.
One thing I can do is disconnect my router and run this FreeBSD box straight from the cable modem. It's the only box I have online. That being the only factor I'll take into account leaving it set up like this and am not the least bit worried with my box facing the internet running pf.
FreeBSD is a Server so why wouldn't I? I've posted the ruleset several times and have one for people who use CUPS made from it.
7 • Xero-what?! (by Someguy on 2022-10-24 07:33:52 GMT from United Kingdom)
Don't like 'flashy', don't like KDE, don't like bloat, etc, etc. My PCs are not toys, just get tasks done fast and simply. Makes OS selection easy, more time to get back to the garden, workshop, maybe watch a bit of cricket and rugby...
8 • Ubuntu Unity (by Sven on 2022-10-24 10:03:12 GMT from Estonia)
It was 5 years ago when Ubuntu dropped Unity, with Mark Shuttleworth claiming the project was not sustainable.
5 years later, we once again have an official Ubuntu-based Unity distro, and the project is led by a 12 year old. TWELVE!
Makes me feel mr. Shuttleworth really should reconsider the quality of his workforce.
9 • firewalls (by Andy on 2022-10-24 10:49:50 GMT from Czechia)
I use ufw, because that's what the distros I use (Linux Mint, RaspiOS, Debian) ship with. I used to use Gufw as well, but it turns out it can't handle rules added from ufw, and since I have to use ufw on RaspiOS (which I run without a GUI), I use ufw on my desktop machine and laptop as well.
10 • Firewall (by James on 2022-10-24 12:35:18 GMT from United States)
I use ufw as it is default on the OS's I use.
11 • Xero (by dragonmouth on 2022-10-24 13:33:35 GMT from United States)
From the review I get the impression that XeroLinux is too cute for its own good. The developers forgot the KISS principle.
12 • Firewalls (by Robert McConnell on 2022-10-24 13:35:01 GMT from United States)
My firewall is a dual-port PC running OPNsense sitting between my computers and the Spectrum cable modem. The only problem I have ever had with it is a recent update that failed to recognize. the NIC on the LAN side. I had to revert to the previous version until I can afford to replace that NIC.
13 • @8 (by dave on 2022-10-24 15:17:59 GMT from United States)
I find it difficult to believe that the lead developer is actually 12. I suppose it's possible that it's some kid-genius, but more likely that it's a LARPing adult. Of course I could be wrong, but all we have is a claim on a web page. Anybody can publish whatever they want to the web, with no proof. I'd be more likely to believe it if there was some video evidence of this supposed 12 year old demonstrating the required abilities, but even that could be faked.
14 • kid-genius (by Proba on 2022-10-24 15:44:17 GMT from Bulgaria)
@13, you should check Aaron Swartz on YouTube, if you haven't heard about him. Maybe we have another one of those... :)
15 • @13 dave, Unity and youth (by Justme on 2022-10-24 15:46:46 GMT from United States)
"difficult to believe that the lead developer is actually 12" I'd be more amazed if the developer were in his 60s or 70s. Software is a young person's game. They have the advantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc6gGs2kM4c
You think that's something? Try this:
http://alturl.com/44aex
16 • Firewall (by Cheker on 2022-10-24 16:33:15 GMT from Portugal)
I usually go with a mixture of Gufw and just ufw. I have some rules that can't be put in place with the GUI. Firewalld is also pretty good but I seem to remember it can't configure outbound rules? That's a hell of a downside, but I assume I'm misremembering and if that's true it's just for the GUI, just like Gufw doesn't do everything either. Admittedly the common person doesn't have to configure outbound rules at all
17 • Fedora 38 proposal (by mnrv-ovrf-year-c on 2022-10-24 18:39:22 GMT from Puerto Rico)
I support this, it would only broaden the appeal, but it would also increase the criticism for having one of the best and "boring" distros. If a "version" should support persistence, ple-ease don't make it a grand fuss like "Liveslak". I already have a "frozen" install of Fedora 37 MATE on an external USB disk, maybe live mode with persistence wouldn't be an improvement anyway. I agree completely with @7 about Plasma. Installed Manjaro KDE fresh on an internal SSD on a separate computer and getting flickering menus sometimes. No fix available in searches online, how sad.
18 • Firewalls (by Crunchy on 2022-10-24 20:01:06 GMT from United States)
I've written my own iptables firewall, although I can't say I know what I'm doing. But I'm learning. nmap and nessus tell me everything seems to be blocked, at least.
I like a really tight firewall, and I find most prepackaged firewalls too open for my taste. I like to be able to turn things on and off at a finer-grained level. I also have a blocking hosts file and an ipset full of blocked IPs, and I don't know (ie, am too lazy to research) how to add that in to prepackaged firewalls. If I did, I'd probably use shorewall.
I tend not to like prepackaged, since I end up learning the syntax of that one, and not how to use the underlying network.
19 • Firewall (by Chris on 2022-10-24 22:18:31 GMT from United States)
I used to love SuSEFirewall2 until they depreciated it. Now I use OpenBSD with PF. I wish I found PF sooner since I can accomplish the same thing as SuSEfirewall2 in far fewer rules.
20 • UFW (by rb on 2022-10-24 23:03:12 GMT from United States)
I like UFW. With about 8 rules I type in the terminal, then enable the firewall in systemd, i have a VPN kill switch. All traffic is routed through the VPN tunnel. If the VPN connection drops the firewall stops all internet traffic. Much easier than setting up Cisco router or firewall which have similar syntax and command line only interface. I tried Firewalld but does the same thing and I'd have to learn new syntax. It didn't seem to offer anything new.
@2 " the disadvantage of Arch: needing to compile from source code the necessary applications; a slow & skilled process." What are you talking about? If you said Gentoo, yes. That might be true. Arch does not require compiling the source code of the necessary applications, as one commenter pointed out. The PKGBUILD file contains all the instructions for downloading and compiling the source code for anything that needs compiled and does it for you. It is a very easy process. Most applications that this would apply to compile faster than apt can sync the sources.list and download and install the binary and config files. While you may see this as a disadvantage, it is actually a strength.
21 • My pf firewall ruleset (by Trihexagonal on 2022-10-24 23:42:38 GMT from United States)
@19 "Now I use OpenBSD with PF. I wish I found PF sooner since..."
The last time I ran OpenBSD was 6.2 but I used the same ruleset I have on my FreeBSD boxen the last 17 year with a one word syntax change to use the word "egress " on the outbound rule. Looking at the OpenBSD pf manpage now it may be alright just like it is.
You might as well have it here for reference. It's the ruleset I'm running on this machine:
### Macro name for external interface
ext_if = "em0"
netbios_tcp = "{ 22, 23, 25, 80, 110, 111, 123, 512, 513, 514, 515, 6000, 6010, 8000, 8080 }"
netbios_udp = "{ 123, 512, 513, 514, 515, 5353, 6000, 6010 }"
### Reassemble fragmented packets
scrub in on $ext_if all fragment reassemble
### Default deny everything
block log all
### Pass loopback
set skip on lo0
### Block spooks
antispoof for lo0
antispoof for $ext_if inet
block in from no-route to any
block in from urpf-failed to any
block in quick on $ext_if from any to 255.255.255.255
block in log quick on $ext_if from { 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16, 255.255.255.255/32 } to any
### Block all IPv6
block in quick inet6 all
block out quick inet6 all
### Block to and from port 0
block quick proto { tcp, udp } from any port = 0 to any
block quick proto { tcp, udp } from any to any port = 0
### Block specific ports
block in quick log on $ext_if proto tcp from any to any port $netbios_tcp
block in quick log on $ext_if proto udp from any to any port $netbios_udp
### Keep and modulate state of outbound tcp, udp and icmp traffic
pass out on $ext_if proto { tcp, udp, icmp } from any to any modulate state
22 • Xero Linux (by Andy Prough on 2022-10-25 02:04:45 GMT from United States)
I feel like I've read this exact same review several times over from a bunch of me-too Arch respins. Xero Linux seems like a fine project, and its devs and users are happy with it I'm sure, but I don't know that it rates any special mention on Distrowatch's front page.
It reminds me of 10-15 years ago, when everyone who had a new idea for a different colored wallpaper was doing an Ubuntu respin. What's funny is that a distro like openSUSE supports about a dozen different desktops and each one of them is at least as deserving of its own review as these Arch respins, but it will never get more than one review in a year from a major reviewer, sometimes only one review over a multiple year period. And then youtubers will say, "it seems like no one ever uses openSUSE, people only ever talk about Arch or Ubuntu". Well yes, because Arch's and Ubuntu's many different respins grab all the review headlines and soak up all the space on the Linux news sites.
23 • @22 (by rb on 2022-10-25 02:39:52 GMT from United States)
@22
I agree with your first paragraph. I don't think it deserves any attention or review on its own merits as a distro as it really is just an Arch Linux spin, using their repos, with desktop tweaks.
" 'it seems like no one ever uses openSUSE, people only ever talk about Arch or Ubuntu'. Well yes, because Arch's and Ubuntu's many different respins grab all the review headlines and soak up all the space on the Linux news sites. "
I think this is a very simplified rationale for why you believe people do not use openSUSE as much as other named distros. There may be a million reasons why it does not get more attention. It does have an interesting history. In its inception it was Slackware based. It was called SUSE before Novell spun it into a free version of their Enterprise version. It was then it became known as openSUSE. Then there was the Microsoft agreement and all that drama which upset a lot of people in the FOSS and Linux communities. It has been sold many times since then.
Not everyone is keen on the features touted by openSUSE. BTRFS and snapshots for one. Admins can find Yast cumbersome and limiting. Everyday users, such as myself, may not find the software they need in their repositories. I do not find their community packages have what I am looking for and therefore not a reliable resource. IMO, it is a niche distro that appeals to a subset of users.
Since early 2000's I have always tried distros based on the page rankings on DistroWatch home page. I never tried a distro based on a review anywhere. In reality, openSUSE is number 11 for now, which is high comparatively. Ubuntu is 6 and Arch is 57.
Lastly, having different community desktop versions may actually fracture Ubuntu's rankings and muddle their true usage statistics.
24 • @14 @15 (by dave on 2022-10-25 04:50:17 GMT from United States)
"Software is a young person's game. They have the advantage."
Generally speaking, that may be true, however most 12 year olds definitely do not 'have the advantage' over an 18 or 20 year old who started to learn programming when they were 12.
'Young' is relative and there are plenty of adults within the spectrum of 'relatively young' that are well under 60. Most of the 12 year olds who are interested in programming are not competent enough to lead a project as complicated as a linux distribution and certainly not a behemoth of a desktop environment like Unity. Note that I never said it was impossible, but it is improbable.
Look at all of the major developers of desktop environments. Pretty sure most of them are middle aged and I guarantee you won't find many developers of linux distributions that are under 18. I doubt you will find any, actually. Definitely not any good ones. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and he's not the one maintaining/developing Unity, however just the linux distribution bit alone is tough to believe.
You're certainly free to take the story at face value, but I think a fair amount of skepticism is warranted. People do lie about their age pretty often-- especially on the internet. The meme that 'programming is a young persons game' is precisely the reason I would expect a programmer to stretch the truth about their age. After all, doesn't 12 sound much more impressive than 22 or 32?
And yes I'm familiar with Aaron Schwartz' story and that is a fair anecdote, but it doesn't exactly wash away any doubt I have in this instance, especially when you look at what Schwartz was doing when he was 12. Compare the level of complication with what we're talking about.
25 • @23 (by Andy Prough on 2022-10-25 05:40:34 GMT from United States)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make a compelling argument for using openSUSE which I haven't personally used for a few years. But I do know they put a lot of work into their different desktop integrations - probably more work than most respin developers. Another example is MX, Mint and Manjaro - each project puts a huge amount of work into their different desktop versions. But a major review site is then only likely to pick one desktop from each to discuss each year, while at the same time reviewing as many as a dozen Arch respins, each of which involves less work. You would be better off as a distro to promote numerous low-quality independent respins than to do a lot of hard desktop integration work yourselves in-house.
26 • @25 (by rb on 2022-10-25 06:16:00 GMT from United States)
@25 ". . .better off as a distro to promote numerous low-quality independent respins than to do a lot of hard desktop integration work yourselves"
If one were hoping for a higher chance that your distro would get a review, then maybe. I don't think anyone is creating and developing a distro for reviews. I think they are likely doing it to create a working desktop environment that suits their needs and hopefully others. I also don't think reviews, positive or negative have any major impact on a distro's popularity or overall usage. A review is just an opinion, nothing more nothing less. It is not a metric by which the average user decides which distro they use on a long-term basis.
27 • @26, Unity and youth (by Justme on 2022-10-25 10:51:16 GMT from United States)
"most 12 year olds definitely do not 'have the advantage' over an 18 or 20 year old who started to learn programming when they were 12." They do if they started at age 6 or before. Coding is learning new languages, and the younger you are the easier it is. It gets progressively more difficult as you age. That's nature.Then there's nurture: There are quite a few 13 and under kids out there coming up with worthwhile inventions, getting programming certifications (as young as 6) with outstanding scores, even starting tech businesses. There's a common thread, most though not all come from Asia, specifically the Indian subcontinent. In the west, it may be "let kids be kids" but in those countries children are expected to learn and excel if possible.
"I would expect a programmer to stretch the truth about their age." Then there must be a bunch of child-like midgets out there passing themselves off. Now that would be improbable. Here are two "midgets" making presentations with more poise and erudition than shown by most adults. Many more examples out there.
https://www.disruptorawards.com/2012-honoree-blog/2017/1/19/thomas-suarez-carrotcorp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxTXZYROnd8
Attaching Ubuntu to an existing DDE, including Unity, is no herculean task. I could do that. It's maintaining and updating and upgrading that requires high coding skills. The Unity dev and 5 or 6 others with him seem to be up to that task with plenty of time for other projects. Whether they are 12 or 20 is irrelevant.
28 • Preferred Firewall (by Whattteva on 2022-10-25 14:30:15 GMT from United States)
I'm quite surprised that the BSD firewall solutions (ie. pf, IPFW, IPF) are not mentioned, especially pf, which in my opinion, is the superior solution and probably one of the most widely deployed thanks to appliance-based solutions like pfSense and OPNsense.
I personally use FreeBSD's pf since that's my OS of choice. They do run a somewhat outdated syntax compared to OpenBSD, but it's fine for my needs.
29 • XeroLinuz (by Dasher on 2022-10-25 15:37:52 GMT from Spain)
This distribution could be a bash script. And that's not a bad thing. I think these distros could benefit from being installed on top of arch. I'm sure the 5 or 6 things they added to arch could be done in AN AUR package or similar so you could install it through yum.
30 • @29 (by rb on 2022-10-25 18:51:47 GMT from United States)
@29
I agree 100. I think there needs to be a distinct line drawn between what qualifies as a distro vs a desktop theme. It definitely could be an AUR package instead of being released as a separate distro ISO file. I think the only real difference is the installer. If you already have an Arch system installed but wanted the XeroLinux setup and addons for some odd reason, you could just install it as a package. At any rate, it could be easily be modified to install on any distro for that matter. Candy for newbies IMO.
31 • firewall management (by Gazz on 2022-10-25 20:45:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
pf via the cli is my favourite fw tool. Very easy syntax
32 • XeroLinux and other Arch based distros (by Tomas on 2022-10-26 20:08:57 GMT from Czechia)
There are 23 active Arch based distros on Distrowatch. It would be interesting to have a comparison of them.
My first Arch based distro was Antergos, not active anymore, but I run it after having found the way to keep it updated (removing any link to its repositories).
Before that I tried to find another distro of its qualities and came to Namib (not active any more) and finally to RebornOS.
If I remember well, the developers claimed it to substitute Antergos, and one of them came from that group.
When I see that it is only no.73 on the popularity list, while EndeavorOS is no.2, I think that something is wrong (I did not like it).
The only reason I can think of why it is so is that Distrowatch says its desktop is Gnome (only) - though the accompanying text says the live ISO boots to Gnome but the installer allows you to install almost any desktop you may wish. Who reads that?
Maybe a review could help.
33 • preferred firewalls - OpenSnitch and OPNsense (by Simon Plaistowe on 2022-10-26 23:23:19 GMT from New Zealand)
On my Linux Mint desktops I use OpenSnitch. This explanation of why is as good as any...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0RRp6N6apo
On my LAN perimeter I use OPNsense but I suppose I could've chosen pfSense or IPFire. I just like the OPNsense interface better.
34 • Me Too! (by penguinx86 on 2022-10-27 03:46:45 GMT from United States)
I had to laugh when I read @22. Yes, it seemed like everyone and their brother was making Ubuntu respins 10-15 years ago. I tried them all. Sometimes they were a flash in the pan that was unsupported a year later. My favorite was Commodore OS Linux, which emulated the look and feel and sound of a Commodore 64. They really did a good job with it. They even sold computers that looked like a Commodore 64 but with an x86 processor that could run Linux. Oh, the nostalgia! I really wanted to buy one, but the company folded before I could order one. But after trying the multitude of Ubuntu spins, I finally settled on Linux Mint for hardware driver compatibility (especially wifi drivers) and a better choice of desktop environments without Unity/Gnome3/Gnome Shell, without the Activities Overlay and without the permanent dock on the left side of the screen.
35 • firewall (by Birb Steppers on 2022-10-27 08:09:56 GMT from Australia)
OpenSnitch not strictly a firewall, but it suits me great!
36 • Firewalls (by Gary H on 2022-10-27 14:52:15 GMT from United States)
The Best Firewall is firewalld and firewall-config with firewall-applet.
It is the best because it allows the user to select what to allow and what to block.
Other firewalls fail to explain what they do, if anything.
Number of Comments: 36
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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| • 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 |
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| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
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| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
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Probatus Spectra Linux
Probatus Spectra Linux was a new Linux distribution version for both beginners and experienced Linux users. This product release originates from Probatus' desire to have more impact on what was included in Linux distributions in general and especially on those which Probatus certifies its products with, recommends to its customers and supports. The complete Spectra Linux retail package consists of the base operating environment delivered on three disks and additional disks containing evaluation versions of professional Linux software, a massive knowledge base, and an exclusive set of productivity tools.
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