 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1000, 2 January 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
This is not only our first newsletter of the year, this week we are also pleased to celebrate a special milestone. This is the 1,000th edition of DistroWatch Weekly, the accumulation of nearly 20 years of weekly publications! How much material is in two decades of Weekly editions? It's in the ballpark of 2,500 articles or approximately 5,600,000 words. It's an overview of a few thousand news announcements, more than 13,000 screenshots, over 6,500 stable open source operating system releases summarized, and more than 2,800 torrents seeded. We've published answers to over 470 questions from curious community members and over 80 Tips & Tricks articles. You could say we've been busy over the past 20 years! We hope you'll continue to follow along and support us as we work toward our 2,000th Weekly publication.
To celebrate this milestone of 1,000 issues we've asked present and past contributors of DistroWatch to talk about their Linux journey and highlight some of their favourite distributions. Our Feature Story contains their responses and thoughts on some of the gems of the Linux ecosystem. Then, in our News section, we report on Fedora trying to unify kernel updates while also speeding up the shutdown process when systemd services hang. We also report on Slackware testing and requesting feedback on newer versions of the Linux kernel. In our Questions and Answers column we offer tips on tacking down which processes are consuming excessive disk space. One way to prevent a process, user, or package manager from taking up too much disk space is to partition the hard drive into smaller pieces. Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll how many partitions your main computer has. Plus we share a summary of the many releases of the past two weeks and list the torrents we are seeding. Finally, we are pleased to announce three new distributions, Vanilla OS, CachyOS, and Nobara Project, have been added to our database. Details on Vanilla OS, an immutable, Ubuntu-based distribution; the Arch-based CachyOS, and the Fedora-based Nobara Project are presented below. We wish you all a wonderful week, a prosperous new year ahead, and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Our favourite projects of all time
- News: Fedora to unify kernel images and speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel versions
- Questions and answers: Finding what is consuming disk space
- Released in the past two weeks: Linux Mint 21.1, Tails 5.8, Guix System 1.4.0, BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium
- Torrent corner: BunsenLabs Linux, EndeavourOS, Haiku, KaOS, KDE neon, Manjaro Linux, Tails
- Opinion poll: One partition or many partitions?
- New additions: Vanilla OS, Nobara Project, CachyOS
- New distributions: GrapheneOS, Serpent OS, Athena OS, embassyOS, carbonOS
- Reader comments
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| Feature Story |
Something to talk about by Jesse Smith
Leading up to this week, and its 1,000th edition of DistroWatch Weekly, we wanted to mark the occasion by having our contributors talk about Linux distributions which were special to them in some way. It could be a favourite distribution, it could be their first, or even one they don't currently use but which encapsulates something special.
I've been using Linux for over 20 years and writing for DistroWatch for over 12. I have probably test driven an average of two distributions per week during my time with this publication, which means I've used in the range of 1,200 versions of Linux distributions for over a day. I'd also estimate that, including brief first-look experiences, I've probably run over 500 distinct Linux projects over the past decade, between writing reviews, evaluating projects on the waiting list, and gathering information for the DistroWatch database.
Narrowing this collection of experiences enough to focus on just one project that would stand out as being special to me was going to be difficult.
I thought about revisiting my first Linux distribution, a long since extinct, minimal flavour of Slackware called Pygmy Linux. Armed with no compiler, desktop, or package manager its claim to fame was it could be run from a DOS/Windows partition and fit on about five floppy disks. I was looking for a free flavour of Unix I could run at home (and download over a dial-up connection) with minimal destruction to my existing system. Pygmy Linux, with its extremely limited, bare bones approach, proved to be a worthwhile learning tool for someone trying to wrap his head around shell scripting and Linux internals.
I could talk about my first full-time Linux distro, the one which made me believe Linux could replace Windows on my computer eventually: Phat Linux. Phat was much larger than Pygmy, featured the KDE 2 desktop, and was based on Mandrake Linux. It, like its parent, is long since gone, but it got me using Linux as my primary desktop operating system.
Likewise, I considered doing a deeper dive on Fedora, the first distribution I got friends to run without problems once I'd set it up for them. Or Linux Mint, the first distribution I was able to give to non-techie people and have them set it up on their own with little or no help from me. The latter I especially feel was a key milestone, around a decade ago, as it demonstrated Linux could not only fulfill the needs of many regular home users, but it actually required less hand holding than Windows for people doing fresh installs.
Linux Mint 21
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I also considered focusing on some less mainstream, yet very cleanly designed, cool, or interesting projects. The Void project, with its incredible speed, unique tools, and clean design speaks to my geeky heart in a way most distributions cannot. I also thought about talking about the operating system which currently powers this website, FreeBSD, and all the aspects of its design, documentation, and stability which make it one of my all-time favourite open source operating systems. I flirted with the idea of writing about Bedrock Linux, a meta-distribution which stitches together multiple distributions on the same filesystem.
In the end though, I decided to focus the bulk of my attention on a Linux distro which showcases so much of what I love about Linux distributions and the Linux community: MX Linux.
On the surface, some people might question why I'd pick MX as one of my all time favourite projects, as opposed to the vast, stable Debian project upon which MX is based. Or why I'd choose MX as opposed to the champion of beginner friendly distributions: Ubuntu. It would be a fair question - on the surface, MX Linux appears to simply be Debian Stable with some custom utilities, many of them inherited from other projects such as antiX and MEPIS Linux. Which, to be honest, is a big part of why I adore this distribution.
A big part of open source, to me, has always been the option to collaborate, to share, and to build on what came before us. When a proprietary project dies, its code typically dies with it. We cannot dig through the rubble of failed commercial operating systems looking for useful bits to employ elsewhere. With open source operating systems we can salvage pieces off old projects to jump-start new ones. This both reduces effort and allows us to learn from the efforts and wisdom of past developers.
MX Linux 21 -- Running the Xfce desktop
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MX Linux isn't fresh and shiny, new and unique. It is very much a collection of pieces (components pulled from Debian, MEPIS, and antiX) which are known to work and have shown their worth. MX Linux, while it has a design that does appeal to me, is an exercise in function over form, practicality over pure design, and what works over idealism. It's an operating system I can use to get stuff done because it's largely built on components that have survived decades through a contest of the fittest.
MX Linux isn't flashy or trendy, it doesn't embrace a purely portable, immutable, or strict open source only policy. It uses an installer that works, because it does just what it needs to do. It includes MX Tools because these are items developers have found it useful to create and keep around. It sits upon Debian's rock solid stability while adding a light mixture of backports for up to date desktop software, providing modern tools on a tried and tested foundation.
MX Linux 21 -- Exploring the MX Tools collection
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To me it doesn't really matter that MX Linux primarily uses the Xfce desktop (though I do find it well suited to my style), that it uses a vertical desktop panel (though I'd probably end up putting the panel on the left side of the screen anyway), or that MX runs SysV init (though I'm the upstream maintainer of SysV init so it's a nice bonus).
What matters to me is MX Linux tends to take a middle of the road approach, delivering a balance of performance and features, a balance of friendly tools and staying out of the way. Everything feels like it has been tested by people who use this software daily, everything feels like the result of a trial by fire where what works has won out over someone's vision for what should have worked. So often in my reviews I write something to the effect of, "This sounds great in theory, but how does it work in practise?" Usually a project's ideals and goals don't get reflected in solid results. MX is different, it doesn't feel like a project of lofty goals, it feels like a project of pieces that work well together.
This is what I want in a daily driver - an operating system that I can install in just a few minutes and that will work, and continue to work smoothly, for years. I don't want to think about my operating system - I don't want to hunt down components or be annoyed by pop-ups or pestered by first-run screens. I just want to slap my distribution on a computer and get to work. MX Linux does that for me. I've been running MX for around five years and have run into two bugs I can recall, neither of them significant or something that couldn't be fixed by performing a full upgrade through the package manager. It is a solid track record that has survived across three versions.
MX Linux, by being entirely unexciting, trouble-free, and predictable is the project which makes me happiest to be a Linux user. It is my practical tool of choice, my base from where I test other projects, my centre of calm in a world of projects trying to reinvent computing.
This is what I love about Linux: I've found a distribution which perfectly fits my needs and outlook, a project which fits my philosophy. It doesn't matter if no one else likes it, or that it doesn't attract a crowd. There are lots of other distributions for the cutting edge crowd, the free software purists, and the people who like flashy desktops. There are distros for all of those people too. But this one fits my wants like a glove and that ability - to find an operating system so well suited to my personality - is what I love about the Linux community.
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Picking a favourite by Joshua Allen Holm
When Jesse asked me to contribute to the 1,000th issue of DistroWatch Weekly and write about a favourite project, I was happy to do so, but a little hesitant. Picking a favorite Linux distribution was not easy. In fact, my internal dialog looked something like the March 1, 1999, strip of User Friendly, the now defunct web comic, which featured Greg, Mike, and Pitr arguing over which distribution to install on their company's servers.
User Friendly Comic by J. D. "Illiad" Frazer
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My Linux experience began 25+ years ago with a Red Hat Linux retail box set. However, that Red Hat box set was only the beginning. Not long after that first foray into Linux, I was trying out all the Linux distributions and various BSDs by purchasing bundles of CDs from vendors like CheapBytes. Dozens of discs would come in the mail, and I would spend weeks installing and reinstalling different operating systems before finally settling on one to use for the next several months before beginning the process all over again.
Of all the Linuxes and BSDs I have tried, there are several that I could make a compelling case for being a good choice for myself or to recommend to others, but which one is the one that was, like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, just right? Red Hat is where my journey began, but that was before the split into Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both are great, but Fedora releases too frequently for my tastes, and RHEL and its clones, while having a more agreeable release and support timetable, have a focus on enterprise usage, so the package selection lacks many of the things I want to install on my computers. My personal preference is for something that releases a major version every couple of years, supports that release a while after the next major release comes out, and includes packages that purely enterprise-focused distributions do not include. After considerable testing of various options, I narrowed my choices down to Ubuntu's LTS releases and Debian Stable. In the end, Debian won out, but that does have an asterisk; all of my computers run Debian, but in some cases that is the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS or OSMC, not Debian itself.
The decision to finally standardized everything around Debian was based on a few things. The biggest of these was the single DVD-sized install image that provided a server install or one of several desktop environments. If I want an Xfce desktop on an older computer, I can install that using the same flash drive that I used to install a GNOME desktop on a newer computer or a server installation with no graphical user interface. Debian provides the right combination of flexibility and choice for me to do pretty much whatever I want with my personal computers. Sure, getting a new major version every couple of years might be too slow for some, but I am very happy with Debian 11's GNOME 3.38 desktop. When Debian 12 comes out, I will happily upgrade and be excited for the new features, but for now my computers running Debian 11 do everything I could possibly want them to do.
I also want to give an honorable mention to FreeBSD. My review of the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD for OpenSource.com was what caused Jesse to reach out to me to ask me if I would be interested in contributing reviews to DistroWatch. PC-BSD would rebrand to TrueOS not long after my review was published and eventually become discontinued. FuryBSD, another FreeBSD-based operating system I reviewed on OpenSource.com, was discontinued shortly after my review. However, FreeBSD itself is still ticking along at a pace that matches my personal preference. If I had more compatible hardware, I think I would have answered Jesse's prompt with a combination of FreeBSD on servers and GhostBSD on desktops/laptops, assuming that BSDs would be acceptable answers to a prompt to write about a favorite Linux distribution.
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wattOS by Jeff Siegel
In 2009, I was distro hopping, trying to find something that would work with the second generation of the Asus netbook that I used when traveling. Those were the days of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, as well as EasyPeasy, Joli OS, and Eeebuntu. But none did what I wanted - light, quick, and easy to use.
Then I stumbled on wattOS, a 32-bit distro based on Ubuntu (and later Debian) that used a refreshed LXDE desktop. And I finally understood what made Linux and FOSS so much fun. Anyone, sensing a need for a distro with specific requirements, could create one. It was almost enough to send me down the development rabbit hole - WriterBuntu, anyone?
Ron Ropp, wattOS's developer, shared my desire for fast, quick and simple. So not only did he work some magic under the hood to make Watt incredibly responsive, but he understood the need for software that did the job but that didn't include features that weren't necessary. So Abiword and Gnumeric instead of those early and bloated versions of LibreOffice. It may be difficult to believe these days, but the 2010 or so version of Abiword was all any freelancer could hope for. And you didn't have to wait and wait and wait for it to load.
wattOS R12 -- Running the LXDE desktop
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I spent entirely too much time in the wattOS forums - so much so, in fact, that I can take credit for Audacious becoming Watt's music player. Ropp was looking for something light, and music players then were as they are now - lots of features that often required extra memory and that weren't necessary for anyone who just wanted to play music.
I suggested Audacious, and Ropp liked it and used it. How's that for someone whose coding didn't go past HTML?
Development of wattOS ceased back around 2016, but in late 2022, has resurfaced. This light, low resource distribution is coming back, offering efficient computing once again! Let me see if I can find one of my old Asus netbooks.
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CrunchBang Linux by Robert Rijkhoff
My love affair with CrunchBang Linux (often abbreviated as #!) started in 2010. I had played around with Linux a little bit and wanted to install a light-weight distro on an old spare laptop. As I was still fairly unfamiliar with Linux I used DistroWatch's search page to select a handful of distros in the Old Computers category and, as I feared, I ran into all sorts of issues with the first couple of distros I tried - most of them wouldn't install, and if they did the system was hardly usable. By the time I tried the last distro on the list my expectations were low. The distro's name - CrunchBang, named after the sound your computer makes when it goes pop - didn't instil much hope either. But, it worked! Not only that, it was love at first sight. I instantly adored the clean, minimal interface and the performance was great.
CrunchBang was based on Debian's Stable branch and used the Openbox window manager. Its main raison d'être was that it made Openbox usable. By default, Openbox is extremely minimalistic - so much so that the environment might be acceptable to Diogenes, had he still been alive (though it's more likely he wouldn't own a computer). Openbox only includes an application menu, which you can open by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop. There's nothing else; not even a panel, system tray or wallpaper. CrunchBang customised Openbox so that it looked and behaved more like a desktop environment.
CrunchBang Linux 11 -- This was the last CrunchBang release
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The interface was still minimal. CrunchBang had a single panel at the top with two workspace switchers (which doubled up as taskbars) and a system tray. The only other noticeable feature was Conky, which is an application that displays system information on the desktop. Other than that it was a blank canvas which you could customise to your heart's content. Typically, that involved editing configuration files. For instance, to change the panel or tweak what information Conky displayed you had to edit one or more text files. This was even true for simple things, such as adding or removing items from the menu.
Tinkering with the system was part of the fun and CrunchBang users often shared what weird and wonderful things they had achieved in the Artwork & Screenshots section on the forums. I did a bit of tinkering as well, but instead of making CrunchBang more extravagant I went in the other direction - I made it even more spartan. I removed the basic graphical applications used to tweak Openbox (because who doesn't enjoy editing XML files by hand) and applications such as Synaptic (the graphical software manager). That wasn't because I found CrunchBang too bloated. It was just that I loved the minimalism and simplicity.
My love affair with CrunchBang ended abruptly in 2015, when the sole developer (Philip Newborough, aka "corenominal") announced he had decided to stop developing the distro. He felt that desktop environments such as LXDE had made CrunchBang redundant, and he wanted to focus on other projects. Personally, I feel that CrunchBang stilled filled a niche. What I loved about CrunchBang was that it was different from common desktop environments. My first impression of Linux on the desktop was that it tried to emulate, or catch up with, the likes of Windows and macOS. That wasn't the case with CrunchBang. It was its own thing, something you could never have on Windows or macOS. And it was bloody good: minimal, customisable and super fast.
Of course, I'm looking through rose-tinted glasses. CrunchBang was the first distro I ran as my daily driver. This was the time I started to learn how Linux works. I installed my first LAMP stack on CrunchBang, for instance. Everything was new and exciting. If I had run, say, Ubuntu I would have had similar nostalgic memories.
Still, there was something special about CrunchBang. And it's not just the distro itself. I feel distros like NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are much more interesting from a purely technological point of view. The main thing that made CrunchBang unique was its remarkably knowledgeable and friendly community. I dislike forums as much as everyone else, but the CrunchBang forum was an exception. The community was genuinely welcoming and helpful. Even though I wasn't much of a tinkerer myself, I loved how people shared how they had configured their system or how they had tweaked Conky. There was a fair bit of banter as well. Honestly, it's the only forum where I lasted longer than a few weeks.
As soon as the end of CrunchBang was announced the community started working on a successor. Unfortunately, there was a split; we now have CrunchBang++ and BunsenLabs. The latter is the spiritual continuation of CrunchBang; it's where most of the community went and it still has a fairly active forum full of nice people - I still recognise a few names from the early 2010s. So, if you're looking for a minimal, customisable distro created by a small but friendly community than it's worth giving BunsenLabs a try.
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A look back on over 20 years of Linux by Ladislav Bodnar
Back in 1999, I had a wonderful opportunity to improve significantly my Linux skills. My local telecommunication company launched a special rate for weekend landline telephone calls - a fixed nominal price for any call exceeding 30 minutes, irrespective of the duration. As connecting to the internet via a 56kbps dial-up modem was no different from a standard phone call, I used this special to connect at 7pm on Friday and to only disconnect at 7am on Monday when the expensive weekday telephone rate kicked in again; that was 60 hours of non-stop internet for an equivalent of less than US$2! Of course, I could never have stayed connected this long with Windows 98 which would routinely crash, killing my modem connection in the process. But with the much more solid Mandrake Linux that I had on another partition of my Twinhead laptop, this worked like a charm. I spent weekend after weekend using Linux only.
When ADSL arrived in my suburb in 2001 (and with it the joy of an always-on internet), I was attracted to a little-known source-based distribution called Sorcerer Linux. It was a distro similar to Gentoo; it required downloading the source code of all the components and compiling everything on my own computer. Sorcerer provided a wonderful set of utilities for this and I found myself spending much time updating and optimising my Linux installation (I knew the kernel configuration intimately as I learnt to compile a perfect small kernel optimised exactly for my hardware). The kernel compiled relatively fast, but compiling XFree86 or KDE would take hours! Still, I enjoyed the experience. At about the same time, I also removed Windows from my computer and I never used it again.
I also happened to work for a Linux company at this time and I had plenty of opportunities to experiment with different Linux distributions. Once the novelty of Sorcerer wore off, I switched to Debian which I found perfect for my needs (I remember writing a review where I claimed that Debian's name for its unstable branch, known as "sid", stood for "still in development", for which I got a lot of flack on Slashdot!). I used Debian on my main workstation for years, until the arrival of systemd for which I had developed some distrust. At this point I switched to the Gentoo-based Calculate Linux which I still use today and which has proven to be a reliable workhorse. I also own the excellent MintBox and use it as an entertainment system (although nowadays it runs the Arch-based Bluestar Linux, rather than the original Linux Mint).
Bluestar Linux 6.1.1 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Fedora to unify kernel images and speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel versions
The Fedora project is looking at moving away from generating new initrd images on computers performing upgrades and, instead, having a unified kernel image which can be installed or upgraded without extra work on the target computer. The unified kernel change proposal explains: "The goal is to move away from initrd images being generated on the installed machine. They are generated while building the kernel package instead, then shipped as part of a unified kernel image.
A unified kernel image is an all-in-one EFI binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature. The Secure Boot signature covers everything, specifically the initrd is included which is not the case when the initrd gets loaded as separate file from /boot.
Main motivation for this move is to make the distro more robust and more secure.
Switching the whole distro over to unified kernels quickly is not realistic though. Too many features are depending on the current workflow with a host-specific initrd (and host-specific kernel command line), which is fundamentally incompatible with unified kernels where everybody will have the same initrd and command line.
Another new change going into the Fedora project is a fix to a long-standing issue: systemd hanging for long periods of time while trying to shutdown the system. "Currently, a service that fails to stop at shutdown time can block shutdown for up to 2 minutes. This is extremely frustrating for our users - someone goes to shutdown or reboot their system, and then unexpectedly has to wait for a long time before they can do anything else.
The most common service to cause this issue is PackageKit, but there are others.
When a service fails to shutdown when it is instructed to do so, it is not behaving properly, and it is preventing the system from behaving in an orderly and predictable manner. Desktop APIs exist for cases when services or apps legitimately need to prevent shutdown, and these allow the shutdown inhibit to be communicated to admins and users, so they understand what is happening. When the user decides to shut down anyway, services must terminate in a timely manner. The Workstation Working Group feels that 15 seconds is the maximum appropriate time for both system and user services, and that Fedora should be robust to buggy and misbehaving services that do not shut down in an appropriate manner." Further details are offered in the proposal.
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New kernel versions are being tested on Slackware Linux and the testing has revealed some problems with the latest Linux kernels, particularly on 32-bit machines: "I've been trying to shape this up for weeks, but there are still issues, and maybe someone out there can help. The biggest problem is that the 32-bit kernels crash on boot. Initially there's some sort of Intel ME failure (this is on a Thinkpad X1E). If those modules are blacklisted, then the kernel will go on to crash loading the snd_hda_intel module. The other issue is that I've got a 4K panel in this machine, and have always appended the kernel option video=1920x1080@60 to put the console in HD instead, and then loaded a Terminus console font to make the text even larger. With these kernels, that option is completely ignored. I've tried some other syntax I've seen online to no avail. And when the Terminus font is loaded the text gets even smaller for some reason." People who have workarounds for these issues are encouraged to report solutions to the Slackware team.
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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) |
Finding what is consuming disk space
Running-out-of-room asks: Over the past few weeks whenever I login to my account and launch the web browser a warning message pops up. It used to say 1.2GB of room is left on the root partition and offers to show an analysis. Then the next week it said 1.1GB of space free, then last week it's down to 1.0GB. How do I figure out what is taking up all the space and deal with it? My home is on another partition so it's not my documents or browser cache using up the space. Any other ideas?
DistroWatch answers: Typically, when the /home directory is stored on its own partition, the root directory is host to the base operating system and some key components. A root partition usually holds applications, their resource files (such as image and audio files), configuration information, databases, and log files. Usually databases and log files are set up to self-clean or rotate, meaning they usually don't take up increasing amounts of disk space over time. Configuration files and most applications don't grow much over time. However, here we have a situation where a large amount of disk space, around 100MB per week, is being consumed.
This is unusual and usually indicates one of three things is happening. I'll walk through each one and offer some suggestions for fixing the situation.
- The most likely cause I can think of is your package manager is downloading a lot of updates - perhaps you're running a rolling release distribution? The files the package manager is downloading are being kept on the disk in a cache and not removed. Most package managers include a command to wipe the disk cache, freeing up space used by downloaded packages.
On most RPM-based distributions, such as Fedora, you can clean out the package cache by running "sudo dnf clean all". On members of the Debian family you can use "sudo apt-get clean". People running distributions in the Arch Linux family can use "sudo pacman -Scc". Check your distribution's documentation for tips on cleaning up files cached by other package managers.
- In my opinion, the second most probably scenario is some program is writing a lot of data to log files, much more than normal, and this is causing the system's log files to grow faster than they are being automatically cleaned up. This can happen if an application or a hardware component is misbehaving.
Since log files are usually text, it takes a lot of log entries to consume 100MB of disk space in a week. You should be able to identify which log file, if any, is chewing up your disk space by opening a terminal and moving to the /var/log directory. Running the command "ls -lS" will display the contents of the log directory, ordered by the size of the files. Run this command, then wait a few minutes and run it again. If one file's size changes a lot in just a few minutes then you'll know which log is being written to. Reading the last few entries in the log will tell you why the system is spamming information to the log file.
Basically, the commands you'll be running will look like this to monitor the logs directory for a fast-growing file and then view the quickly growing log file:
cd /var/log
ls -lS
sleep 300
ls -lS
tail -n 20 quickly-growing-log-file.txt
- This is somewhat related to the first option, but concerns different technologies. Portable package formats, such as Flatpak and Snap, bundle their dependencies and take up more room on the disk than traditional packages. Even if no portable packages are actually installed on your system, the information Flatpak caches on your system can take up a lot of disk space. Earlier this year, I did some clean-up on a Linux Mint system which had over 14GB of Flatpak cached data on the disk, despite no Flatpak packages being installed. The utility just kept downloading and caching data from the Flathub repository, filling up the disk over time.
The Snap utility can eat up disk space quickly because it, by default, automatically updates any Snap packages. This can gobble up several megabytes of data each time an update occurs.
With Flatpak you can run the following command to clean up old package versions which are no longer needed:
sudo flatpak uninstall --unused
If you have Flatpak installed, but no Flatpak packages installed, you may want to clean out any files in the /var/lib/flatpak directory by running:
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/flatpak/*
With Snap packages you can see a list of all installed Snap bundles by running:
sudo snap list --all
You can then remove old versions of packages you no longer need by running "snap remove" along with the name and version of the unwanted package. For example:
sudo snap remove vlc --revision="3.02"
In situations where the above three options do not reveal the culprit and a solution, we can cast a wider net and monitor the entire operating system to see where space is being consumed. We do this in two stages. First, we capture a snapshot of what disk usage looks like now. We do this by running the du command which will show us the size of each directory. We then sort the information and save it in a text file called starting-point.txt:
du -c / | sort -n > ~/starting-point.txt
We then wait a while, about a week in this case, as that seems to be how often large amounts of disk space are consumed. Then we basically run the same command again and save the results to another text file:
du -c / | sort -n > ~/ending-point.txt
If we then open the two text files, starting-point.txt and ending-point.txt, in text editors side-by-side we should soon see areas where more disk space is used in the second text file. The information is sorted with larger directories at the bottom of the files, meaning we should probably start looking for large size differences near the bottom of the two text files and work our way up.
We will likely find a database or cache directory which is getting larger by leaps and bounds which will let us know what is taking up all the disk space. From there you can decide what to do, whether that is removing the offending program, clearing its cache, or even mounting the directory on another partition with more space.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium
John Raff has announced the release of BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium, a major update of the project's lightweight, Debian-based distribution with an Openbox window manager as the preferred user interface. Beryllium is the project's first version based on Debian 11: "The BunsenLabs team is happy to announce the release of BunsenLabs Beryllium, based on Debian 'Bullseye'. Here are some features: a handsome 'Dragon' black theme - if you're not used to dark themes, give Dragon a few days and you might appreciate it more; the BLOB utility helps you to to quickly switch to another set of theme configuration; the jgmenu menu has been refreshed and the search facility might now be more useful; the Welcome script will check for missing Debian apt sources (eg. after offline install) and offer to add them; also in the Welcome script, an offer to check for missing firmware and install; BLOB, conky and tint2 utilities improved, and various tweaks and bug fixes applied elsewhere; the documentation still needs work, but some BunsenLabs help files have been added or improved." Read the release announcement and the release notes for more information and known issues.
BunsenLabs Linux -- Running the Openbox window manager
(full image size: 1.7MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Guix System 1.4.0
Ludovic Courtès has announced the release of Guix System 1.4.0, an advanced and "libre" distribution of the GNU operating system developed by the GNU Project. Its custom pacakage management, called "guix", supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, as well as unprivileged package management. "We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.4.0. The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running 'guix pull'. ... One area where Guix shines is the management of software environments. The 'guix environment' command was designed for that but it suffered from a clumsy interface. It is now superseded by 'guix shell', though we are committed to keeping 'guix environment' until at least May 1st, 2023. 'guix shell' is a tool that's interesting to developers, but it's also a useful tool when you're willing to try out software without committing it to your profile with guix install." Read the detailed release announcement for more information and screenshots.
EndeavourOS 22.12
Bryan Poerwo has announced the release of EndeavourOS 22.12, an updated build of the project's Arch-based Linux distribution with Xfce as the default desktop (and with other popular desktops available for selection during the installation process). This version ships with the just-release Xfce 4.18: "Cassini packed with new features is here. It took the development team on a longer journey than expected but we are proud to present our latest 'Cassini' release, named after the NASA mission with the Cassini spacecraft carrying the Huygens probe. Just like the NASA mission that had its fair share of nail-biting moments, this release had some nail-biting test runs because getting here required a major overhaul in how we build our ISO image. The last time we presented such a major overhaul was our ISO-Next release back in August 2021. This ISO image and the offline install comes with: Calamares 3.3.0-alpha3, Firefox 108.0.1, Linux kernel 6.0.12, Mesa 22.3.1, X.Org Server 21.1.5, NVIDIA 525.60.11, GRUB 2.06." Continue to the release announcement for further details.
EndeavourOS 22.12 -- Running the Xfce desktop
(full image size: 5.0MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Tails 5.8
Version 5.8 of Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), a Debian-based live DVD/USB that attempts to provide complete Internet anonymity for the user, is now available. Although the new version continues to be based on Debian 11, it brings some surprising changes, including improved persistence features as well as Wayland as a replacement of X.Org: "Tails 5.8 is the most important release of Tails in years. It includes both major redesign of existing features, important usability improvements, and hardened security. After 2 years of hard work, we are extremely proud to present you a complete redesign of Persistent Storage. Persistent Storage hasn't changed much since its first release in 2012 because the code was hard to modify and improve. But we learned from users that Persistent Storage could do a lot more for you if it had more features and was easier to use: you don't have to restart any more after creating Persistent Storage or each time you activate a new feature; you can change the password of Persistent Storage from this new application; you can choose to create Persistent Storage directly from Welcome Screen, if you don't have one already." Read the full release announcement for further information.
Linux Mint 21.1
The Linux Mint team have announced the release of Linux Mint 21.1 "Vera". The new release makes handling Flatpak packages smoother, integrating Flatpak support into the update manager and making it easier to work with both traditional deb packages and Flatpaks in the software centre. "Flatpak support was added to the Update Manager. Flatpak applications and runtimes can be updated like any other supported types of software. The Software Manager features a refreshed user interface which makes it easier to distinguish between Flatpaks and system packages. When looking at an application which is available both as a system package and a Flatpak, you can switch back and forth between its two versions. New Flatpaks from Flathub are automatically added to the Software Manager on a daily basis." These and other changes are covered in the project's What's New documents for each edition (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) and further information is provided through the distribution's release announcements (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce).
Peropesis 1.9
Peropesis (personal operating system) is a small-scale, minimalist, command-line-based Linux operating system. The project's latest release, version 1.9, fixes mandb and su utility function as well as introduces the JOE text editor: "In the Peropesis 1.9 edition, the ability to set the system language, region and the ability to read and write text content in your native language was implemented (Note. Only a few languages of European countries have been tested). For this reason, the GNU C Library software package was fully installed and the KBD software package was newly installed. New chapters locale, terminal font and keyboard map was created in the user manual to discuss the nuances of managing the new equipment. Also in release 1.9 a full-featured terminal-based and ncurses-based text editor, JOE, was installed." Details on the new version can be found in the project's release announcement.
NuTyX 22.12.0
NuTyX is a French Linux distribution (with multi-language support) built from Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch, with a custom package manager called "cards". The latest version, 22.12.0, provides several key package upgrades and offers twelve desktop editions along with one command line edition. "The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 22.12.0 and cards 2.6.3. New toolchain GCC 12.2.0, glibc 2.36 and Binutils 2.39; The X.Org graphics server version 21.1.6, the Mesa 3D library in 22.2.3, GTK 4.8.2 and Qt 6.4.1; the Python interpreter is updated to version 3.11.1; the Xfce desktop environment is updated to version 4.18.0; the MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version; The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 43.0; the KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.26.4, Framework 5.101.0 and applications in 22.12.0; available browsers include Firefox 108.0.1, Chromium 108.0.5359.124, Epiphany 43.0; many desktop applications have been updated as well." Additional details can be found on the project's news page.
Manjaro Linux 22.0
Philip Müller has announced the release of Manjaro Linux 22.0, a major update of the project's rolling-release distribution with separate KDE Plasma, Xfce and GNOME editions. The new version updates all major components of the three popular desktops and brings the very latest Linux kernel 6.1.1. "Since we released 'Ruah' in June, all our developer teams worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it 'Sikaris'. The GNOME edition has received a major update to GNOME 43. It comes with a redesigned system status menu, which allows quickly changing commonly used settings. Settings which previously required digging into menus can now be changed with the click of button. The new design also makes it easy to see the status of your settings at a glance. Our in-house Layouts Switcher application has gained some new features as well as various improvements and fixes - now you can create your own dynamic wallpaper. With Gradience you can customize your theme simple from within the application." Read the full release announcement for more details.
Manjaro Linux 22.0 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 3.3MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
Mabox Linux 22.12
Daniel Napora has announced the release of Mabox Linux 22.12, a major update of the project's Manjaro-based, rolling-release distribution with a highly customised Openbox window manager as the preferred desktop: "After more than a year of development, the new major release of Mabox Linux 22.12 'Istredd' is ready for download. In addition to numerous improvements, Istredd brings us two exciting and original features - Colorizer and context menus for Conky. Colorizer, a tool created especially for Mabox, allows you to easily and quickly adjust the colors of your desktop. Colorizer can even do this automatically based on the color palette of the currently set wallpaper. The advanced mode allows for more fine-tuning. The second functionality that is available for the first time in Mabox Istredd are context menus for Conky. The right-click context menu allows you to manage individual Conky properties, like the position on the screen, individual colors or the color scheme. The left-click context menu is for quick access to user-defined commands." Continue to the release announcement for more information and screenshots.
Zephix 6
Zephix is a live Linux operating system based on Debian's stable branch. It runs totally from removable media without touching any files stored on the user's system disk. The project's latest version, Zephix 6, uses the same base and most of the same package versions as Zephix 5, but introduces several improvements to the boot process. "Fixed UEFI issue of not booting on specific systems and on latest VirtualBox. Updated base to Debian 11.6 adding corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Optimised the 'toram' boot option mechanism - to boot Zephix totally in memory, it now requires 1.5GB RAM (core, firmware and desktop modules) or 512MB RAM (core module only). Updated module creation and manipulation scripts making it much easier to create new modules without having to reboot the ISO after creating a single module and also reducing the size of each module accordingly (refer to the Customise section for more details). Updated desktop and firmware modules. Optimised boot sequence code for a cleaner and smoother boot process." Additional information is available on the distribution's about page.
siduction 22.1
The siduction distribution is a desktop-oriented operating system and live medium based on the Unstable branch of Debian GNU/Linux. The project includes several updates to its featured desktop environments and the Linux kernel. It also adopts the Nala package manager: "Nala as a new frontend for Debian's package manager frontend apt. It works as a drop-in replacement, meaning that you can use the commands you are used to from apt also with nala. Apt gets the job done, but it is neither fast nor is it very user-friendly, when it comes to how it outputs its information. Nala in comparison seems like apt on steroids. It is faster by using parallel downloads, has better output, that is presented in a user-friendly way. It also has a history function that was borrowed from Fedoras package manager frontend dnf. You can try out nala right now and if you don't like it, return to apt any time. You can also use both, alternating between them. Some good reading about nala can be found on the website Linuxiac. Our manual also offers a section on nala here." The release announcement offers further details.
Vanilla OS 22.10
Vanilla OS is a fixed release distribution based on Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop. Vanilla OS is an immutable operating system where core parts of the system are locked down to prevent unwanted changes and corruption from third-party applications or a faulty update. The project has released its first stable release, Vanilla OS 22.10. "Vanilla OS is not an ordinary Linux distribution, it is a project that sets itself many goals and is not afraid to put itself out there, proudly displaying its unique technologies such as the Apx sub-system, its own automatic update system, and ABRoot transactions. So many terms, so many promises, so much everything. But let's see together, in detail what the strengths of Vanilla OS are, the features that make it unique. Vanilla OS comes with its own sub-system.. ehm.. package manager, called Apx. Apx introduces a whole new paradigm in package management. The idea is to use your system only as a box for storing your files, leaving it clean of packages and limiting the risk of breaking due to incompatible, poorly constructed or conflicting packages. It achieves this by installing software inside one or more containers fully managed by Apx having restricted access to your system's resources while still being able to use the same drivers, display server, etc." Additional details are presented in the distribution's release announcement.
Vanilla OS 22.10 -- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 268kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Calculate Linux 23
Alexander Tratsevskiy has announced the release of Calculate Linux 23, a major new version of the project's Gentoo-based, rolling-release distribution available in KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, LXQt, MATE and Xfce flavours: "We are pleased to announce the release of Calculate Linux 23. This new (year) version includes a server Calculate Container Manager for working with LXC, a new cl-lxc tool, and it features mirror selection for updates. Main changes: all desktop environments have been updated, namely KDE Plasma 5.25.5, Xfce 4.18, MATE 1.26.0, Cinnamon 5.6.5 and LXQt 1.2; we launched a new server flavour, Calculate Container Manager, for running LXC containers; a new tool, cl-lxc, has been added - it allows creating and updating Calculate Linux containers; the cl-update tool now features mirror selection for binary packages; an availability test has been added for Git repositories...." See the complete release announcement for more information and screenshots.
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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: 2,814
- Total data uploaded: 42.7TB
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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) |
One partition or many partitions?
Traditionally, one of the features of Linux distributions (and other Unix-like systems) which made them flexible was the ability to attach multiple partitions under one unified filesystem. The Linux filesystem is one large tree which can have branches spread across multiple partitions, disks, and even network storage.
Over time, most distributions have shifted from recommending filesystems be spread across several disks and partitions, to just a few (for root, /home, and swap), to some encouraging single partition/disk layouts with a swap file in place of a separate partition.
On your main computer how many partitions are attached to your filesystem? Do you have one unified partition where root, a swap file, and other directories reside together? Do you keep swap and /home on different partitions? Do you still hold to the traditional layout which could use four or five partitions to logically separate user data, the operating system, swap, and log files? Let us know if you have an unusual disk layout in the comments
You can see the results of our previous poll on categories of distributions which interest our readers the most in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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How many partitions do you have?
| 1: | 280 (16%) |
| 2: | 324 (19%) |
| 3: | 464 (27%) |
| 4: | 235 (14%) |
| 5: | 99 (6%) |
| More than 5: | 236 (14%) |
| One filesystem/volume spread across multiple disks: | 23 (1%) |
| Unsure: | 47 (3%) |
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| Website News |
New distributions added to database
Vanilla OS
Vanilla OS is a fixed release distribution based on Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop. Vanilla OS is an immutable operating system where core parts of the system are locked down to prevent unwanted changes and corruption from third-party applications or a faulty update.
Vanilla OS 22.10-- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 268kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Nobara Project
Nobara Project is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. The distribution comes with certain features that do not ship with the regular Fedora, such as WINE dependencies, OBS Studio, 3rd party codec packages for GStreamer, NVIDIA drivers, and some package fixes.
Nobara Project 36 -- Running the GNOME desktop
(full image size: 3.7MB, resolution: 3840x2400 pixels)
CachyOS
CachyOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It focuses on speed and security optimisations - the default Linux kernel is heavily optimised using the BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) scheduler, while the desktop packages are compiled with LTO and x86-64-v3 optimization, security flags and performance improvements. The available desktop environments and window managers include KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, i3, bspwm, LXQt, Openbox, Wayfire and Cutefish. CachyOS also ships with both graphical and command-line installers and provides a Firefox-based browser (called Cachy-Browser) with some security enhancements and performance optimisations.
CachyOS 221230 -- Running the KDE Plasma desktop
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 3840x2400 pixels)
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New distributions added to waiting list
- GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is a privacy and security focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility developed as a non-profit open source project. It's focused on the research and development of privacy and security technology including substantial improvements to sandboxing, exploit mitigations and the permission model. It was founded in 2014 and was formerly known as CopperheadOS.
- Serpent OS. Serpent OS is an independent Linux distribution built around the moss package manager.
- Athena OS. Athena OS is an Arch Linux-based distribution designed for penetration testing.
- embassyOS is a server distribution designed to make it easy to set up and host network services.
- carbonOS. carbonOS is a minimal Linux distribution featuring the GNOME desktop. It uses OSTree and Flatpaks for software management and tries to provide the GNOME-equivalent to ChromeOS.
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 9 January 2023. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • New Year (by Jules Ambrosi on 2023-01-02 02:06:58 GMT from Australia)
Hi,
Just thought I wish you people and the readers a Happy New Year !
Keep up the good work...
2 • Memories (to the tune of Memories by ?) (by New User on 2023-01-02 02:27:14 GMT from Canada)
Thanks for sharing your memories of the Linux user experience over the years.
Also; 1000 issues - and everyone a gem. Have learned so much, not only from your reviews and tips, but also from user comments as well. Have found the comments here informative, well moderated, and even the "flame wars" (especially over things like, cough, cough, s-y-s-t-e-m-d) to be educational and entertaining.
Re the number of partitions: added up the number of partitions used; then had to remember, with 64bit systems, we also have that uefi thingy we often forget about....(so add 1 to your total).
Personal longtime favourites would be Slackware for learning, stability, and just plain working; Salix when I want Slackware and too lazy to do a full install, and MX for providing a an almost instant Debian workspace without the hassles (sort of a salix-style lazy install). I do remember tinkering with the original Redhat, but every point zero release (4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0) was frought with bugs.
Speaking of Slackware, this week's news about kernel video issues seems to tie in with comments 7 and 15 in Distrowatch Issue 944. Maybe I should spend more time watching developments on the kernel page? Unfortunately, much of the discussion is somewhat beyond my programming level. Perhaps in your weekly news, there might be interest in a summary of where kernel development is going, and how that effects the community longterm, (as changes there effect all users)?
3 • How many partitions (by penguinx86 on 2023-01-02 02:36:27 GMT from United States)
My preference is everything on a single partition. My laptop has a 1tb SSD and there's plenty of room for everything. The only reason I'd need multiple partitions mounted is if I had multiple disks. In the good ole days, I could install everything on a single partition using Legacy Boot and MBR. But now, the installer creates annyoing /boot and /efi partitions that are tiny and useless once the system boots. Even more annoying are all the Snaps that appear as filesystems in the output of the df command. So even though I voted 1 partition that I actually use, I'm stuck with all the extra junk that I don't really want or use.
4 • Distributions-- (by smsharma on 2023-01-02 02:40:08 GMT from United States)
Glad to discover someone is on the same wavelength.
I used Debian as desktop for ~10 years and then went back to Windows as Debian frustrated the eeks out of me -- and regretted that move painfully with their forced updates.
Now I only have MxLinux except on Pi's and I am done experimenting!
5 • MX Linux (by Steve K on 2023-01-02 02:51:52 GMT from United States)
I agree with your review of MX Linux. It is one of my two favorite Linux distros, the other being Linux Mint Mate, my daily driver. Even though you have observed that "MX Linux isn't flashy" and consider it to be "an exercise in function over form, practicality over pure design, and what works over idealism" it doesn't mean that one has to give up aesthetics and settle for a purely practical distro. This is Linux and Linux is totally customizable so that you can make it look and feel exactly the way you want to on top of the underlying practicality, stability and features that MX Linux offers. This is what I do and I always customize the hell out of all my distros by changing desktop themes, icon themes, wallpaper, tweaking desktop themes with the Compiz window manager and adding Emerald themes, etc. None of my Linux distros look like they did out-of-the-box but they perform just as well. My customized distros are some of the coolest-looking on the planet but I'm not sacrificing anything in functionality. You can have the best of both worlds!
(BTW, the MX Linux taskbar can be moved from the left side of the screen to the bottom, but you probably already new that. Some others may not.)
6 • Happy New Year and 1000th issue (by Vic on 2023-01-02 03:32:29 GMT from Canada)
Thanks for the two decades plus of wonderful content. Can't claim to have been here at the very beginning but I wouldn't be surprised if I've caught close to the last 800 or so issues. And after all these years I still look forward to every Sunday evening read. Looking further forward still to seeing another 1000+ more to come in future issues. Keep up the great work. Happy New Year and cheers to another great year of Linux/open source computing!
- Vic
7 • Memories and Distros Over the Years (by Jared on 2023-01-02 03:52:51 GMT from United States)
Very Nostalgic distro weekly. I've been using Linux for 21 years and found distrowatch shortly after.
Thank you for all you do for the Linux community.
My first distro was Red Hat 7.1 back in 2001, installed as a dual boot with Windows ME by a friend.
Shortly there after I moved to Mandrake 7.1 (2002 - 2005) and removed the dual boot with Windows, then PCLinuxOS (2005 - 2008). Ubuntu (2008 - 2011), Crunchbang (2011 - 2015), Ubuntu (2015 - 2020) until I found Manjaro 2 years ago (2020). Now, I can't see myself using anything beside an Arch-base on the Desktop.
On servers, It's always Debian from the beginning, now and probably forever.
Happy New Year to Everyone!
8 • Happy 1,000 DW!! TempleOS is still the most special to me (by Andy Prough on 2023-01-02 03:56:55 GMT from United States)
This week's main article is very fun, I'm glad to read about everyone's favorite projects.
As far as my all-time most special distro/OS, the one that jumps to mind is the famous TempleOS by Terry Davis. I just love how he poured everything he had into it, and how he created something that was a completely new paradigm for OS's. Cheers to your memory, Terry. My wish would be that someday Jesse could do an official TempleOS review.
Runners up for me are TinyCore Linux and Hyperbola GNU/Linux, both of which are similarly incredible in their visionary work.
9 • QandA_Root-Space (by jonathon on 2023-01-02 04:18:18 GMT from Australia)
When I've run out of space on a root partition it was due to me forgetting to remove old kernels. This was an Ubuntu based O.S.
Congratulations DistroWatch...!
10 • The 1000th issue (by David Milovanovic on 2023-01-02 05:09:39 GMT from Serbia)
Congrats on the 1000th issue! It's a great achievement. You guys are doing an amazing work and I hope you will be doing it for many, many years to come. Thank you and Happy New Year to everyone!
11 • My induvidual alltime highlights (by always-curious-about-FOSS on 2023-01-02 06:44:22 GMT from Germany)
Happy new Year
first off all, many thanks to the team of distrowatch for all the interessting and importent informations that been edited in the former Years.
So what are ma alltime highlights? I using Foss since April 2014 ( end of support for xp ). So perhaps i am still too newbie for alltime highlights, but these two OS that have influenced me the most are Bunsenlabs and NomadBSD. My daily driver is Xubuntu. NomadBSD was my daily driver for a whole summer becauce it was installed on my Laptop Ithat I am using on my balcony.
12 • Today's themes (by PLM on 2023-01-02 07:42:39 GMT from Spain)
Favourite distro here? Sparky stable w/Xfce... it's perfect. It could be LMDE (Mint-Debian)... but no Xfce version (so I install it and get rid of Cinnamon). It could be MX... but I had to reinstall it a couple of times after catastrophic updates (no more MX, thank you).
Another distros I like: The brand new Spiral, the new Debian based Peppermint and the old reliable PCLOS.
Partitions per disk here? One for each system (always 2 different systems in each computer) and at least another partition for data. In my distro-test machine... a lot more per disk!
Happy New Year!!
13 • Congratulations DW (by Guido on 2023-01-02 08:25:40 GMT from Philippines)
Happy New Year 2023 to all Linux users and the editors. Congratulations on so many editions of these great articles about Linux.
My Linux of choice is Manjaro, which I use in three different editions. It is very stable, always up-to-date and does not need to be reinstalled every two years. That certainly speaks against Debian and MX.
14 • Congratulations! (by Abhijeet on 2023-01-02 08:34:14 GMT from India)
Many Congratulations on 1000 DW Weeklies & a Happy New Year!
I remember using CrunchBang in late aughts & later. Great distro & probably the best linux community while it was there. I do miss it.
15 • highlights (by tomposter on 2023-01-02 08:54:31 GMT from United States)
Highlights are all in earlier days. Steps forward were exciting then. After that, enthusiasm and expectations have been somewhat reduced, as most every major step forward seems to leave behind some functionality available in the past.
#1 Highlight: Knoppix 3
Honorable mentions: Kanotix, Librenet, Mepis
(2005 thru 2007)
Part of the early fun of Knoppix and Kanotix was "klik" (later version is AppImage).
16 • Memories ... (by DaveB on 2023-01-02 09:09:01 GMT from Australia)
I think it was 1996. I installed Slackware onto a spare 386 using two 1.44MB floppy disks (that was all I could find spare). While my desktop downloaded the next floppy, I'd be using the other floppy for the next install step. It took a while.
In 1999 I discovered that Linux on a P120 downloaded my mail quicker than W95 on a P166. I haven't looked back - been using Linux as my primary OS ever since. I forget which distro I was using back then - I've used quite a few over the years - currently Mint derivatives)
With partitions, I keep Win partitions in case I need to compile something on it. It is hardly touched. There is always at least one spare 50GB partitions - which means I can spin up another distro if I feel like swapping / trying out a new one if something in my current one annoys me to much. This way I can slowly move over. Hint if you're doing this with a shared /home, use different usernames / home folder names as sometimes different versions of software expect different config files. You can link your Documents & other folders to not lose anything if swapping distros.
Congrat's on 1,000 issues. Distrowatch has been a useful resource for me for several years - especially when I feel like changing distros.
17 • Memories and partitions (by mdisaster on 2023-01-02 09:31:08 GMT from Italy)
DISTROS
I started in the '90s with whatever version of Slackware came on those shareware CDs, not sure about the version number but I remember it had kernel 1.09. I did some distro hopping across the ages and used a lot of Puppy Linux, both as a main system on those old PCs I can't get rid of and as a rescue disk.
Then I mostly settled on Linux Mint, but I still like to try out something now and then - of late for example I checked out Void, Deepin and MX Linux, I liked them a lot (for different reasons) but not enough for me to switch over. So I'm sticking with Linux Mint, which works well for me and doesn't require jumping through hoops to make things work.
PARTITIONS
I generally use the classic layout of /, /home, /swap, maybe /boot if the installer insists on it, plus whatever (U)EFI stuff is required to boot. However the next time I could just dispense with /swap and have just / plus a /data partition on an external disk for the stuff meant to survive a reinstall - documents, media and such.
Happy New Year and thanks for Distrowatch !!!
18 • Favorite Distros (by kc1di on 2023-01-02 09:57:04 GMT from United States)
Thank you for the 1000 issue and the look back. I started out in the 90's with slackware that came on about 25 floppy discs. Those were the days. No hand holding, no easy installs remember it took a couple weeks to get everything working and on configurations done. I Then used Redhat (Came in boxed set) But it never quite fit my operating style. Of course over the year have tried many distros. including Debian,Ubuntu, Mint, PClinuxOs,Arch and it's derivatives. One of my all time favorites was Mepis. Used it on several machines and it just always seemed to work. So I guess it's natural that today I use MX - XFCE most of the time. Like Jessie I like the way it's stable but stays out of my way. That's not to say in future I may go to a newer Distro who knows. I've always from the beginning liked Mint. But for some reason i always seem to return to MX. Happy New year to all and keep up the good work.
19 • Partitions (by John on 2023-01-02 10:20:45 GMT from United Kingdom)
One drive with four partitions, each holding a different distro (at present Manjaro, MX, openSUSE and Kubuntu), and a second drive holding data and swap.
20 • Memories. (by DachshundMan on 2023-01-02 10:30:38 GMT from United Kingdom)
Firstly, happy 1000th edition to DistroWatch. I read it nearly every week.
I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu (UB) only because it was supplied on the cover disk of a computer magazine I bought in an airport. As a traveling engineer I wanted to play some games in the evening and I realised that if I ran UB from an external disk it gave me a way to get around the corporate locking of my laptop. I also tried Arch but quickly switched to Manjaro (MJ) and decided to use Ubuntu for things where I cared about stability and MJ when I wanted to play with the OS or install programs not in the UB repositories. When UB got Unity I did not like the look and feel so I switched over to Mint which is where I am now. When I retired I mainly stopped messing with the internals of OS so the Manjaro external disk got put away and is gathering dust. However, I sometimes run MJ on my Raspberry Pi although mainly I use the Arm version of UB.
Whilst there are some really interesting distros out there I decided long ago not to use any with a single developer due to a bad experience with a distro that went defunct.
21 • Linux nostalgia (by César E. M. R. on 2023-01-02 10:31:30 GMT from Chile)
Buenos días y saludos a todos. Feliz año nuevo a todos desde Santiago de Chile.
I remember my first distro around the 2003 (+/-), i install SUSE in my old Athlon XP, works much better than Windows ME.
From that time, i test a lot of distros Linux and BSD (Slackware, Devuan, Debian, PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Mageia, Ubuntu (and derivated), PCBSD, FREEBSD, etc., etc., etc..
Now in present times, i use Debian in my HP Workstation and Fedora in my laptop HP (because everything works with Fedora, including Bluetooth and Wifi, in Debian not, i don't know why)
¡¡¡Saludos!!!
22 • Partitions (by Nobod Yin on 2023-01-02 11:21:01 GMT from United States)
I have 3 partitions: /boot/efi, /, and /home. I can reinstall the os or use any kernel without messing with my data.
23 • Linux distros & my partitions (by Star Picket on 2023-01-02 11:43:53 GMT from Australia)
I found it interesting to read your experiences with Linux over the years. It was a nice start to the year - thank you.
My first distro was Mandrake and then Mepis. After that Fedora and later Mint when it was first released. I used Puppy on a persistent USB for work since I hated the forced use of Windows on the network server at my work place at the time. Since those days it is a blur.
As for the number of partitions I use, there are 5. I have a dedicated Data disk which includes work data that says put when I choose to change my distro. I also have back up and time shift partitions on it. I have a separate root and home partition, as well as a swap partition.
One thing I hate about many apps these days is that they assume you only have a home partition for everything. It's a pain the the butt to have to track down my data on a different drive because the app doesn't expect there to be one.
24 • Partions (by James on 2023-01-02 12:06:34 GMT from United States)
Usually two. The FAT UEFI partition and ext 4 for the OS. On a couple of older laptops I have also two, the ext. 4 partition for the OS and some swap. I used to dual boot more than one linux OS, but UEFI and os prober disabled by default has mad that a pain I avoid these days.
25 • Distros, partitions and @13 Debian+rolling (by Dr. Who on 2023-01-02 12:27:59 GMT from Philippines)
Tried Linux early on, but didn't find it useful until around 2006. Tried PCLOS, Ubuntu and Mint. Stayed with Mint for a few years, then roamed for a while. Tried Manjaro but preferred EndeavourOS. Still too frequent a need for updates. Now have Ubuntu on a laptop and Debian on my daily desktop. MX just hasn't done it for me. I use separate root and home partitions, no swap. I wont count uefi since it's not a Linux partition, nor the Windows 11 on dual boot.
@13, Debian does not have to be reinstalled every two years. They release every two years, but support for around three, and if it goes to LTS, a total of five. Or you can change your sources to "testing" and roll. You can even use "unstable" if you feel adventurous. Right now I am using the Bookworm repos, still in "testing" which should be good until 2028, and then I can simply change to the next release or directly to testing and keep going. There are a few Debian rolling distros on "testing," and there's Siduction on "unstable," and maybe others.
26 • Distros and Partitions (by Dr.J on 2023-01-02 12:28:50 GMT from Germany)
Happy New Year to everybody
Distros: I can't remember my distro history completely. There were very many and it started with Debian and OpenSuse (not to mention the early Unix-Years in the 80s). Then came a phase with many experiments and several distros in parallel (Ubuntu,Kubuntu,Lubuntu, Mint, Majaro, AntiX,BSD). Around 2012 I ended up with Arch, where I feel so at home since then that the distro hopping has come to an end. But from time to time I always check out new distros in Virtualbox (such as Void, MX, Garuda or most recently Mabox).
Partitions: I have two built-in hard drives (each with 3 Partitions: OS, Data, Backup) and a network drive. In addition, all other computers and devices (such as set-top-boxes) in our home network are connected to my computer via NFS and some encrypted data containers are mounted as drives. Finally, the "temp" folder is mounted as RAMfs. The whole thing is partly functional (two hard disks with two operating systems plus backup partitions; Network-Admin), partly historical. In the future (PCI-SSD, no second slot in newer notebooks) this will change, though.
27 • Partions or not? (by Otis on 2023-01-02 12:59:40 GMT from United States)
Reasons for:
Ease of use – Make it easier to recover a corrupted file system or operating system installation.
Performance – Smaller file systems are more efficient. You can tune file system as per application such as log or cache files. Dedicated swap partition can also improve the performance (this may not be true with some kernels).
Security – Separation of the operating system files from user files may result into a better and secure system. Restrict the growth of certain file systems is possible using various techniques.
Backup and Recovery – Easier backup and recovery.
Stability and efficiency – You can increase disk space efficiency by formatting disk with various block sizes. It depends upon usage. For example, if the data is lots of small files, it is better to use small block size.
Testing – Boot multiple operating systems such as Linux, Windows and FreeBSD from a single hard disk.
Reasons against:
?
28 • Partitions (by vmclark on 2023-01-02 13:15:35 GMT from United States)
Seven partitions. Remember efi is also a partition, and I have a swap as partition + 4 Linux installs + 1 Windows:
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat 2787-600D
├─nvme0n1p2 ntfs Windows 1079A18749D11406
├─nvme0n1p3 swap 542e5af0-7004-48f1-8238-bfc416b7eed8
├─nvme0n1p4 ext4 ubuntu 6c2e6801-6481-4c18-aa6c-6a8675528460
├─nvme0n1p5 ext4 gnome 47645145-f7f4-4717-accb-572c301218f3
├─nvme0n1p6 ext4 gecko 56617ffb-0123-4979-b4ec-993088a11e51
└─nvme0n1p7 ext4 xfce bfbf2e3c-c12f-4a51-a058-798b9488e29b
29 • I don't need to partition my disks (by Sumire on 2023-01-02 13:40:40 GMT from United Kingdom)
I use stable ZFS on Linux (NixOS) root partition and the removable drive where I store my data. ZFS supports Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and illumos, but currently has limited support for Windows, It doesn't affect me because I don't use Windows. ZFS doesn't require partitioning, I don't need to calculate the size of each partition, just create some datasets to use. However, GRUB has limited support for ZFS, so I cannot enable all features, such as zstd compression.
30 • vanilla doesn't work in virtualbox (by icecream on 2023-01-02 14:08:49 GMT from Moldova)
Wanted to try Vanilla OS,
Unfortunatelly it doesn't work in VirtualBox
i cannot see the mouse pointer -> so essentially cannot install it.
31 • all time best open source projects and distributions (by Matt on 2023-01-02 14:12:29 GMT from United States)
Glad to see Debian made the list. It would have been my top choice for most impactful Linux distribution of all time. Ubuntu would have not be possible without Debian, and Mint wouldn't be here without Ubuntu.
Apache would get my vote for the most important open source project. The LAMP server is the most impactful Linux application in history.
Libreoffice is hands down the most important open source project for Linux desktop and workstation applications.
32 • partitioning with LVM (by Matt on 2023-01-02 14:17:23 GMT from United States)
Thanks to logical volume management, I don't need a complex partitioning scheme. My laptop has three partitions: EFI, boot, and an encrypted physical volume used for LVM.
33 • Partitions and Vanilla OS (by Jesse on 2023-01-02 14:55:56 GMT from Canada)
@30: If your mouse pointer isn't showing up in VirtualBox it's probably either due to a graphical problem (meaning you can switch video drivers in the VirtualBox settings), or you're running a Wayland desktop session. Switching to the X11 GNOME session will probably fix it.
@27: With regards to whether to use multiple partitions or not, most of the "pro" reasons listed are not true. Or, more accurately, not true _anymore_ or not relevant for most people. About the only two reasons for using partitions these days are running multiple systems (or upgrading the OS) and preventing files on one partition from taking up too much space.
Recovery, performance, and security are not usually benefits of multi-partition systems. Unless you're doing a lot of fine-tuning of your filesystem options or locking down partitions with noexec for security, you won't get much benefit from multiple partitions.
On the other hand, having fewer partitions means more flexibility, more space available for each part of the system, less confusion when setting things up. For most personal systems, especially single user systems, it makes sense to stick with minimal partitions. Typically one for the OS and one for data to make it easy to upgrade or re-install.
34 • Congrats Distrowatch (by Geo on 2023-01-02 15:21:31 GMT from Canada)
So, it turned out Linux wasn't a flash in the pan afterall. 😉
35 • Favorite Distros (by bittermann on 2023-01-02 15:30:17 GMT from United States)
I've tried about half of the top 100 distros from here and keep coming back to Linux Mint with cinnamon. It just plain works and seems to be the easiest to configure gaming on. I've recently discovered Manjaro with Xfce and am really impressed. Never really got into Arch distros but I will be giving it a thorough test on the gaming side. I guess half the fun is testing new distros.
36 • Number of partitions (by Tim on 2023-01-02 15:43:12 GMT from United States)
I have five partitions across three drives. My main system SSD has a VFAT UEFI partition, a btrfs partition with / and /home subvolumes, and a swap partition (I am old fashioned like that). My second SSD has a btrfs partition that contains my "big" data files, which are mostly photo image files. And my HDD has a btrfs partition with "old" backup and data files; it is mostly unused in day-to-day system usage.
37 • Partition and favorite distro (by Zed on 2023-01-02 16:48:01 GMT from Italy)
3 partitions:
/
/home
swap
Favorite distro: Mageia.
38 • Memories (by zhymm on 2023-01-02 17:04:00 GMT from United States)
My journey with linux began c. 1999-2000 with attempts to install one distribution or another. Usually without success. Then PCLOS 0.93 "Big Daddy" happened and for me it just simply worked. I dual booted Windows and PCLOS for a few years until one of Windows' inevitable BSODs had me cut that cord for good in 2006. I remember the moment, mid afternoon on August 16th. Though I no longer use PCLOS as my daily driver, I still look on it with some fondness because it's the one that really got my linux journey going for good.
Much distro-hopping and multi-booting ensued. With a separate partition for each distro. A few highlights for me here were Crunchbang, Peppernint, vanilla Debian, and Arch. Arch was a real adventure. I would 'bork' the system trying something odd that I had the whole Arch install process memorized to the point I could do a full manual re-install in less than 30 minutes. And a special nod goes to Vector Linux, which for a short time had me packaging (and compiling those packages from source).
Today it's Manjaro on my main desktop and MX on my laptop. The first to be near the "cutting edge" and the latter for stability.
An, in closing, just one partition. For simplicity.
OMZ
39 • p.s. (by zhymm on 2023-01-02 17:10:56 GMT from United States)
I forgot to add that MX has got me to placing the panel vertically on the left side regardless of the distro.
OMZ
40 • Favourite distro (by David on 2023-01-02 17:41:30 GMT from United Kingdom)
I started with Shoestring — a port of Red Hat 7 to the Motorola architecture. When I moved to the Intel (actually AMD) architecture, I switched to Fedora 1. When Gnome 3 came in, I moved to CentOS 6. When the support ran out, I moved to PCLinuxOS with Xfce. You might guess that I don't like change!
41 • First OS (by Roger on 2023-01-02 18:08:01 GMT from Belgium)
My alternative first OS was BeOS in 1998, reason was that I thought there must be something better than Win98.
BeOS was better and I had no problem printing and going on the internet thru a modem, graphical it was a lot better.
42 • 20 Years!!! (by kilgoretrout on 2023-01-02 18:20:52 GMT from United States)
I started using linux 20 years ago, Mandrake 8.2, so are linux timelines are about the same. Congratulations on 20 years of discovery, reviews and news as well as gaming the Distrowatch rankings and arguing about what it all means. May you have 20 more!
43 • Partitions (by Robert on 2023-01-02 19:34:00 GMT from United States)
I use 3 or 4 partitions depending how you count.
1 efi partition that doubles as /boot
1 LVM partition I use for OS
2 disks in a ZFS mirror for /home. 1 filesystem, but I suppose that's 2 partitions, 1 for each disk.
44 • Warm congratulations! (by James Larue on 2023-01-02 20:09:02 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch has been part of my Mondays for many years now. So in 2023, I'm sending you many thanks, and warm best wishes for many years to come.
45 • Warm congratulations! (by James Larue on 2023-01-02 20:09:03 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch has been part of my Mondays for many years now. So in 2023, I'm sending you many thanks, and warm best wishes for many years to come.
47 • Warm congratulations! (by James Larue on 2023-01-02 20:09:03 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch has been part of my Mondays for many years now. So in 2023, I'm sending you many thanks, and warm best wishes for many years to come.
48 • natsukashii (by Jay on 2023-01-02 20:27:01 GMT from Austria)
My first Linux memories go back to ordering a CD with Linux v1.0.1 on it. After Slack, I jumped to RedHat and ended up on Mandrake until Stormix.
I still have soft spots for Debian minimals (Crunchbang, MX, Q4OS [in VMs], WattOS, Zen) but my Debian days are done. I may still create custom servers via Parrot Architect, but my desktops have been Arch for years.
I'll be replacing my last remaining Debian install (a VM server) with Alpine shortly and continue using Arch variants in virtual desktops.
Linux has been a long, interesting, and rewarding choice and I've no regrets; using it has granted me privacy, security, autonomy, and an opportunity to grow personally and professionally for decades.
49 • patitions (by M.Z. on 2023-01-02 20:59:26 GMT from United States)
I'm at 5+ on my two main computers:
1 shared swap across all the distros I boot +
1 shared /data across everything +
3-4 /boot partitions (one for each distro that I can go to the bios & manually select if my main one with grub customizer has an issue) +
3-4 / root partitions - one for each distro (Mint LMDE, KDE neon, & Mageia, plus or minus some thing random on occasion)
50 • Warm congratulations! (by James Larue on 2023-01-02 20:09:04 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch has been part of my Mondays for many years now. So in 2023, I'm sending you many thanks, and warm best wishes for many years to come.
51 • Partitions (by V on 2023-01-02 21:47:03 GMT from United States)
I've got 5 partitions.
One is the EFI Boot partition
The second is the Microsoft Reserved partition.
The third is Windows 10
Fourth is Kubuntu 22.04
Fifth is Windows Recovery (OEM)
BTW, congrats on 1000 issues!
52 • Memories, WayBack (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2023-01-02 22:18:11 GMT from United States)
First experience with Linux should have been with a free CD from Canonical, but it just wouldn't boot on the hardware I had at the time without parameter(s) found years later.
First viable experience was Trisquel, a Freed Open-Source Software variant of Ubuntu.
Best early experience was Kongoni, a Freed Open-Source Software variant of Slackware.
In those days necessity forced learning to resemble a "power user". Distro-hopped for years, until MX.
53 • Thank you Jesse (by Simon on 2023-01-03 01:01:15 GMT from New Zealand)
I've been grateful for many years for this, my favourite website... but I had no idea you also maintained sysvinit. For maintaining (at least) two important FOSS projects, thank you.
54 • First Linux (by Sam Crawford on 2023-01-03 04:03:57 GMT from United States)
Distrowatch, contrats on 20 years and 1,000 issues. I look forward to reading it every Sunday night.
It took me awhile to remember my first Linux distro. In 2001 I bought a box with a few 3 1/2 floppy disks from Xandros and installed the Xandros desktop.
It was simple enough and ran well. Over the years I've gone back and forth from Windows and different distros, mostly Debian derivatives and occassionally, Opensuse-Tumblewed.
Today my desktop boots into Windows 11 and Debian "Bullseye" with the Gnome desktop. Debian Stable with a few Flatpaks works well for me. No issues to fix.
55 • Software projects (by Jesse on 2023-01-03 04:33:22 GMT from Canada)
@53: Thanks, I work on a number of open source projects. Most of them probably not as well known as sysvinit. I also work on the FreeBSD (and other platforms) port of doas, cpulimit, Bftpd, a handful of games like Atanks, a D&D character generator and Sopwith, You can follow my updates here (shameless plug): https://www.patreon.com/sysvinit
56 • Distros, partitions (by Albert on 2023-01-03 04:35:58 GMT from United States)
Firstly, congratulations on your 1,000th issue of DWW!
I have multiboot setups of several linux distros on my machines. The first system has /boot/efi, /root and /home partitions, the rest only root and home (no swap). I keep all my personal files on an external drive.
I've tried many different distros and finally set on Debian and Ubuntu derivatives (L.Mint, MX, Neptune, etc.) for their stability. I started with Ubuntu and Gnome 2, but the evolution of this system has been very disappointing to me: the adoption of Unity, Gnome 3 later and the Snaps finally made me shy away from it.
Thank you, Jesse, for your work.
Happy new year everyone!!
57 • Partitions (by Plume on 2023-01-03 06:53:06 GMT from France)
Six partitions here:
- one for boot
- one for Windows
- three for Linuxes (MX, Debian, Solus)
- one for data ($HOME for Linux users, /opt and appimages shared by the tree Linuxes)
No swap
58 • Congrats & Distro memories (by MadBrownDog on 2023-01-03 07:22:45 GMT from Australia)
I've been reading this site for ~10 years. These days it's the only computer site I check regularly.
I've been Windows free since 2015, with Linux Mint as daily driver. It works, meets my needs, can't think of a reason to change. I recently installed MX on another partition to check it out. (Don't like LH panel, still figuring out how to change it.)
Messed about with live CD's since Lindows in ~2003. Ran a laptop on PClinuxOS 0.93 and 2007, and later on Puppy. I had a Puppy disc customised with same wallpaper as I had on my desktop XP installation. Left it in the CD drive one time and my 13yo turned on the PC and screamed "Dad, the computer's gone all Linuxy!"
59 • Disk space hogs (by MadBrownDog on 2023-01-03 07:33:53 GMT from Australia)
Had the "low space of root partition" issue about 2 years ago, and traced it to /var/tmp containing LOTS of files starting with "cnij", each of 93MB. Canon printer driver starts with cnij. A bit of monitoring revealed that my printer was dumping these files in there at least daily, possibly more often. I set up a cron job to remove cnij* files from /var/tmp daily.
60 • Congratulations and the number of partitions (by Alexandru on 2023-01-03 08:20:17 GMT from Romania)
First of all, congratulations for the 1000th issue of DWW. I started to follow this site in 2004 when I was technical redactor of Linux Magazin Romania.
My first Linux experience was Mandrake Linux shortly switched to SuSE Linux. After few years when I discovered Debian I switched to it and never regretted. Of course, I continued to test other distributions. But I don't find a better Debian than Debian. I also tested other OSes: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris/OpenSolaris/Indiana/OpenIndiana, BeOS/Haiku, Plan 9, MenuetOS/ColiblriOS and other more or less exotic OSes.
As of the number of partitions, there are some more considerations:
1. As it is already pointed out, ZFS, BtrFS and *BSD disklabel has internal partitioning/mountpoint usually opaque for disk partitioning software. It may be considered as different partitions or not depending on point of view.
2. BSD land usually recommends different partitions for other reasons than saving disk space. There can be different filesystem types or different mount options which best make sense for different filesystem locations.
3. Computer architecture may impose some special partitions, e.g. for EFI, /boot etc.
Usually I have separate /home partition and all the rest keep in the same different partition. Nowadays I don't use swap partition. However, when swap is necessary, and because I usually keep several Linux installs, I make a shared swap partition too.
61 • Saving disk space (by Alexandru on 2023-01-03 08:23:55 GMT from Romania)
Additionally to what already was said here, I found browser cache may easily exceed 1GB. So, cleaning browser cache/history is a very efficient way to save disk space.
62 • Happy New Year! (by Andy on 2023-01-03 13:37:40 GMT from United States)
Happy New Year everyone, I just wanted to thank the staff of Distrowatch for the many years of work. I've been at the same job for 21 years now and a big part of making Monday's fun is reading the newsletter every week and checking out different distro's that get added to the list. So thank you so much!.
63 • First Distro (by Hugh on 2023-01-03 14:39:33 GMT from United States)
My first was Linux Mint Helena back in 2009. Tried a lot of other distros in between then and now, but I'm back to Mint LMDE with Cinnamon. It might be a tad boring, but it works and I don't have to spend time taking care of it.
64 • 1000th issue (by Will on 2023-01-03 15:16:08 GMT from United States)
Wow. Has it really been that long? I've followed the site since its inception and was addicted from the beginning. It's been a goto site for me to compare distributions, learn about new ones, and as a grab bag to choose a random one to play with. Kudos. This issue was a fun read.
My personal list:
slackware and x11 via 11, if I remember correctly, floppy disks, as the first and most eye popping distro I ever downloaded and installed - so much more powerful than dos/windows at the time, running on the same hardware!
redhat 4 for it's installer (anaconda or some such snake), ease of use and package management rpm was extraordinary at the time.
debian for its romance, the gift of apt, its stability, and its children (mint, ubuntu, and mx) - by far my favorite lineage.
freebsd 8+ - installed as my server of choice for all things requiring minimal intervention, and for ZFS, of course!
sco - for suing att and exploding the popularity of linux. nevermind that caldera was actually pretty cool
oracle - for putting out a database that worked better on linux than anything else. oh, and for daring to put out an unkillable? linux.
65 • From Windows to Linux (by Otis on 2023-01-03 15:22:09 GMT from United States)
Back in '98 we were noticing RedHat Linux and SuseLinux and TurboLinux in the big box stores right next to Windows. Seemed natural and I did entertain notions that Windows might be in a fight for supremacy for the desktop market.
Well they won. But we're still here with our Linux and BSD machines and I guess we won, too.
My Linux foray began with RedHat 5.2. Struggled with it to try to make it more like Windows 95 then 98. I wonder how many others began back then and spent years trying to make Linux at least look like Windows and realizing later that there is no real reason to do that as one can make Linux and BSD look and function in any way one fancies.
66 • Used disk space (by David on 2023-01-03 18:41:57 GMT from United States)
Besides removing old kernels, which someone else mentioned, another possible issue is applications that have been upgraded but are still running. In Linux, when a file is deleted, it stays on disk as long as it is still open by a process (which includes executables that are currently running). I've had this exact same problem the user described on my parents' machine because of Google Chrome. Its executable is rather large, and it installs to /opt which isn't separated onto its own partition as often as some other parts of the filesystem tree, so it can fill up the root partition pretty easily. Solution: restart applications when installing updates.
67 • Congrats on 1000 issues! (by Luke on 2023-01-03 20:19:23 GMT from United States)
Very cool to see Ladislav join in once again! I remember all the way back when DWW first started, as I was an avid distro hopper at the time and visited this site all the time. Nowadays I just run Ubuntu, but I always come back for DWW.
Much love to all of the contributors over the years, thanks for the first 1000, and here's to the next!
68 • Gift (by stargbx on 2023-01-03 22:05:04 GMT from Puerto Rico)
I take as a Christmas gift to us readers the stories told by each of you DW managers/contributors on your experiences/preferences with your distros of choice. Really interesting, really fun to know :)
69 • Looking back (by Trihexagonal on 2023-01-04 00:42:48 GMT from United States)
Mandriva was the first distro I installed successfully and still have a screenshot from 2000 posted at a UNIX forum. I used Tao Linux for a while, still have a BackTrack 5 Live CD, which eventually became Kali Linux, in my desk but Debian was my distro of choice and settled on that early..
In 2005 I found PC-BSD and signed up as a beta tester. In 2012 I built my first vanilla FreeBSD desktop, have had OpenBSD, OpenIndiana and Solaris desktops.
A couple years ago I reincarnated a Thiinkpad T61 with Lenovo 100GB HDD and thought Kali GNU/Linux would be perfect for that. When I had to look up GNU to see exactly what that meant realized I had very little Linux experience and started to get some, much to the chagrin of Chicken Little chickadees everywhere.
One partition and one Operating System on one laptop my mantra with multiple laptops running FreeBSD or Kali Linux my Tao today.
70 • Distros used... (by LongInteresButLongConversion on 2023-01-04 01:47:28 GMT from France)
My road to Linux took time, but now it's my daily driver at home.
When i first got my own desktop personal computer, i installed Windows 95, then 98, along Debian and Red Hat (RPMS nightmare) on it, but got lazy when trying to configure Xfree86 and desktopn environment. I stuck with Windows 95 which was usable even with its blue screen sof death (BSOD). And i could play Age of Empires on it... After 2 months, i installed a firewall freeware on it, with paranoid parameters regarding incoming traffic, And after a week i noticed no BSOD had appeared ever since its installation. Hence a big lesson: the major source of BSOD were neither crappy device drivers, nor faulty RAM, but hackers scanning your sockets ad trying to connect to them, probably getting connected to some Windows service - i always used a firewall on Windows thereafter and never got any BSOD anymore, whatever the machine or version of Windows...
A few months later, i lay hands on an old PC at my new work and tried Mandrake on it. it installed and i got a KDE session. But at some point, my manager found some use for me, and i settled to work on my official Windows 95 workstation, and the Mandrake machine ended up discarded as garbage. That was the end of running Linux at work. But...
My home computer use filled the harddisk to the point i removed the Debian and Red Hat partitions i actually never used. For a few years my Linux interest was limited to reading information about it. Nothing more.
in 2001 i bought an Windows XP Asus Laptop for travels, whose Hitachi hard disk broke 2 years later. After replacing the disk with a Seagate, it worked great for another decade.
In 2004 i had to replace my desktop PC. It bought a new Shuttle small factor desktop to replace the old one that didnot support SATA. Its Shuttle motherboard power controler got fried 4 years later - a defect common to the brand (for this model). No Shuttle anymore for me.
So in 2008, i replaced it with a big 18" Sony Vaio laptop with (for desktop use), plus another 13" Sony Vaio laptop for travels, both running Windows 7 with 4GiB of RAM and respectively two and one 512-GiB harddisks (still decent today, and both machine still work, but not under Windows anymore).
I still had that old 2001 IA-32 Asus laptop with a RAM tripled in the meantime to a whooping... 768 MiB. It couldn't run Windows 7, so i tried and installed Desktop-BSB an PC-BSD on it (but they use KDE, something too much like Windows to my taste), then Debian-based Linux distros: Xandros and Linspire failed (actually, once they where installed i couldnot login because the silly designers didnot register in the installed OS the French AZERTY keyboard layout used at installation (or maybe the editors' customised login screen where juste hardcoded for US QWERTY keyboards you cannot really find here). Each time, before searching the Web for a solution i juste tried another distro. Third trial was the right one : Ubuntu 07.04 remembered the keyboard layout after the first reboot. Ubuntu upgraded regularly on it, until it installed Unity which was apparently developped by idiots who didnot know of accelerated graphics: it couldnot even exploit the old IGP for its transparency gimmicks, meaning the Unity shells took a dozen second to display itself, one screen refresh per second, before you could click on anaything...). I then tried GNOME 3 with the community Ubuntu GNOME Remix. It was fluid (despite embedding a JavaScript engine - at least GNOME 3 uses accelerated graphics!), but it didnot let enough RAM for Firefox... So I stuck with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS until Ubuntu MATE was released in 2014. A few months later after using Ubuntu MATE, the hardisk died after a dozen years of intensive service. And i then discovered i had fastened the harddisk screws so hard that trying to unfasten them damaged their heads. Otherwise, i would have been able to use the machine until now (albeit switching along the way to an IA-32-still-supporting distro, enventually with a tiling windows manager and text based applications).
In the meantime, Microsoft urged users to replace Windows 7 with Windows 10. But Windows 10 didnot support the IGP of the bigger, so i migrated it to Linux too. On the other one, Windows 10 worked for a 4-5 months, en then one peculiar Windows update managed to corrupt Windows itself to the point it couldnot proprely reboot. So instead reinstallinng the OEM Windows 7, then the upgrade to Windows 10, an ten the updates (risking to ncounter the same trouble again, i also teh machine to Linux. On both, i installed Ubuntu GNOME Remix (because i still prefer GNOME 3 to anything else, for its ease of use). Since 2011, my personal machines have never run Windows anymore.
One day Ubuntu decided to ditch their Unity crap to embrace GNOME 3, and Ubuntu GNOME Remix ended up updating itself to nowadays' Ubuntu.
I've bought 2 Asus laptop more modern machine since then and immediately installed Ubuntu GNOME, and then Ubuntu on them.
I keep my 2 2008 Sony Vaios, because they have integrated DVD drives, and i still need them so digitalize may DVDs and CDs. One of them i also my testbed for alternative distros - you never know if Ubuntu is not going to do again something as stupid as Unity, Amazons "lenses" or over-Snapping (i have found a way to get Firefox updates without Snap, but this is the current itch). This machine has been running Manjaro GNOME for 3 years now. I have tried other distros and desktop environments on it, but GNOME is still the best for me (it just run and is so simple to use), and i have found nothing match Ubunu yet, despite being obliged to deactivate Snaps an circumventing Firefox updates via Snaps: Last spring manjaro update corrupted something that made the screen flicker and i found no other way to get out of the mess than resinstalling Manjaro form scratch. Whatever the non Ubuntu distros i have used, i always get in some kind of trouble one day, while Ubuntu installations has been updating themselves for years seemlessly (my 2 oldest current has run since 2011 - their boot splashscreen animation is still the original community Ubuntu GNOME Remix one!).
To my experience only Debian-based distros are this rock-solid, but Linux Mint ignores GNOME and Debian is supposedly a little rougher on the edges for an end-user like me, who likes that everything just runs out of the box as smootly as a Macinhtosh, and only opens a terminal for fun or when feeling like learning something under the hood.
71 • Distros used... [Erratum) (by LongInteresButLongConversion on 2023-01-04 01:56:10 GMT from France)
The send-to-las Pragarph is abourt my 2 Sony Vaios.
It should have been wrtten:
"In the meantime, Microsoft urged users to replace Windows 7 with Windows 10. But Windows 10 didnot support the IGP of the bigger Sony Vaio, so i migrated it to Linux too. On the other Vaio, Windows 10 worked for a 4-5 months, and then one peculiar Windows update managed to corrupt Windows itself to the point it couldnot proprely reboot. [etc.]"
72 • Distros used... [Erratum again] (by LongInteresButLongConversion on 2023-01-04 02:00:47 GMT from France)
Sorry, my finger get tired too. So let me rewrite the erratum.
The second-to-last paragraph is about my 2 Sony Vaios.
It should have been written:
"In the meantime, Microsoft urged users to replace Windows 7 with Windows 10. But Windows 10 didnot support the IGP of the bigger Sony Vaio, so i migrated it to Linux too. On the other Vaio, Windows 10 worked for a 4-5 months, and then one peculiar Windows update managed to corrupt Windows itself to the point it couldnot proprely reboot. So instead of reinstalling the OEM Windows 7, then the upgrade to Windows 10, an then the updates (risking to encounter the same trouble again, i also migrated it machine to Linux. On both, i installed Ubuntu GNOME Remix [etc.]"
73 • Disks and partitions (by Andy Figueroa on 2023-01-04 04:19:56 GMT from United States)
I run Gentoo on my primary desktop. All my drives are spinning media. My primary drive, a 1 GB /dev/sda has eight user partitions. The drive is partitioned with a DOS/MBR partition table.
lsblk /dev/sda
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 125G 0 part /
├─sda2 8:2 0 125G 0 part /home
├─sda3 8:3 0 125G 0 part /scratch
├─sda4 8:4 0 1K 0 part
├─sda5 8:5 0 125G 0 part /mnt/vbox
├─sda6 8:6 0 125G 0 part
├─sda7 8:7 0 125G 0 part
├─sda8 8:8 0 125G 0 part
└─sda9 8:9 0 56.5G 0 part
/scratch contains additional personal files that are not in /home.
/mnt/vbox contains VirtualBox virtual machines that are in addition to the ones in /home. /home and /mnt/vbox are both 62% used. /scratch is 84% used. The other four sda partitions are spares for future use.
I have two additional hard drives, 1 GB and 2 GB. Each of these has nine user partitions, one on each drive being a swap partition, and all of the other more or less equal sized partitions used for systematic backups. That third hard drive was added because I outgrew the second one. I also backup weekly to external media on a weekly and monthly rotating basis.
74 • The past & the future (by Gary W on 2023-01-04 05:38:36 GMT from Australia)
Let me echo the many congratulations for such a milestone issue! Looking forward to the next 1000 (especially next week's :-)
I started in 1996 with Slackware (installed from floppy on a CD-less machine).
Moved to Red Hat 6 (or 7) on CD-equipped hardware when I discovered package management.
Moved to Debian testing when I discovered working package management.
Had a spell of distro-hopping in the late noughties (to go with new hardware): Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Debian again, Arch, quite a few others (briefly).
Finally settled on MX; it works for me. PCLinuxOS is my fallback if/when there's a problem with MX. I play with EXE (Devuan with the Trinity desktop) as a viable option for old (32-bit) systems (and my old scanner).
As for partitions, unless I'm just testing, I make a system partition, an alternate system partition (which has been handy for the situation of broken upgrades, notably due to Nvidia drivers), and a data partition. I use a swap file instead of a swap partition. Works for me.
75 • Disks and partitions (by Disks and partitions on 2023-01-04 11:43:22 GMT from France)
The number of disks and partitions varies across different machines but the essential partition is always the one containing my personal files. In addition I have a partition for my OS (currently Mint XFCE or MX XFCE) and one for a small home directory. /home is sym linked to the partition containing my personal files.
On work machines I have an EFI partition that also holds a copy of Clonezilla.iso for taking partition image backups.
76 • Congrats and fav distro (by George on 2023-01-04 11:50:03 GMT from Canada)
I've read you for at least 10 years. Happy new year and congrats on your 1000th issue!
As for distros, I've tried a few but mostly been disappointed. I don't want to make a hobby of customizing anything, I just need to get to work. I find Linux to be quite amateurish, that is lacking in cohesiveness. However, when I use Linux it's Mint Cinnamon. Though looking very basic, it was easy to use and just worked for me. I think Elementary is promising and is an example of a cohesive OS that I am referring to. It's impossible to leave Windows; the games my friends play need it, because of deep kernel anti-cheat hooks that won't ever work with Wine. Besides that, there's far too many scientific Windows programs that I use.
77 • Guhnoo slash leenux (by Cheker on 2023-01-04 16:54:20 GMT from Portugal)
I'm a relatively new face, been visiting the site since around mid 2019 (which is also more or less when I got serious about dual booting Linux, up until then it was just messing around in VMs). For no particular reason I landed on Manjaro, and it's what I use on the desktop to this day.
78 • Partitions Used (by PalomarJack on 2023-01-04 21:04:16 GMT from United States)
A long time ago there was an operating "environment" that seemed to be (or still is) designed to randomly crash, but, I was intrigued as a hobbyist by multitasking, so I kept at it. Later in version 4.x it still was not much better. All Microsoft did was make it boot at the same time as DOS. V4.1, Win98', was marginally better, but I still didn't trust it, it crashed randomly, too. At least there was long file names, at least.
Back on v3.x I lost many letters and much hobbyist programming code to Windows 3.x. It seemed the over bearing strain of a programming environment, text editor and calculator accessory was just too much. Yes, soon I saved to a separate disk, a partition was not a safe haven. Even those files were potential victims of a Windows tantrum. I managed to save files, but my whole computing world came to a, yes, crashing halt as Windows committed digital suicide by making it's system files a tangled mess, usually while writing an important correspondence. And never, ever print before saving. Just what the hell...?! As they whined about digitally deadly Windows crashes, what was the computer media missing? Microsoft was (is?) clearly clueless. So, I tried something I heard about in the Unix world, a swap partition. Was it really that simple? I put it on a small but fast hard drive, system files on the first partition of the larger drive and my files in the second partition. Hey, imagine that! Well, it never fixed the crashes, but it stopped windows from trashing everything in the process. And, I could reinstall or upgrade without the tedious task of backing up. Seems when Windows crashed most of the time, it was during a swap access which sent the heads careening about the disk while writing to the swap file. The swap drive also sped up disk access because now Windows could write to swap and read data at the same time in the new 32 bit mode. These were the reasons Unix admins were utilizing separate partitions, with swap preferably on a separate drive. DUH! Yes! It is true, the best solutions are the easiest to implement.
The moral of my lengthy story is, don't duplicate the way a more popular but inferior OS is utilized, EVER. Unix and earlier Linux installs were partitioned as they were for a reason. And their hard drives were far more expensive, so drive cost is no good excuse. Doing it the "Microsoft Way" is just plain, lazy. Some will profess that Linux is too advanced and reliable to require separate partitions. That may be so, but all it takes is one failed chip on the motherboard to change your mind.
Now I know, not everyone has a laptop that can accommodate two drives, but for Gods sake man, at least use home and swap partitions and back up your files to something reliable, not some "cloud".
Epilogue: Did Microsoft ever fix this? Well, an unknown virus is usually blamed for Windows wiping out an entire drive, including the install partition. Was that a virus? Could be. But, what do you think? Like COVID being the favorite excuse for government and corporate laziness, so are obscure computer viruses for lazy coding and install procedures. Don't do it the Microsoft Way, do it the Right Way.
79 • distro (by jay on 2023-01-04 21:19:45 GMT from United States)
i like garuda linux for its amazing options, but it is really heavy due to kde, and kde is always fixing bugs. Not good for light network. One thing rest of linux community can do -- add support for searx out of the box, instead of relying on google or bing or even duck duck go. searx is excellent search engine its a shame its complicated to install, or that firefox does not support out of box.
80 • Congrats and fav distro (by Raymond on 2023-01-04 23:26:07 GMT from Netherlands)
I started reading Distrowatch around 2002. Then using Knoppix live cd. Since then there have been many good distros, but PCLinuxOS is the one I always getting back to. Distrowatch has meant a lot to the Linux community. Both in content and its support for open source projects. Congrats to the team.
81 • How many partitions? Too many but there is a logical reason for each. (by Clarence on 2023-01-05 02:05:00 GMT from United States)
I started out having a very hard break between Linux and windows 3.x I think, Good old AT&T Linux and network. My first time with having actual email. Go down to Micro Center and buy some CD;s. Slackware for sure because it would actually run on my computer.Skip Red Hat because I probably bought 10 different versions of Red Hat over the years and eventually gave up on getting it to work.
.I still experiment with new distro's and everyone uses a boot, root, and user partitioon. This explains how I now have 12 disk partitions and feel that everyone should too.
82 • tech turmoil (by Billy-Jo Daniels on 2023-01-05 21:37:49 GMT from United States)
20 years of distrowatching, and who would have thought these things would happen:
* Sun Microsystems would go belly-up.
* Apple would become the world's richest company.
* Donald Trump would become the US President, whose claim to fame would be the use of Internet social media.
* Cybercrime would bcome a $-multibillion industry.
* Vint Cerf, the creater of the Internet - for friendly file sharing - would now recommend that ppl require a licence to use the Internet to combat its negative influence.
* An open source CPU would be developed to challenge the proprietory tech giants' CPUs.
* Distrowatch would still be going strong.
It's been a wild ride...
83 • CyberSecurity (by Antonio C Miles on 2023-01-05 19:43:53 GMT from United States)
N/A
84 • 1000th DW weekly (by dolphin oracle on 2023-01-06 03:29:02 GMT from United States)
Congratulations on your 1000th!
and thanks for including MX as one of the favorites.
85 • Finding what is consuming disk space (by Carlos Moreira on 2023-01-06 15:50:19 GMT from Brazil)
I like to use the application ncdu, the command:
sudo ncdu -x /
will open up a cli application interface showing you a nice view of your root partition files, from there you can manage it, even deleting some folders to free up some space.
86 • ncdu (by Steve Lane on 2023-01-06 19:16:45 GMT from United States)
I use ncdu all the time.
1) to check storage usage
2) to remove unneeded files; firmware is one such huge folder.
Number of Comments: 85
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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| • Issue 1091 (2024-10-07): Redox OS 0.9.0, Unified package management vs universal package formats, Redox begins RISC-V port, Mint polishes interface, Qubes certifies new laptop |
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| • Issue 1089 (2024-09-23): Expirion 6.0, openKylin 2.0, managing configuration files, the future of Linux development, fixing bugs in Haiku, Slackware packages dracut |
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| • Issue 1086 (2024-09-02): Vanilla OS 2, command line tips for simple tasks, FreeBSD receives investment from STF, openSUSE Tumbleweed update can break network connections, Debian refreshes media |
| • Issue 1085 (2024-08-26): Nobara 40, OpenMandriva 24.07 "ROME", distros which include source code, FreeBSD publishes quarterly report, Microsoft updates breaks Linux in dual-boot environments |
| • Issue 1084 (2024-08-19): Liya 2.0, dual boot with encryption, Haiku introduces performance improvements, Gentoo dropping IA-64, Redcore merges major upgrade |
| • Issue 1083 (2024-08-12): TrueNAS 24.04.2 "SCALE", Linux distros for smartphones, Redox OS introduces web server, PipeWire exposes battery drain on Linux, Canonical updates kernel version policy |
| • Issue 1082 (2024-08-05): Linux Mint 22, taking snapshots of UFS on FreeBSD, openSUSE updates Tumbleweed and Aeon, Debian creates Tiny QA Tasks, Manjaro testing immutable images |
| • Issue 1081 (2024-07-29): SysLinuxOS 12.4, OpenBSD gain hardware acceleration, Slackware changes kernel naming, Mint publishes upgrade instructions |
| • Issue 1080 (2024-07-22): Running GNU/Linux on Android with Andronix, protecting network services, Solus dropping AppArmor and Snap, openSUSE Aeon Desktop gaining full disk encryption, SUSE asks openSUSE to change its branding |
| • Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
| • Issue 1077 (2024-07-01): The Unity and Lomiri interfaces, different distros for different tasks, Ubuntu plans to run Wayland on NVIDIA cards, openSUSE updates Leap Micro, Debian releases refreshed media, UBports gaining contact synchronisation, FreeDOS celebrates its 30th anniversary |
| • 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 |
| • Issue 1075 (2024-06-17): Redox OS, X11 and Wayland on the BSDs, AlmaLinux releases Pi build, Canonical announces RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu, key changes in systemd |
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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 |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • 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 |
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