 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1009, 6 March 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
There are hundreds of Linux distributions in the world and, chances are, if you've used more than one you've noticed differences in their performance. Each Linux distribution has different software and settings which result in big differences in how quickly they respond and perform tasks. We talk about why this happens in our Questions and Answers section, along with key factors which can be adjusted to improve the performance of one distribution when compared next to another. Is distribution speed a big factor when you are selecting which operating system to install? Let us know about how much performance factors into your decisions by voting in our Opinion Poll below. Also on the topic of performance, in our News section we discuss performance improvements coming to the Nemo file manager as the Linux Mint team gears up for their next release. We also share a utility which can create custom Debian and Ubuntu installation ISO files and porting efforts to bring FreeBSD's core utilities to Linux. First though, we dive into the PinePhone ecosystem. The low-budget, open hardware device has been available for a few years now and there are about 20 known operating systems available for the PinePhone. In this week's Feature Story, Jesse Smith explores some of the available distributions for the PinePhone and reports on their current status. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone
A little over a year ago I got my hands on a PinePhone which, following the arrival of its successor, the PinePhone Pro, is sometimes called the original PinePhone. I had fun exploring the PinePhone which is a very open, flexible, but quite low-powered device. As I discovered, and wrote last year, the PinePhone is intriguing as it is a first-step effort. It's open, it has attracted a lot of developers of open source, mobile operating systems to work on the device. It's probably not practical for most people, given its low specifications and short battery life, but it paved the way for more polished efforts in the mobile field.
Last year I looked at three mobile operating systems: Manjaro Linux running the Plasma Mobile interface, UBports featuring the Unity interface, and postmarketOS with the Phosh interface. Now that a year has gone by and the PinePhone community has had a chance to further develop their mobile operating systems, I wanted to look at more options. This past week one project in particular caught my eye: Nemo Mobile.
The Nemo Mobile website highlights four main features:
FOSS - Free open source software. Anyone can see, use, and contribute to the codebase.
Built with mobile in mind - Nemo Mobile utilizes well developed and fully open source Mer-core. It has been optimized for mobile devices and is based on multi-platform toolkit Qt.
Easy to use UX - Glacier UX as the default the use of Nemo Mobile is fluid and natural. It is very easy to build new user experiences.
Secure - Security is a default with true Linux devices. You control everything just like with your Linux desktop.
The Nemo Mobile operating system reportedly runs on the Volla Phone and the PinePhone, though not all typical functionality is offered yet. There is a table of features which shows what works and what does not.
The project's install instructions are fairly straight forward. We can just download the image, decompress it, and write the file to an SD card. The website even shows how to handle the decompression and image writing together in one command. Then we can insert the SD into our PinePhone (the slot for the SD card is under the back case, right above the battery) and boot the phone.
The download for Nemo is just 541MB and the uncompressed image file is 3.6GB. When I wrote it to an SD card and tried to boot the phone, the device launched its default operating system (Manjaro) from the internal storage instead. I tried booting once more and again the Nemo boot process failed, turning me over to Manjaro.
My assumption was the Nemo image file might have been corrupted during download or writing it to the SD card. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any checksum or verification signing information on the Nemo website which makes it impossible to confirm if the image file we end up with is correct.
I grabbed a fresh copy of Nemo from the project's website and wrote its image to a fresh SD card. This time the Nemo image was detected and booted. Since this would suggest my first download was corrupted and the second one worked, I'm sharing the SHA256 hash of my second, bootable download: cc176ee05ba461554a0eafe82c91b22173a4cee1d4e46f443727ef670b8717b0
The first time I booted Nemo the system showed me an animated Nemo logo while it set up its filesystem. This took a few minutes. Then the screen went blank and the indicator light came on. Then nothing happened for the next ten minutes. Pressing the power button would cause a flashing text cursor to appear in the upper-left corner of the screen, but there was no way to interact with the phone and no text was displayed. After a few more minutes I forced a reboot. This time Nemo booted almost immediately to the blank screen and activated the indicator light. Again, tapping the power button would only show a text cursor.
A third attempt to boot Nemo Mobile gave the same result with nothing but a blank screen and text cursor to show for my efforts. No text, no buttons to tap, and no progress after several minutes. There was no helpful information for troubleshooting this issue on the website so I moved on.
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Exploring other options
A year or so ago I observed there were around 20 mobile operating systems available for the PinePhone. However, what I might not have talked about at the time is how difficult it can be to find documentation and detailed descriptions of these open source operating systems. A lot of the entries simply offer a single-line description with a download link. Often times the documentation which is provided is out of date or the hyperlinks no longer work. I'd like to provide a few highlights of my experiences from last week to illustrate what I mean.
As an example, I wanted to try Sailfish. The project is Linux-based and mostly open source, but features a proprietary user interface. I've often heard good reports from other users of Sailfish and wanted to try it. There is a fairly large amount of documentation in the PinePhone wiki about Sailfish and the project's main website offers a lot of details and screenshots. It seems like an unusually well polished mobile platform. However, the section of the website dedicated to providing PinePhone images was not responding. It seems that part of the website is off-line or has been shut down.
I also wanted to try Glodroid, a fully open source port of Android for devices such as the PinePhone and Raspberry Pi 4. The website suggests the operating system needs to be compiled and I could find almost no end-user documentation or useful information on setting up Glodroid. Source code was easy enough to find, but useful directions on installing and using the software were not.
The ExpidusOS project caught my eye. It's a fork of Void for the PinePhone and it reportedly uses an Xfce-based user interface called Gensis. I'd never encountered a mobile-oriented flavour of Xfce before and I like Void's performance. However, all the download links on the project's website were broken. It seems ExpidusOS is no longer available or in development.
My PinePhone usually runs UBports 16.04 and has been mostly working well, despite the limited hardware of the platform, for about a year. With this in mind I wanted to test drive the upcoming release of UBports 20.04 which I believe will be launched later this year. I tried to find pre-release mages of UBports 20.04 to test, but didn't find any on the project's Devices page. I downloaded the UBports graphical installer and found it supports a few dozen mobile devices, but the PinePhone is not included in the list. I browsed the project's forums and found a post indicating that, as of January 2023 at least, there is no development image of UBports 20.04 for the PinePhone.
The UBports app tray
(full image size: 646kB, resolution: 720x1440 pixels)
I was tempted by Mobian, which is a build of Debian with the Phosh user interface. This project seems to be unusually detailed in terms of descriptions and documentation. However, one big stumbling block is the website reports Mobian will only boot on the PinePhone if tow-boot is already installed. This led me down a series of mazes trying to find information on tow-boot. What is tow-boot, how does it work, why does it need to be installed? Most importantly: how was tow-boot to be installed? Here the documentation turns into a weird combination of highly technical and oddly vague statements. Technical information is provided, but it's not always clear from which device we're meant to run commands or on which storage mediums (local PC, PinePhone internal storage, or SD card) files should be written.
I finally ran into a wall when I found a description of which files were required to install tow-boot and steps to perform these actions, but I couldn't find any links to download the required files.
These are some examples, but nearly all of my dives into working with mobile operating systems for the PinePhone followed this pattern of missing files, missing documentation, or broken links.
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Manjaro Linux running Plasma Mobile
When I first started using my PinePhone a year or so ago, one feature I enjoyed was the PinePhone has internal storage and space for an SD card. When the SD slot contains a card with a bootable operating system, the phone boots from the SD card. If no operating system is found on the SD card then the phone boots from its internal storage. By default, the operating system featured on the internal drive is Manjaro running the Plasma Mobile interface.
In late 2021 I wrote about my experiences with the mobile version of Manjaro. On the whole, I did not have a particularly productive time with Manjaro on the PinePhone, though a series of fixes and updates did help my experience.
The Plasma Mobile home screen with dark theme
(full image size: 899kB, resolution: 720x1440 pixels)
I had rarely had a reason to boot into Manjaro in the past year. Once my testing with other operating systems was completed, I mostly defaulted to running UBports from the SD card. However, I wanted to keep playing with the PinePhone and so I booted Manjaro. Immediately a notification appeared to let me know system updates were available.
I opened the Discover software centre and was told there were 717 new package available, totalling 1.1GB in size. I told Discover to fetch the updates. After a few minutes, Discover reported it was finished and I should reboot the device. When I rebooted, a new notification appeared, telling me updates were available. When I opened Discover again, I found 717 new packages were available, but the download size was zero bytes. It looked as though packages had downloaded, but were not installed.
I opened the terminal application and ran the pacman package manager. It found four updates waiting to be downloaded and also reported it needed to fetch and update its verification keys. I suspect the existing keys expired in recent months and pacman needed to swap them out for a fresh set. The package manager went to work fetching its keys and discarding the old ones. Then it seemed to be installing updates.
While pacman was working, the screen locked up. I was shown the middle third of an error message, but most of the words were cut off. The bulk of the message was off the edges of the screen. The interface was not responsive and I could not interact with the error or get back to the Plasma interface. I forced a reboot and, this time, Manjaro failed to load beyond the splash screen where the interface's "K" logo was shown with a mouse pointer. I could tap on the screen to move the pointer, but that was all. The system never finished booting, didn't otherwise respond, and didn't connect to the local network. Rebooting again (and again) would only bring me back to the logo screen.
In short, trying to bring Manjaro up to date failed and broke the system to the point of being unbootable. This isn't entirely surprising since Manjaro is a rolling release operating system and it had been several months since the last update. This sort of leap forward tends to be unstable on rolling release distributions. However, it goes to show that Manjaro's classic operating system approach has drawbacks. A lot of other mobile operating systems (such as UBports and Android) use immutable system cores to avoid breaking the system when performing upgrades. A phone running Murena or UBports can be updated months or years after the last upgrade. With Manjaro the process is more risky.
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Conclusions
I started out this week looking forward to trying a new operating system, Nemo Mobile, and when it didn't work for me, I ended up going down a long series of dead-ends. What began as a week of gradually exploring one mobile platform turned into a journey through the landscape of the PinePhone ecosystem.
What I discovered there was not encouraging.
A year or so ago the PinePhone appeared to have a healthy and growing community. There were over 20 operating systems available for the PinePhone, people were encouraging developers to port their distributions to the original PinePhone, and it was proving to be a good test bed for mobile Linux systems. The PinePhone looked to be performing a similar role for the open source mobile community as the Raspberry Pi did for budget computing. Neither device is high powered, but they are fairly open and inexpensive. Both are great for hobbyists and people looking to polish software which might end up running on other, more formidable equipment. In other words, a new mobile operating system running on the PinePhone today where it can be tested and polished might be ported to mainstream devices next year.
The Raspberry Pi, and its imitators, have enjoyed a lot of success over the past eight years. The ecosystem grew, matured, and slowly gained support from new operating systems and projects. It encouraged people to make sure their code worked on ARM processors as well as the x86 processors used in most workstations and laptops. I'd hoped for something similar to happen with the PinePhone.
Instead, the PinePhone community seems to be stagnant. There don't appear to be any more distributions for the device now than there were a year ago. Several of them seem to be abandoned or their documentation is out of date. Often times I ran into vague directions for downloading and installing new systems and other times download links were broken. Half the time, if I did get a new distribution image to download it wouldn't boot. Even the Arch Linux disk images for the PinePhone haven't been updated in over six months and it's a rolling release platform which will be hit hard the first time a user tries to update the system (as I discovered with Manjaro).
There are still a few gems. UBports is running well and, had I performed a fresh install of Manjaro rather than using the default system which came with the PinePhone, it might have offered a better experience. Sadly, these gems are rare and it looks like efforts to port and polish software for the PinePhone have not taken off the way they looked like they might a year earlier.
I am hoping the PinePhone community, and interested developers, rally around the newer PinePhone Pro. The newer device offers better specifications and I think the GNU/Linux community very much needs both competition and a focal point for mobile computing.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Linux Mint adds new performance boosts and security measures, Debian and Ubuntu custom builds provided through Cubic, FreeBSD core utilities ported to Linux
The Linux Mint developers are preparing for their upcoming version 21.2 release. Some of the changes coming to 21.2 will include better performance from the Nemo file manager when generating a lot of thumbnails along with security fixes to the Warpinator file sharing utility. "In preparation for Linux Mint 21.2, the changes below were implemented. Nemo 5.8 will feature multi-threaded thumbnails. Instead of generating each thumbnail one by one, Nemo will generate multiple thumbnails in parallel. This uses more CPU but it results in loading directory content faster, especially for directories which contain a large amount of media files. CJS 5.8, the Cinnamon JavaScript interpreter, will be rebased on GJS 1.74 and make use of SpiderMonkey (libmozjs) 102. The current version of cjs uses SpiderMonkey 78. XDG Desktop Portal implementations are being written for Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. This will provide better compatibility between desktop environments and non-native applications such as Flatpaks or libAdwaita apps (though these are usually written only for GNOME anyway)." These and other changes are discussed in the distribution's monthly newsletter.
* * * * *
People who wish to customize their Ubuntu or Debian experience have a helpful tool to utilize. Cubic is the "Custom Ubuntu ISO Creator", which creates custom Debian and Ubuntu ISO files. This allows users to deploy custom builds of the distributions using a graphical wizard: "Cubic permits effortless navigation through the ISO customization steps and features an integrated virtual command line environment to customize the Linux file system. You can create new customization projects or modify existing projects. Important parameters are dynamically populated with intelligent defaults to simplify the customization process." Screenshots and install instructions can be found on Cubic's GitHub page.
* * * * *
Back in 2017 a new project was created which aimed to test the performance and executable sizes of core OpenBSD tools against the GNU core utilities (coreutils) running on Linux. The project has since switched to using FreeBSD code as its base and it is gaining traction, providing FreeBSD's central, command line utilities on GNU/Linux distributions. "The project began in October 2017 and initially ported code from the OpenBSD source tree. The original objective was to see how much work was involved and to compare relative sizes of built executables with those found in GNU coreutils and other projects. In an effort to gain more featureful BSD commands and to possibly work more easily with dotfiles for users on MacOS X systems, the project started over by porting the commands from FreeBSD in April 2021." People interested in testing the FreeBSD versions of these utilities on Linux can visit the project's source repository.
* * * * *
These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Matching the performance of one Linux distribution from another
Need-for-speed asks: Why do some distributions offer better performance than others? Can I make one distro perform the same as another? I find Linux Mint's Xfce edition performs better than Pop!_OS on the desktop, but the latter gives me a better frame rate when gaming.
DistroWatch answers: Linux distributions are made up of thousands of packages. Often times, especially if two distributions are in different Linux families, these thousands of packages will each have been built with different optimizations, set up with different configurations, and may even offer different versions of the same software. As a result there are literally millions of little changes which can go into making one distribution perform better than another, even when performing the same tasks and run on the same hardware.
With that said, there are a few key factors which tend to cause differences in performance when you're running two closely related distributions (such as Linux Mint and Pop!_OS) on the same computer. These are, in no particular order:
- Desktop environment and compositing - This is usually the factor I see affect Linux distributions the most. The resource load of one desktop versus another can be huge, especially if compositing is enabled. Lighter window managers and desktops can run circles around heavier desktops. As the original question pointed out, a big, 3-D desktop like GNOME will often be less responsive than a lighter desktop such as Xfce. This difference tends to be more noticeable if one desktop has visual effects enabled.
- Video drivers - When dealing with desktop environments and games, a big factor when it comes to performance is video drivers. If you are running games or a 3-D desktop (such as GNOME, Cinnamon, or Deepin Desktop Environment) then you really need both a video card which will support 3-D and the appropriate video drivers. Missing either of these will greatly slow your machine.
- Services running in the background - It tends to be less of an issue these days, but background services have traditionally been a bottleneck for performance. This is especially true of background services which index files or check for updates.
- Memory consumption - This is tied, in a way, to which desktop we run and which services are working in the background. If a computer has a small amount of RAM and there are a lot of heavier programs running, such as background services, then the computer will end up moving data to the disk (swap space) and this will greatly degrade performance.
The list can go on and may include such things as which process scheduler is enabled in the kernel. Also, if your system needs to access the disk a lot, perhaps while gaming, then the difference between an SSD and spinning hard drive may be notable.
All of the above items can greatly impact performance, even when running otherwise similar distributions on the same hardware.
As to whether you can make one distribution perform like another, you can, usually by changing the components which make them different. For example, Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are both members of the Ubuntu family, which means they mostly use the same packages, kernels, and probably most of the same build and configuration options. But they do use different desktop environments (GNOME vs Xfce) and they may install different drivers (which can be handled through the driver manager), and they'll run some different background services (which can be managed through systemd's systemctl utility).
However, after you've swapped out the desktop environments, services, and drivers to make one distribution perform like another, you've come quite close to just having the second distribution installed. A few default applications and the front-end software centre might be different, but most other aspects will then be the same. You may find it easier just to install the distribution you find suits you best and doing little things to try to boost its performance. These will probably include installing an updated video driver, disabling unused services, maybe turning off your desktop's visual effects, and turning off compositing.
* * * * *
Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
IPFire 2.27 Core 173
IPFire is a small Linux distribution for firewalls and other networking devices. The distribution has published a new release which upgrades the kernel to version 6.1 and includes support for accessing 4G and 5G networks. "The Qualcomm MSM Interface is a proprietary interface increasingly used by 4G and 5G cellular modems. Commencing with this Core Update, IPFire supports interacting with such modems, thus significantly expanding its hardware compatibility to QMI-only cellular modems, and providing a faster and more modern interface. Thanks to Michael for implementing this feature. On that occasion, he also refactored related networking code. Arne has updated the Linux kernel to the most recent stable series, 6.1.11, which has become the new long-term series. Aside from the usual improvements such major kernel updates bring like bug fixes, improved hardware support and security improvements, we took the occasion to bring several new hardening changes to IPFire users: System calls permitting processes to read or write other processes' memory are no longer provided by the kernel. On EFI systems supporting it, the firmware is now instructed to wipe all memory when rebooting, to hamper cold boot attacks. Landlock support has been enabled. GCC's 'latent entropy' plugin has been disabled, since it does not generate cryptographically secure entropy." Additional details are presented in the project's release announcement.
Emmabuntus DE4-1.03
Emmabuntüs is a light, Debian-based distribution intended for less experienced users. The project's latest release includes content filtering controls for screening on-line content. The release announcement explains: "the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 1.03 update (32-bit and 64-bit), based on the Debian 11.6 'Bullseye' distribution and supporting both Xfce and LXQt desktop environments. This new update adds the CTparental control, as well as a script to help install and configure it. This will greatly simplify the deployment of CTparental for the parents who want to protect their children against unsuitable content on the internet; see our tutorial presenting the parental control. This new version will be the basis for our future Debian 12-based Emmabuntüs DE5, which we will start testing in the coming weeks. For this version 1.03, the following fixes and improvements have been implemented: distribution based on Debian 11.6 'Bullseye'; added parental control CTparental; added deb-get and Deborah utilities in 64-bit version; Updates of: Firefox ESR 102.8.0, Thunderbird 102.8.0, Ventoy 1.0.88, Multisystem 1.0461, Warpinator 1.4.4; The Debian Bullseye beginner's handbook 11.4."
Linux From Scratch 11.3
Linux From Scratch (LFS) version 11.3 has been released. Linux From Scratch is a free book containing step-by-step instructions to build a custom Linux system from scratch. A separate book called "Beyond Linux From Scratch" enables installing and configuring further software on top of a base LFS system. From the release announcement: "The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 11.3, LFS Version 11.3 (systemd), BLFS Version 11.3 and BLFS Version 11.3 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to GCC 12.2.0, glibc 2.36 and Binutils 2.39. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 6.1.11. The BLFS book includes approximately 1,000 packages beyond the base Linux From Scratch 11.3 book. This release has 1,357 updates from the previous BLFS version including package updates and numerous text and formatting changes. Other changes to BLFS include an addition of numerous Python modules to the book to allow generation of package documentation using the Gi-DocGen and Sphinx applications. Also several desktop environments (DEs) have been upgraded - GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.26.5, Xfce 4.18. Finally, a new X.Org driver, intel-media-driver, has been added to to the book to provide video acceleration for Intel Broadwell CPUs and higher."
NuTuX 23.02.1
NuTyX is a lightweight distribution based on Linux From Scratch which features a custom package manager called cards. The project has published a new version, NuTyX 23.02.1, which updates several of its supported desktop environments and key applications: "Spiky and me are happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 23.02.1 and cards 2.6.3. New toolchain GCC 12.2.0, glibc 2.37 and Binutils 2.40. SysV in 3.06 and systemd in 252.4. The X.Org Server graphics server version 21.1.7, the Mesa 3D library in 22.3.5, GTK 4.8.3 and Qt 6.4.2. The Python interpreter is updated to version 3.11.2. The Xfce desktop environment is updated to version 4.18.1. The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26.0 version. The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 43.3. The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.27.1, Framework 5.103.0 and applications in 22.12.2. Available browsers are: Firefox 110.0, Chromium 109.0.5414.74, Epiphany 43.1. Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Telegram-desktop 4.6.2, Thunderbird 102.8.1, Scribus 1.5.8, LibreOffice 7.5.1.1, GIMP 2.10.34." Further information can be found on the project's news page.
NuTyX 23.02.1 -- Running the LXQt desktop
(full image size: 552kB, resolution: 1920x1200 pixels)
Armbian 23.02
Armbian 23.02 is the latest release from a project providing a lightweight Linux distribution optimised for custom ARM, RISC-V or Intel hardware, with fully-featured Xfce, GNOME or Cinnamon-based desktop. This version upgrades the Linux kernel to the long-term supported version 6.1: "Armbian 23.02 'Quoll' is now available. It features a new LTS kernel based on Linux 6.1.y (where possible), with builds around 'Bullseye' and 'Jammy', as well as Debian 'Bookworm' and Ubuntu 'Lunar' for developers. Armbian OS remains one of the most popular operating systems on the new Rockchip RK3588 platform, featuring official support for Radxa Rock 5 and Orange Pi 5. This will be the last release before we switch to the new build framework, which has been completely rewritten. The new build framework has an advanced but simple-to-use logging system and we no longer use external compilers and the caching system has been reworked to maximize space and computing resources. Compilation works on all architectures and operating systems, including now officially supporting WSL2." See the release announcement and the changelog for further details. The project provides images for a vast range of computers and boards, including a generic Intel/AMD builds, based on Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04.
Garuda Linux 230305
Garuda Linux is a rolling distribution based on the Arch Linux operating system. the project's latest release, Garuda Linux 230305, features an improves interface for the setup assistant and replaces Latte-Dock with standard Plasma panels. "The dr460nized edition has in the past relied heavily on Latte-Dock's features. For most of us, it's not news that the development of Latte-Dock has now more or less ceased. This sadly necessitated significant changes, that required replacing Latte-Dock with more standardized Plasma panels. This change takes away somewhat from the dr460nized edition's eye candy appeal factor by losing features like top bar colors/transparency. Usability is also impacted to some degree as it will no longer be possible to drag the top bar to move windows. However, we expect these changes to make the KDE dr460nized edition's desktop experience far more stable, but also different. We feel these new required changes still provide great OOTB visual appeal worthy of being called dr460nized. Since Latte-Dock will inevitably cause instabilities and glitches in the future, we'd highly suggest switching to Plasma panels before it's too late." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,838
- Total data uploaded: 43.0TB
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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) |
How big a factor is a distribution's performance when you are selecting one to install?
In this week's Questions and Answers section we talked about factors which affect a distribution's performance. We'd like to hear how important a distribution's performance is to you when you're deciding what to install on your computer. Do you need a light and fast distribution, is it just a nice bonus, or does performance (within reason) not affect your decision?
You can see the results of our previous poll on distributions which use boot environments in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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The performance of a distro is...
| Of high importance to me: | 744 (51%) |
| A factor but not significant: | 596 (41%) |
| Not a factor: | 120 (8%) |
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| Website News |
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Dutch language translation updated
With many thanks to Theo de Kruijf, we are pleased to report the Dutch language translation of DistroWatch has been greatly improved. We previously had a small collection of phrases and menu options translated from English to Dutch, and Theo kindly volunteered to expand and improve on the translations for us. The translated pages can be accessed by visiting our front page with the Dutch language selected
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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 March 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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| Archives |
| • Issue 1021 (2023-05-29): rlxos GNU/Linux, colours in command line output, an overview of Void's unique features, how to use awk, Microsoft publishes a Linux distro |
| • Issue 1020 (2023-05-22): UBports 20.04, finding another machine's IP address, finding distros with a specific kernel, Debian prepares for Bookworm |
| • Issue 1019 (2023-05-15): Rhino Linux (Beta), checking which applications reply on a package, NethServer reborn, System76 improving application responsiveness |
| • Issue 1018 (2023-05-08): Fedora 38, finding relevant manual pages, merging audio files, Fedora plans new immutable edition, Mint works to fix Secure Boot issues |
| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Issue 993 (2022-11-07): Static Linux, working with just a kernel, Mint streamlines Flatpak management, updates coming to elementary OS |
| • Issue 992 (2022-10-31): Lubuntu 22.10, setting permissions on home directories, Linux may drop i486, Fedora delays next version for OpenSSL bug |
| • Issue 991 (2022-10-24): XeroLinux 2022.09, learning who ran sudo, exploring firewall tools, Rolling Rhino Remix gets a fresh start, Fedora plans to revamp live media |
| • Issue 990 (2022-10-17): ravynOS 0.4.0, Lion Linux 3.0, accessing low numbered network ports, Pop!_OS makes progress on COSMIC, Murena launches new phone |
| • Issue 989 (2022-10-10): Ubuntu Unity, kernel bug causes issues with Intel cards, Canonical offers free Ubuntu Pro subscriptions, customizing the command line prompt |
| • Issue 988 (2022-10-03): SpiralLinux 11.220628, finding distros for older equipment and other purposes, SUSE begins releasing ALP prototypes, Debian votes on non-free firmware in installer |
| • Issue 987 (2022-09-26): openSUSE's MicroOS, converting people to using Linux, pfSense updates base system and PHP, Python 2 dropped from Arch |
| • Issue 986 (2022-09-19): Porteus 5.0, remotely wiping a hard drive, a new software centre for Ubuntu, Proxmox offers offline updates |
| • Issue 985 (2022-09-12): Garuda Linux, using root versus sudo, UBports on the Fairphone 4, Slackware reverses change to grep |
| • Issue 984 (2022-09-05): deepin 23 Preview, watching for changing to directories, Mint team tests Steam Deck, Devuan posts fix for repository key expiry |
| • Issue 983 (2022-08-29): Qubes OS 4.1.1, Alchg Linux, immutable operating systems, Debian considers stance on non-free firmware, Arch-based projects suffer boot issue |
| • Issue 982 (2022-08-22): Peropesis 1.6.2, KaOS strips out Python 2 and PulseAudio, deepin becomes independent, getting security update notifications |
| • Issue 981 (2022-08-15): Linux Lite 6.0, defining desktop environments and window managers, Mint releases upgrade tool, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 980 (2022-08-08): Linux Mint 21, Pledge on Linux, SparkyLinux updates classic desktop packages, Peppermint OS experiments with Devuan base |
| • Issue 979 (2022-08-01): KaOS 2022.06 and KDE Plasma 5.25, terminating processes after a set time, GNOME plans Secure Boot check |
| • Issue 978 (2022-07-25): EndeavourOS 22.6, Slax explores a return to Slackware, Ubuntu certified with Dell's XPS 13, Linux running on Apple's M2 |
| • Issue 977 (2022-07-18): EasyOS 4.2, transferring desktop themes between distros, Tails publishes list of updates, Zevenet automates Let's Encrypt renewals |
| • Issue 976 (2022-07-11): NixOS 22.05, making a fake webcam, exploring the Linux scheduler, Debian publishes updated media |
| • Issue 975 (2022-07-04): Murena One running /e/OS, where are all the openSUSE distributions, Fedora to offer unfiltered Flathub access |
| • Issue 974 (2022-06-27): AlmaLinux 9.0, the changing data of DistroWatch's database, UBports on the Pixel 3a, Tails and GhostBSD publish hot fixes |
| • Issue 973 (2022-06-20): openSUSE 15.4, collecting distro media, FreeBSD status report, Ubuntu Core with optional real-time kernel |
| • Issue 972 (2022-06-13): Rolling Rhino Remix, SambaBox 4.1, SUSE team considers future of SUSE and openSUSE Leap, Tails improves Tor Connection Assistant |
| • Issue 971 (2022-06-06): ChimeraOS 2022.01.03, Lilidog 22.04, NixOS gains graphical installer, Mint replaces Bluetooth stack and adopts Timeshift, how to change a MAC address |
| • Issue 970 (2022-05-30): Tails 5.0, taking apart a Linux distro, Ubuntu users seeing processes terminated, Budgie team plans future of their desktop |
| • Issue 969 (2022-05-23): Fedora 36, a return to Unity, Canonical seeks to improve gaming on Ubuntu, HP plans to ship laptops with Pop!_OS |
| • Full list of all issues |
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