 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1005, 6 February 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
A long time ago, in the time of floppy disks and single-core processors, there was a Unix desktop called the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). This graphical user interface was commonly seen on Solaris machines and it offered a virtual experience which tried to imitate a real world desk. These days not many people use CDE, but the desktop has been ported to modern operating systems and, this week, Jesse Smith tries out CDE on the NuTyX Linux distribution; read on to learn about his experiences. Do you use CDE or a modern clone of the desktop? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. In our Questions and Answers column we peek under the hood of Linux systems to talk about user identification numbers (UIDs) and why the ranges of these numbers are different across different flavours of Linux. We also share news stories, covering improvements to the new Pop!_OS COSMIC desktop environment along with better access to keyboard and mouse settings on Linux Mint. Then we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. This past week we introduced the helloSystem project to our database. helloSystem is a FreeBSD-based project which seeks to provide a macOS-like desktop experience and we have details below. We also added two new packages, nftables and ClamAV, to our software version tables and Search page which we hope you will find useful. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
NuTyX 22.12.0 and a return to CDE
About a year ago I decided to revisit the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) to see how the experience held up to my 20 year old memory of running the desktop on Solaris. I ended up installing CDE on Debian. While I did get the aging desktop running, there were some severe limitations, such as the inability to use the mouse to click on icons and menus, and my trial soon came to a close.
The idea of revisiting CDE stayed with me though and, last month while I was tinkering with Arch Linux, I noticed NsCDE is in the Arch User Repository (AUR). NsCDE (the Not So Common Desktop Environment) is a modern implementation of CDE using FVWM minimal window manager. I decided to try installing NsCDE on my Arch system, which already had GNOME and Xfce running on it, to see how the experience held up.
I tried to perform the install of NsCDE from the AUR using the yay assistant, but the build failed due to missing dependencies. I tracked these down and the build failed again, with more missing dependencies. Then failed again. I manually added more dependencies. Then the build failed again with less clear errors. So I gave up on running NsCDE on Arch and went looking for another distribution which might offer NsCDE or the real, original CDE. I found what I was looking for in NuTyX.
NuTyX offers about a dozen editions. Most of these editions feature modern desktop environments and some include lightweight window managers. There is a minimalist, command line only edition, and, yes, one edition featuring CDE!
NuTyX is built from Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch, with a custom package manager called "cards". The package manager can install individual binary packages, a group of related binary packages (e.g. desktop packages, such as KDE or Xfce), and compile source packages from ports. The distribution is designed for intermediate and advanced Linux users. I downloaded my coveted CDE edition which was available as a 1.5GB ISO file.
Installing
Booting from the NuTyX media brings up a text-based menu screen where we are asked to pick our county and language from a list. We're then asked to pick one of three options: Install, Advanced, or Help. I picked Install which asked me to pick my keyboard layout from a cryptic list of short names and then make up a username and password. The system then seemed to be loading something for a handful of seconds. The screen cleared and showed me a graphical login screen for CDE.
What took me by surprise is, at first, I still thought I was engaged in part of the install process from the live media. However, when I signed into the desktop and was greeted by no more prompts or questions I checked and confirmed NuTyX was now running from my hard drive. On one hand, it is very impressive that NuTyX installed and then rebooted so quickly that I didn't notice it had happened. I don't believe that has ever happened to me before. In the time it takes some distributions to merely load their installer or present package selection options, NuTyX finished its install process.
On the other hand, I'm concerned about the fact NuTyX took over my hard drive, wiping the entire disk clean, without warning. I didn't see any prompt asking me about partitioning or erasing data. NuTyX simple took the nuclear option without fanfare. This is not going to make for a great first impression for most users. I went to the distribution's website and read the documentation about installing. To be fair, it does say the default Install option on the live media offers automated partitioning. However, it does not seem to indicate the disk is erased and partitioning happens without warning. Lots of distributions offer an "automated" or "guided" partitioning option, but they almost always warn the user first.
The documentation does mention the Advanced option on the live media can be used to access a command line and run disk partitioning tools. The steps outlined require a bit of Linux knowledge and manual work, but they should allow someone to set up the distribution without having it take over the entire disk. When taking the automated approach, I ended up with a single ext4 partition for the root and home directories. A swap partition is also created. According to the project's documentation, on machines with UEFI enabled, an EFI partition is created. However, I was unable to get NuTyX to boot in UEFI mode, it only ran in Legacy BIOS mode during my tests.
Early impressions
NuTyX boots to a graphical login screen where we can sign into the CDE desktop. The session loads unusually quickly and, the first time we sign in, a file browser and document explaining how to use CDE are automatically opened. Booting NuTyX takes about two seconds and loading the desktop takes about a second. The CDE desktop places a thick panel at the bottom of the screen. The panel holds quick launch icons and buttons which will open "drawers" where we can find additional applications. There is also a large virtual desktop switcher in the middle of the panel. The panel further holds buttons for locking or leaving the desktop session.
NuTyX 22.12.0 -- Changing sound and screensaver settings
(full image size: 135kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The default theme tends to use white font on a beige background which I found difficult to read. The virtual terminal uses white on black which I find easier on my eyes. We can open a settings panel which will allow us to pick alternative colour themes. However, the desktop session must be closed and we must sign back in to see the new theme, it does not change on the fly.
Application windows have maximize and minimize buttons and a general window menu for moving or resizing the application, but no dedicated close button. We can close windows by clicking the general menu button and selecting the Close entry. Most native CDE applications also have a menu built into the application which offers a Close option. I found this somewhat inconvenient, but I suppose the lack of a Close button is intended to help people avoid data loss. Clicking a window's minimize button shrinks the window to an icon and places to the left of the desktop. There is no dock or task switcher, just an open space on the desktop or holding a list of icons.
More details on CDE
I'd like to return focus to the CDE panel for a moment. The panel holds a number of application launchers and information indicators. These include a calendar, a launcher for the file manager, and a mail icon for opening an e-mail client which did not work as no mail client was installed. There are buttons for locking and leaving the CDE session, and four large buttons for switching between virtual desktops. There is a button for opening a printer browser. This print tool should let us see printers and waiting print jobs, but the utility doesn't enable us to add new printers.
Digging through the drawers of the panel we find one drawer is mostly geared toward launching applications such as text editors and the terminal. Another drawer gives us quick access to desktop settings. The desktop settings application includes modules for adjusting the theme, font size, and mouse behaviour.
NuTyX 22.12.0 -- Running Firefox and browsing application launchers
(full image size: 359kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The panel also includes a help menu where we can see a guide which explains using the CDE interface and a trash bin where we can find deleted files. Near the middle of the panel is a light which flashes when we try to launch an application. This visual feedback was more helpful back in the days when it took several seconds to a minute to launch new applications. One button on the panel minimizes the panel just like we would a window, pushing it off to the left side of the screen.
One of the drawers offers a launcher which opens a window that lists software categories and, when we select a category we are shown application launchers for popular applications. This arrangement of icons is misleading as almost none of the programs listed are actually available - they are not installed on the system. I'm not sure why this program shows us lots of icons for unavailable software. When we install new desktop applications, as I'll talk about later, launchers are added to this window. This application browser, which has its own window, feels like an early version of the modern full-screen application grid approach to launching apps used by GNOME and smartphones.
Something I find interesting about CDE is how much the environment tries to imitate a physical desk. The way we don't minimize applications to an abstract taskbar, instead moving small markers for the window to the left, for example. Or the way we open and shut drawers (which stay open until manually closed) rather than browsing a menu tree. By default, CDE saves our session when we logout, meaning when we sign back in the applications we were using open automatically and return to their previous positions. Modern desktops can save sessions, but usually do not, preferring to give us a clean slate. CDE tries to treat our digital environment like a physical one where open tasks do not disappear when we leave the room.
To the modern eye, CDE might seem dated or quaint, but I think there was a strong effort here to make the digital world feel familiar to people accustomed to working with physical equivalents of the tools provided. Which makes CDE's approach fairly easy to learn, even if it doesn't feel as efficient compared to some modern desktops.
Included software
NuTyX doesn't ship with a lot of software installed. The GNU command line programs are available along with the CDE desktop. There is no compiler on the system and no web browser. The distribution runs the SysV init software and version 6.0 of the Linux kernel, at the time of writing. The man command line utility is installed, but manual pages are not available by default. When we install new software, manual pages are an optional additional package we can fetch rather than part of the program's main package.
NuTyX 22.12.0 -- Browsing files and changing the desktop appearance
(full image size: 208kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Package management with cards
As I mentioned at the start of this review, NuTyX uses the cards package manager. The cards utility is a command line tool which uses a fairly straight forward syntax. The "cards search" command finds new software, "cards install" fetches a package, "cards remove" deletes a package, and "cards upgrade" updates installed software. We can run "cards list" to see items already installed.
In the event we forget these commands, or want to see other options cards provides, we can run "cards help" to see a summary of features the package manager offers. Something I found interesting is "cards help" displays its options in colour in the terminal. This means if we pipe the output of "cards help" through a pager, like less, the output becomes scrambled as colour codes are printed in the text, making it hard to read.
NuTyX 22.12.0 -- Running the cards package manager
(full image size: 136kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I found cards worked quickly for me, and functioned without errors. The output produced is slightly on the terse side, but cards seemed clear in its syntax and output. I quickly grew to like cards and its quick performance.
While the NuTyX repository is missing some common open source desktop applications, we can try to overcome this by using portable packages, such as Flatpak. The Flatpak framework can be installed by cards and the popular Flathub repository is automatically enabled for us. I had problems installing Flatpaks though. I attempted to fetch and run four applications and three of them failed to install properly, giving checksum errors. In short, while Flatpak is an option, is did not prove to be a reliable one. Even when I then tried installing Flatpaks on NuTyX which I already had running on another distribution at the same time, the installation usually failed.
Hardware
NuTyX is a fairly light distribution. When signed into the CDE interface the system consumed about 115MB of RAM. A fresh install used about 4GB of disk space.
At first I struggled with the desktop resolution while running NuTyX in VirtualBox. The CDE desktop defaulted to displaying at 800x600 pixels, which was probably fine in 1998, but not ideal for a modern screen. To make matters worse, CDE does not include any configuration tools for adjusting the desktop resolution. On Solaris, there were external command line tools to manage CDE's resolution, but these are not included in NuTyX. I worked around these limitations by using cards to fetch the xrandr command which can query and set the screen resolution.
Doing this while logged into CDE changes the screen resolution, but not the amount of display real estate CDE consumes. The desktop stays firmly in the upper-left 800x600 corner of the screen until we sign out and log back into the desktop.
As I mentioned earlier, I got NuTyX to boot in BIOS mode, but not in UEFI mode. This prevented me from successfully running the distribution on my laptop. My trial was restricted to a VirtualBox instance.
Conclusions
As the NuTyX website makes fairly clear up front, the distribution is geared toward more experienced Linux users. People who are comfortable using the command line, manually partitioning a hard drive with command line tools, people who don't mind using a custom package manager, and manually enabling services. The distribution is very hands-on and the documentation is often brief on topics covered. This leaves the user to mostly navigate using on-line documentation as a quick-start guide and local manual pages (which must be installed separately).
I'm not thrilled with how NuTyX takes over the hard drive with no warning during the installation and virtually no hint of what will happen in the documentation. This is dangerous and a good way to put off first-time users.
After this initial surprise though, NuTyX performs fairly well. The installer is super fast, the distribution boots within two seconds and logs into CDE in about a second. (This disproves the myth the classic SysV init software is slow to boot; when it's configured properly it brings up the system almost instantly.)
NuTyX is fairly small, fairly lightweight, but offers enough popular software and options through the repositories that I think has the tools for most people to perform basic tasks. The challenge, I find, is bootstrapping enough applications onto the system in the beginning to make the minimal operating system useful for daily tasks. This can take a while as NuTyX ships with such a small collection of applications.
In short, both CDE and NuTyX are small and fast. Both do a minimal of hand holding, and both feel like trips to past popular technologies. I liked visiting CDE again after 20 years and, while it is not a desktop I'd now want to use regularly, I did appreciate how much the developers tried to make CDE feel like a familiar, physical desk. NuTyX is somewhat limited in its packages and utilities, but the trade off is a simple design and fantastic performance.
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Visitor supplied rating
NuTyX has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8/10 from 11 review(s).
Have you used NuTyX? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes mouse and keyboard options more accessible
The Pop!_OS developers have been working on a custom desktop for their distribution. The new desktop is called COSMIC and is written in Rust, a language designed for both safety and speed. The developers have published updates on their progress and included screenshots of the young desktop environment in action. "COSMIC DE uses the Wayland display server, a program which communicates with the rest of your system to run your application, show it on-screen, and register user inputs. But Wayland is relatively new compared to the X11 display server, so some applications may not be compatible. That's where XWayland comes in. The XWayland display server includes a compatibility layer for applications using X11 to run on Wayland instead. Since one of our engineers, Victoria, integrated XWayland into the cosmic-comp compositor, the engineering team has been testing how X11 applications like Firefox and Steam are faring on COSMIC DE." Additional information and highlights can be found in the project's blog post.
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The Linux Mint team have published their monthly newsletter and taken the opportunity to highlight changes coming to the next version of their distribution. Two of the notable changes include improved accessibility for changing keyboard layouts and tap-to-click is enabled for touchpads on the login screen. "System layouts defined in /etc/default/keyboard are listed first for easy access. Below that a sub-menu lists all supported layouts. Touchpad support was also improved. Tap-to-click is detected and enabled automatically in the login screen. The layout used for Onboard, the on-screen keyboard, is configurable. The keyboard navigation was improved. The arrow keys can be used to edit the password which is being typed. A revealer icon appears when the password is clicked or edited. This revealer can be used to toggle the visibility of the password. Among other small improvements Slick-greeter also received support [for] Wayland sessions, LXQt/Pademelon badges, and a scrollable session list." Additional information can be found in the project's newsletter.
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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) |
User identification number ranges across different distributions
What-is-my-number asks: I'd love to see a story about user ID numbers, 1000 for Debian, etc. And why they're different across, sometimes, common platforms.
DistroWatch answers: A user identification number, which is sometimes referred to as a user ID or UID, is a positive integer which is associated with a user account on a Linux, BSD, or other Unix-like operating system. Basically, every user is assigned a UID in order to uniquely identify their account.
A UID is also used to assign file and directory permissions. A username can change on an operating system and usually changes when moving files between operating systems. Using a numeric value instead of a name makes it easier to update access permissions in case a username changes.
As for why UIDs are different across platforms, I believe this question is referring to the fact that the range of UID values can be different on different operating systems.
Backing up a bit, the Linux kernel (and the kernels of other members of the Unix family) do not usually care about the UID associated with an account. You can assign just about any number in the range of 1 to 65535 to a user account, as long as the value is unique on your operating system. The one exception is the root user, the administrator. The root account always has a UID of 0 (zero). Apart from this special instance, UIDs can be just about any positive integer value for any account.
These days most Linux distributions (and flavours of BSD) assign UIDs to new user accounts starting at the value 1000 and rising incrementally. In other words, the first user account you make will be assigned the UID 1000, the second account will likely have a UID of 1001, the third 1002, and so on. However, some distributions (especially older ones) may start assigning UIDs at 500. So the first account gets a numeric identifier of 500, the second gets assigned 501, the third 502...
Why start with such high numbers, like 500 and 1000, instead of, 1, 2, 3, and 4 for the first four regular (non-root) users? The gap between 0 and 1000 is typically reserved for system and service accounts.
Most Linux and BSD platforms reserve UID numbers below 1000 for system services. When you run a web service, mail server, secure shell login service, or printing service these services typically get assigned a user account. These services are common and important to run, but they would carry a security risk if they were run either as your regular user account or as the root user. You don't want your mail service or network manager to have full access to your operating system, especially if it gets compromised. So these services are associated with a user account which is not allowed to login and which has limited access to everything on the system, except the files it absolutely needs. This isolates system services and prevents them from doing damage if they misbehave.
In short, the root user gets UID 0, system services are assigned reserved values from 1 to 499 (or 999), and regular user accounts start at 500 or 1000 and move up. Why 500 and 1000? They're just nice, big, round numbers which makes them easy to remember.
The reason different distributions use different ranges of numbers for regular users, typically in the range of 500+ or 1000+, is just a matter of preference on the part of the developers. I think it was previously more common to use 500 and up, but over the years most projects have shifted to 1000 and up for new user accounts. This is usually just to give more room for UIDs to be assigned to system services. In years past, when computers had more limited resources, it was pretty common to have each system just run one or two background services. Now powerful machines could run hundreds of services at a time, which I believe was the motivation for some distributions to reserve more space between the UID for root (0) and the UID of the first user account (1000). There isn't anything particularly special about the starting point for UIDs, but 1000 is a nice, round number.
If you are curious about your account's UID you can run the id command to see it. On most distributions you can see what ranges of UIDs your distribution uses by looking in the /etc/login.defs file. The lowest possible UID value for a regular user will be defined in this text file as UID_MIN and the highest will be defined by UID_MAX. On my system, these are defined in the /etc/login.defs file as:
UID_MIN 1000
UID_MAX 60000
While not generally recommended, as it can break ownership of files outside the user's home directory, it is possible to change an existing user's UID. This can be done with the usermod command. An account's UID can be changed as shown below:
usermod --uid 2000 jesse
In the above example, I have changed the UID for Jesse from its original value (1000) to 2000. This should automatically also change ownership of Jesse's files in their home directory, but will not seek out and adjust ownership of other files on the system or on removable storage media.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
elementary OS 7.0
The elementary OS team have published a new version of their Ubuntu-based distribution. The new release, elementary OS 7.0 "Horus", introduces a number of new changes, many of them focused on the software centre: "As always, AppCenter is the centerpiece of elementary OS. The primary purpose of any operating system is to support the apps that you use to work, play, and express yourself creatively. In the latest version of AppCenter we've worked on making app descriptions more engaging with more information, making it easier to update to the latest versions of apps, and improving support for sideloading and alt stores. We've also worked on improving AppCenter's responsiveness - making sure you can comfortably use it when tiling and on small displays as well as better using space on large displays. We've completely rewritten the way navigation works in AppCenter and now support two-finger swipe gestures to navigate back. The entire app loads much faster and provides more feedback when running background tasks via an overlay bar in the bottom right or left corner." Additional information, along with screenshots, can be found in the project's release announcement.
elementary OS 7.0 -- Running the Pantheon desktop
(full image size: 2.3MB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
Gnoppix Linux 23.2
Andreas Mueller has announced the release of Gnoppix Linux 23.2, an updated version of the project's Debian and Kali Linux-based distribution with GNOME 43 as the default desktop: "We are proud to announce the release of Gnoppix 23.2, the latest version of our popular Linux distribution. This version includes many new features and improvements, including extensive bug fixes and improved performance, as well as support for the latest hardware and software. Gnoppix 23.2 also incorporates extensive user feedback, which we have been continuously working to implement in order to make our distribution the best it can be. This feedback has been crucial in helping us improve Gnoppix 23.2 and we are very grateful to our users for their help. On Perrit's request, we've added ChatGPT as a GNOME extension. We are now working on the next release, with GNOME 44, which is scheduled for release in March 23. This release will include the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment, as well as a number of other improvements and changes. We look forward to bringing you Gnoppix 23.3 and continuing to improve Gnoppix with your help." Continue to the release announcement for a full changelog.
Slax 11.6.0, 15.0.1
Tomáš Matějíček has announced the availability of Slax 15.0.1 (based on Slackware's "Current" branch) and 11.6.0 (based on Debian 11.6.0). Both new releases of the project's minimalist live distribution bring updated software as well as improved persistence: "I am excited to announce the release of Slax's latest versions - Slax version 15.0.1, based on Slackware 'Current' and Slax version 11.6.0, based on Debian 11.6. Both versions are available for both 32-bit and 64-bit processor architectures. One of the biggest improvements in Slax 15.0.1 and 11.6.0 are updated packages. Another key feature of the new Slax versions is the use of the newest DynFileFS which implements how 'persistent changes' are stored on writable media. This means that when you run Slax from a USB device, all the changes you make to the system will be stored in a special file (actually, a set of four files) on the USB disk, making it possible to use Slax on the go. In the past, this feature was limited to a total size of 4GB, but with the newest DynFileFS, you can store up to 16GB of data." Read the full release announcement for further details.
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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: 2,826
- Total data uploaded: 42.8TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Would you consider using CDE as your daily desktop?
In this week's review of CDE, the Common Desktop Environment, we revisited an interface which was popular in the Unix community in the 1990s. While CDE has been ported to multiple operating systems, and related projects such as NsCDE try to keep CDE's style alive, this desktop environment is rarely used anymore.
With CDE (and modern clones like NsCDE) now available across multiple Linux distributions and other open source operating systems, do you have any interest in running CDE?
You can see the results of our previous poll on checking the health of storage devices in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Would you run CDE?
| I would run CDE: | 126 (9%) |
| I already run CDE: | 10 (1%) |
| I have run CDE in the past but no longer: | 212 (16%) |
| I would run NsCDE: | 61 (4%) |
| I already run NsCDE: | 5 (0%) |
| I have run NsCDE in the past but no longer: | 23 (2%) |
| I would not run CDE/NsCDE: | 922 (68%) |
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| Website News |
Tracking new packages
Part of the work we do here at DistroWatch is tracking the versions of popular open source software available in each Linux distribution. Information on these packages, their latest stable version numbers, and a brief description can be found on our Packages Tracked page.
This past week we added two new packages to be tracked, the nftables firewall software for Linux and the ClamAV anti-virus scanner.
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New projects added to database
helloSystem
helloSystem is a FreeBSD-based, desktop-oriented operating system. The project seeks to provide a macOS-style desktop interface and layout while using open source software.
helloSystem 0.8.0 -- Exploring the application menu
(full image size: 353kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
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New distributions added to waiting list
- blendOS. blendOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution which, using a custom package manager called blend, allows the user to install software from multiple distributions (including Ubuntu and Fedora). blendOS is an immutable distribution with a read-only root filesystem.
- QuemOS. QuemOS is a Debian-based Linux distribution featuring the Xfce desktop.
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 13 February 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:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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| Extended Lifecycle Support by TuxCare |
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • CDE (by Brad on 2023-02-06 01:24:21 GMT from United States)
On a VMS Workstation, back in the day...
2 • Nutyx but what is CDE (by mnrv-ovrf-year-c on 2023-02-06 01:37:35 GMT from Puerto Rico)
Nutyx is a good distribution but has some rough edges. Unlike the reviewer on this site, I preferred a desktop environment. First I went with XFCE but had to give up because I couldn't get Wifi. Then I installed it with KDE, which was better but I was unable to get through one item to help me connect. I should have read the whole review above but, when picking one of the ISO's with D.E., the installer is one of the most straightforward I've ever encountered. First choose a partition then it copies files as if it were making a "live" CD/DVD. Then choose a different partition to place the bootloader. But the user should be prepared to edit a couple of text files for the right partitions. For me it was able to boot via UEFI but I had to go looking for the EFI file right after turning on computer.
It seems to come with "stock" KDE Plasma because a few things were missing such as the compositor section of "System Settings". Therefore I had to deal with transparency and a few other visual effects I detested. Some programs might not resize to maximum correctly. The "FLCards" program is a joke, should use the terminal instead to deal with packages. To run AppImages must install "fuse2". This is the first distro where I had an issue like this.
This distro is not for people who have slow Internet connections, and for those who only "want to consume". It does have fewer packages than competitors and there's no "multilib". It's possible to have "musl" for those who prefer that branch. Might have to install the "devel" group to get serious work done.
3 • CDE (by Friar Tux on 2023-02-06 02:01:36 GMT from Canada)
If you're running any gtk3/4 DEs (Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, etc.) you may find the OneStepBack gtk theme will work nicely without having to change to CDE. If you're comfortable messing with the code and image files, you can change the colours to your liking.
4 • CDE... (by Joe on 2023-02-06 03:29:56 GMT from New Zealand)
Once, a multitude of moons ago. Modern desktops are light years ahead!
It was applicable in that era of single CPUs, single threading, 8-bits (16 if you got lucky) and processors with frequency only a bit above high C on a piano. Today, NO.
5 • UID vs NFS (by Bob McConnell on 2023-02-06 03:37:30 GMT from United States)
The biggest issue with the UID differing on various systems is trying to use NFS mounts for NAS devices. NFS doesn't allow you to assign them in the mount command like CIFS does. I have multiple Slackware boxen where my UID is always 1000. But Raspian has already pre-assigned that one, so I can't mount my Raspberry Pi to those NAS drives using NFS and share files with the other systems. I have to have both NFS and CIFS mounts available. I have yet to find a way out of this dilemma.
6 • Desktop environments CDE, etc. (by Bobbie Sellers on 2023-02-06 05:40:43 GMT from United States)
I never used CDE nor NsCDE.
Someone mentions 8 or 16 bit computers but I ran AmigaOS which was proprietary as you
needed an Amiga to run it on. At 1.2 or 1.3 it was pretty primitive but by 3.1 it looked better
and took less resources than most systems, running on a 16/32 bit implementation of the 68000 chip and the OS came on a few 3.5 inch floppies. It had an additional 256 KB of ram
that loaded the vital parts of the OS on boot and nearly every program had to use a special Workbench disk which provided the needed libraries. When we got hard drives that became unnecessary. It was intended for home use without internet which was practically unobtainable at the time. My A2000b ended up with 32 Megabytes of ram, and a 68060 running at 50 MHz about 3 times the speed of the old 68000. I had a 3.2 GB hard disk and sadly no memory protection. So I switched to GNU/Linux after some years, with 2006 Mandriva. Sadly my skill at termination of SCSI drives is now obsolete. But Linux is much better and practically never
falls over due to Memory conflicts. Oh but the Amiga went from BBS programs to Internet
eventually but no real security. When it was turned on you were running in root mode essentially with unrestricted access to the system.
7 • CDE (by Pecka on 2023-02-06 07:03:26 GMT from Sweden)
I remember my father using Sun workstations back in the day but he preferred OpenWindows to CDE.
8 • UID vs NFS (by Terryn Serge on 2023-02-06 07:48:10 GMT from Belgium)
Use rpi-imager to write your image. Before writing, click on the cogwheel and change the user to your username to login with ssh. Then you get 1000 as UID.
9 • CDE (by Dr.J on 2023-02-06 08:20:07 GMT from Germany)
I bought my first computer in the mid 80's and at university we had Sun workstations with Unix, so i'm always interested in the old stuff. I'll certainly take a look at CDE out of curiosity. I will not change just as sure, because for about 10 years my Openbox-WM is the measure of things and I have everything I need.
10 • CDE (by Sasi on 2023-02-06 10:32:51 GMT from India)
Yes. I remember to have run Windows 3.1 on an Intel 286 machine with 8mb RAM and 40mb HDD (Sony)!!!
11 • Could Use NsCDE But... (by joncr on 2023-02-06 10:58:44 GMT from United States)
The jagged fonts would keep me away from CDE but NsCDE is in Fedora's repos so I installed it on a 4K laptop running Fedora Mate. I'm too lazy to mess with xrandr just for a test but everything looked as expected, just tiny.
More importantly, tap-to-click wasn't working. There's likely a way to deal with that. But, given its heritage, NsCDE is probably best suited for a mouse and a 1080p display.
12 • CDE (by eb on 2023-02-06 13:02:50 GMT from France)
Is a desktop useful ?
13 • CDE is/was a blast (by crayola-eater on 2023-02-06 13:17:12 GMT from United States)
Maybe 1-2 years ago, I saw CDE as a DE option in Sparky), and gave it a go. The install of CDE was from inside a running install, and it installed and ran just fine when chosen from the DM on the next reboot.
I never ran CDE before, but wanted to give it a look from both an historical curiosity, and wanting to see how what was arguably the first real desktiop handled the task.
I remember looking somewhat deep under the hood, and was pleasantly surprised to find editable text files as being the core of how a great deal of the desktop operated. After my initial get to know you dances with the desktop, I started to try and see if I could mould it into a possible daily runner.
I remember even being able to partially redesign the core control panel a bit to make it more convienient. I was able to add programs already installed show up in the apps drawer, but can't recall if I was ever able to create a cohesive 'menu' or not.
In the end, it was a load of fun to play with, but the legacy aspects of it that made it the superpower of the big iron days, I felt were more of a burden to my meager desktop today.
So on the next distro hop, it was gone, but not forgotten. I from time to time look at CDE and NsCDE in the Sparky repro and go "should I?".
14 • CDE (by kc1di on 2023-02-06 13:49:08 GMT from United States)
Remember using CDE on unix systems. Not willing to go back there now :)
But were fun days back then when almost everything was done via terminal. Most machine then had no Desktop so to speak.
15 • CDE (by Otis on 2023-02-06 14:35:29 GMT from United States)
My thought processes went, "Well, I don't always drive my car or ride my motorcycle, I sometimes walk or ride my bicycle, so maybe I should have CDE on my Linux system.
But that's where analogies often fall apart: In the real world, "on the ground," in real life, etc. CDE is just not efficient enough as compared to evolved DEs and WMs.
Have fun. ;o)
16 • CDE (by Voelsen on 2023-02-06 15:20:31 GMT from Sweden)
Used it with SparcStation 2+ som 30 years ago.
17 • CDE? (by JeffC on 2023-02-06 15:27:24 GMT from United States)
The first version of Xfce was built to be a Linux FOSS clone of CDE, it has evolved considerably since then.
I believe I will stick with Xfce.
18 • CDE/XFCE (by Zipslack on 2023-02-06 16:04:47 GMT from United States)
I've tried and been disappointed with the Linux CDE implementations. What I want is the original XFCE version that tried to mimic the look and feel of CDE (when it was still based on FLTK).
19 • CDE and GeoWorks (by James Larue on 2023-02-06 16:58:02 GMT from United States)
I remember using GeoWorks back in the 90s--a multi-threaded graphic desktop environment that used Motif. It looked a lot like CDE. At the time, it was also way, way ahead of Windows. Even on a 286 is ran fast, allowed for long file names, did true multitasking, and printed beautifully. Microsoft crushed it, I believe.
20 • I don't do quaint or vintage either... (by tom joad on 2023-02-06 16:03:01 GMT from Germany)
I read the explanation of the 'CDE.' And the one word question popped into my head...'Why?"
As of this writing 16% of the respondents have used CDE and left it in the dust. Add that to the 70 or so percent who stated they were not interested in using CDE. That is roughly 86% total.
Progress is better than vintage. Evolution is better than old static.
21 • CDE keystrokes? (by AdamB on 2023-02-06 20:56:42 GMT from Australia)
If I remember correctly, the keystrokes used, almost universally, in GUI applications for Cut, Copy and Paste - Control-X, Control-C and Control-V - were originally part of the CDE specification.
I presume that Control-O for Open, and Control-S for Save, were part of the same specification.
I seem to recall articles back in the day referring to "CDE-compatible" text editors.
If so, part of CDE lives on.
22 • Old static?? (by Friar Tux on 2023-02-06 21:48:37 GMT from Canada)
@20 (tom) You can actually have both - progress AND vintage. Evolution AND old static. As I mentioned in comment 3, the OneStepBack theme looks like CDE but works on modern DEs (based on gtk3/4). I rather like the look of it, though, I did change the drab grey to a darkish cyan, which I like better. All you'll need to complete the look is an appropriate icon set - of which there are plenty.
23 • WebApps (by poiema on 2023-02-06 22:43:57 GMT from United States)
Would like to see DistroWatch track Distro's that make it easy to run WebApps. I've found it simple on Mint. Peppermint, and BigLinux. BigLinux actually has somewhat of a 'store front' of WebApps. For those that have arguements against non-native tools like FlatPaks, Snaps, and AppImages it seems that WebApps offer a simpler solution that can also run behind the safety of your favorite browser in many cases. Sure beats having to install Microsoft Edge for a browser that can setup the same thing. Though it seems Gnome Web has also started adding this functionality.
Can DistroWatch track Distros that make it easy to use WebApps?
24 • Web apps (by Jesse on 2023-02-07 02:03:55 GMT from Canada)
@23: Web apps aren't native applications, they're just websites, typically running in a browser window without the normal address bar and menu. Which is why they aren't an alternative in most situations to portable formats like Snap and Flatpak.
Any and all Linux distributions which include a web browser make it easy to run web apps. All you need to do is create a shortcut on your desktop (or in the application menu) which launches your web browser with the "--app=URL" command.
For example: "brave-browser --app=https://duckduckgo.com". Just swap out Brave,in this case, for Chrome or Chromium or Falkon or whatever you normally use.
You can do this on almost any Linux desktop simply by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting "Create launcher", then put in the URL as shown in the example about. It's almost exactly the same steps and amount of time as using ICE or WebApp Manager.
25 • CDE fonts (by Marcus on 2023-02-07 02:43:26 GMT from Switzerland)
Is it possible to turn on hinting and antialiasing for fonts in the CDE user interface?
26 • Nuke 'em, Dano (by Trihexagonal on 2023-02-07 04:45:56 GMT from United States)
The nuclear option is the one I always use with installing an OS, with one disk/one OS many laptops my way..
No, I would not use CDE or any other flavor of Linux but a Debian bastard. I'm a long time Fluxbox user and all that I use on FreeBSD. I do use Xfce on Linux sometime, but I have many more packages installed on it and the DE menu is handy to use.
Package managers,... Baskin Robins has 31 flavors. Vanilla ports and apt is what I like, and all I use. If it's not in the ports tree of repositories of choice I don't use that program and I have all the programs I need through them to suit my purposes nicely..
And stay off my lawn, darn space age whiz kids....
27 • CdE (by Npaladin2000 on 2023-02-07 14:27:25 GMT from United States)
Used it back when I was working with AIX systems. And i used XFCE back when it was a CDE clone. At the time I'd take it over Windows.
28 • CDE? (by Slobbering Fanboy on 2023-02-08 07:57:01 GMT from United States)
CDE, who cares (sorry Jesse)? There are other way more interesting DE/WM’s around that are still being developed & maintained. Window Maker & Fluxbox, for example. On a side rant, I have never understood why it is that whenever Fluxbox is mentioned, someone always shifts the conversation to extolling the superiority of Openbox. This happens in spite of the highly opinionated, disputable fact, that Fluxbox looks better and is more easily configurable. Meh, to each his own. The same goes for Snap packages, I like them.
29 • CDE (by bgstack15 on 2023-02-08 15:08:29 GMT from United States)
I used CDE on AIX 6.1 back in 2014. I do not have access to that environment anymore, but I'm guessing nothing has changed and those systems still have this CDE environment running.
30 • NuTyX the malware disk wiper (by Simon on 2023-02-10 08:29:02 GMT from New Zealand)
How disgusting that it formats and writes over a user's hard disk without warning. I'm struggling to believe that any developer could be so clueless as to code an installer that simply goes ahead and trashes a user's system without giving the user a single warning that this was going to happen. Just on the basis of that fact, the developers' total disregard for the possible impacts of their software upon their users, I would never touch this distro and will certainly warn others against it.
Number of Comments: 30
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