DistroWatch Weekly |
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1022, 5 June 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 23rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Immutable distributions are a popular concept in the Linux ecosystem at the moment. While immutable distributions, those with read-only root filesystems, mostly gained popularity on mobile devices and on some server platforms, the idea has been spreading to desktop systems. Canonical has announced a future version of Ubuntu will feature an immutable core with Snap packages providing desktop software. We share more information on this announcement in our News section. We also talk about Purism launching an updated, freedom-respecting server line for people who want to be able to audit their entire hardware and software stack while Red Hat phases out support for its LibreOffice packages. Plus we share a look at the current state of MINIX, a small operating system widely credited for inspiring the development of Linux. In our Questions and Answers section this week we discuss how to find and remove duplicate files in a large directory tree. First though, we talk about three distributions: GetFreeOS (an Arch-based, desktop distribution), Slint (a Slackware-based project for visually impaired persons), and Liya (another Arch-based project featuring the Pamac software manager). Read on to learn about the strengths and problems with these three projects. Then, in our Opinion Poll, we talk about openSUSE, a distribution which is available in many editions. A new version of openSUSE is due to be released later this week and we take a moment to ask: which branch of the project is your favourite? Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
Content:
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Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
GetFreeOS 2023.05.01
One of the younger projects on the DistroWatch waiting list is GetFreeOS. The distribution is based on Arch Linux and, like its parent, offers a rolling release model. The distribution is available in two editions (KDE Plasma and i3) with both ISO files just over 3.2GB in size.
The GetFreeOS project is geared toward gamers and is reportedly intended to be used for primarily for gaming. This intention goes hand in hand with some unusually high demands in the list of system requirements. The distribution reportedly needs 8GB of RAM and 20GB of storage to run, recommending 16GB or more RAM and 60GB or more storage space. This is about four times more memory and double the storage most mainstream distributions require, so the numbers are probably intended to be a "minimal for good gaming performance" metric, rather than literal minimal requirements for the system to run properly.
I decided to try the project's KDE Plasma edition. The live media boots and loads the Plasma desktop with its panel across the top of the display. Almost immediately a notification appears near the top of the screen to let us know software updates are available. This is followed by the Plasma customization wizard being launched, which is then covered by the Calamares system installer window. In other words, it is a busy environment straight away.
Installing
The Calamares installer, which launches for us automatically, is pleasantly easy to navigate. The graphical installer walks us through picking our language, time zone, and keyboard layout. We're given the option of a manual partitioning approach which a nice, graphical interface or a guided approach that can be navigated with a couple of clicks. The guided approach defaults to setting up a single Btrfs partition. This screen can be confusing because the filesystem selection box shows ext4 as the selected filesystem, but the summary screen showing actions the installer will take shows Btrfs will be used. The installer then asks us to create a username and password for ourselves and, optionally, a different password for the root account.
Calamares was, as always, straight forward to navigate, but I noticed the mouse pointer kept disappearing or changing shape and getting stuck as a cursor bar instead of a pointer when moving between fields.
The first time I tried to install GetFreeOS I walked away while the installer was working and, when I returned, the screen had locked (due to an idle timeout). When I tried to unlock the screen (without a password) it seemed to restore my session, but then the desktop crashed. The system then locked up and refused to respond to keyboard or mouse input and I was unable to switch to a text console. When I forced a restart I found the installer had not finished its work successfully while I was away, despite having been left alone for half an hour (longer than most distributions need to complete the process).
I tried again from scratch, this time making sure the automatic screen locking feature was disabled in the System Settings panel. I again went through the Calamares steps and, about 10% of the way through the process of copying files to my hard drive, the Plasma desktop crashed, taking the installer down with it.
On a side note: the default theme presents us with a variety of text and background combinations. Some of these are difficult to read. For example, one page of the System Settings panel uses three colour combinations for fonts: black on white, white on black, and black on black. The last one is obviously impossible to read which makes it difficult to change settings.
GetFreeOS 2023.05.01 -- Various font colour combinations in the default theme
(full image size: 113kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
At this point I realized the symptoms I was seeing (crashes and odd mouse pointer behaviour) were probably the result of Plasma running on Wayland and confirmed GetFreeOS was indeed running a Wayland session. The next time I booted GetFreeOS from the live media I signed out of the default desktop session and signed back in using the Plasma on X11 session.
When running under X11, my mouse pointer behaved properly. The window manager still crashed once while navigating the install process, but didn't take Calamares down with it this time. Unfortunately, 10% of the way through the file copying process Calamares crashed again.
This was a frustrating and uphill battle with GetFreeOS where both the desktop and the installer were not stable. This brought my experiment to a halt, but not before I'd attempted four different times to run through the install process.
I think what made it especially frustrating for me is, for the past several years, I've regularly thought of Calamares as being a friendly, dependable installer. It was perhaps one of the easiest to use and dependable installers in the Linux ecosystem. For years I could very nearly install any distribution featuring Calamares while I was asleep it was so easy and reliable. Recently, around the start of 2023, this changed. Now in all three of my test environments Calamares almost always fails to complete an installation successfully. Even without Plasma crashing, Calamares once again failed to get even halfway through the file copying process. I'm not sure what changed between late 2022 and early 2023, but it has frequently meant I could not run distributions featuring this installer.
A few weeks ago I mentioned this recent series of issues and one commenter suggested Calamares might be starved for RAM, requiring around 3GB to 4GB of memory to function properly and thought this might be causing it to crash, at least in virtual machines. However, I usually have this much RAM available in virtual machines. Still, I tested this theory a few times this week. With the Plasma desktop running, a terminal open, and Calamares copying files to my hard drive GetFreeOS (and Liya, which I'll talk about later) never used more than 1.2GB of RAM. My workstation has 8GB of RAM and when I was trying the distribution in a virtual machine it had over 3GB of RAM assigned, meaning RAM was always less than half full when the installer abruptly terminated.
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Slint 15.0-3
The Slint distribution has been in our database for a little while, but hasn't been given much attention. Slint is based on Slackware Linux and ships with software to help people who are visually impaired. In particular, Slint includes support for Braille-enabled devices and text-to-speech readers.
I had originally tried version 15.0 when it first launched, but had trouble getting it to install due to a corrupted package on the install media. Since then, the developer has put together a few updates. The latest update to 15.0 includes access to a repository for installing the Xfce desktop environment (LXQt and MATE were already available).
I downloaded the lone edition of Slint which is available as a 4.0GB ISO file. After confirming the media's checksum, I booted from the install media. The system brought up a text console and asked me to type "S" if I wanted Braille and text-to-speech support or press Enter if I didn't need these features. I proceeded without the accessibility features.
The system then brought up a series of text-based menus where I was asked to select my preferred language from a list of eight European languages. I was then asked to confirm my keyboard's layout. The system then dropped me at a command line prompt where I was automatically signed in as the root user. I was told I could run the "doc" command to see documentation or "setup" to install the distribution.
I did a quick read through of the documentation and liked what I found. While it is technical in nature and assumes some basic familiarity with Linux, this is in line with the target audience of Slint. We are given tips on installing the distribution, encrypting the hard drive, and using the package manager. There is even a glossary at the end of the documentation.
Something which caught my eye in the documentation is a warning the installer requires at least 50GB of disk space. This seems like an odd statement given that Slackware (which has similarly sized install media) takes less than 12GB of disk space. It's hard to believe Slint, which is virtually the same distribution with Braille support, it more than four times larger. However, using a virtual machine, I was able to confirm the installer will refuse to proceed unless it can find a disk (or an available partition) which is at least 50GB in size. This limit exists whether we choose to use guided or manual partitioning.
I've mentioned this in a previous review, and touched on it briefly earlier this week, but it annoys me when developers make up completely arbitrary system requirements. I've run into a few installers lately which refused to run without at least 50GB or 99GB of disk space, or which would refuse to install the operating system unless at least a certain unusually high amount of RAM was available. Meanwhile their parent distributions, or even larger distributions, enforce no such artificial limitations and work perfectly well. It feels lazy and unnecessary and does not help the user or developer. I am in favour of providing a "recommended" set of specifications, but refusing to perform an install of an operating system that is less than 20GB in size unless the partition is at least 50GB is counterproductive.
Getting back to the install process, when presented with a large enough disk, running "setup" kicks off the text-based installer. We're asked to select which disk will hold Slint, the size of our root partition, and whether to encrypt it. We are asked to make up a root password and create a username and password for a regular user. We're also asked if we want to enable Braille support. We're also asked to pick our locale from a list and asked to confirm our timezone.
The installer then goes to work setting up the partitions and copying files. After a few minutes the installer reported it could not proceed because a package file on the media was corrupted. It also reports it cannot extract file /usr/bin/aria_chkand then bails out. I confirmed the install media had the correct checksum, indicating the problem is with the included package itself, not the install media on which the package is located. This brought my experiment with the accessibility-focused Slint to a close. This was the same problem I had with the original release of Slint three months ago and it's discouraging to see the corrupted package issues has not been fixed, despite refreshed media being published.
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Liya N4Si
The third project on my list this week was a young distribution called Liya. It is an Arch Linux-based operating system which includes the Calamares installer and a graphical package manager. The project's website doesn't provide much technical information. There are a lot of blurbs about the distribution being open source, simple and easy to use, approachable for people migrating from Windows, and intuitive. However, there are not many details about how the distribution accomplishes these goals.
I will say, in the project's favour, the website does include realistic system requirements. The project's ISO file is 3.4GB in size and we're advised to use a 4GB USB thumb drive for holding the install media. We're advised the distribution can run on UEFI-enabled systems and machines still using Legacy BIOS (and I confirmed this information is accurate). We're advised to have at least 2GB of RAM and 15GB of disk space, though more is recommended and these specifications are pretty realistic for a desktop Linux system. In short, while not a lot of technical information is provided, what is offered is at least accurate. I did find it curious the disk space requirements are listed as 15GB, but further down the same page we're told the root partition needs to be at least 50GB in size. In practise, the installer doesn't seem to place any limits on the disk size and 15GB is enough.
Launching the distribution from the live media loads the Cinnamon desktop with a dark theme. The desktop panel with its application menu, quick-launch buttons, and system tray are displayed at the bottom of the screen. Once the desktop appears an emoji picker window opens. The emoji window doesn't have any obvious way to close it, but it can be terminated by right-clicking on its entry in the desktop panel.
Liya N4Si -- Exploring the Cinnamon application menu
(full image size: 551kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
Installing
Liya ships with the Calamares system installer. Calamares offered the same steps I mentioned earlier, in the GetFreeOS portion of this column. As before, despite the Cinnamon desktop and Calamares only consuming 800MB of RAM, the installer crashed the first two times I attempted to set up the distribution. The third time though, taking the same settings as the first two attempts, Calamares was able to complete its work successfully, despite the Cinnamon desktop crashing and restarting itself during the procedure. In the end, Calamares reported it had finished and offered to restart my computer. The system then booted to a graphical login screen.
Early impressions
Liya features icons on the desktop which open the Nemo file manager (the live session also includes an icon for launching Calamares). Cinnamon has a dark theme and is fairly responsive, both when running inside VirtualBox and when running on my workstation. When I was using Liya on my workstation the Cinnamon desktop was stable as well as working quickly. However, when running in VirtualBox the Cinnamon desktop would crash about once every five to ten minutes. While desktop applications typically survived the crash, it did regularly put a pause in my workflow and would interrupt me while navigating menus or performing tasks. This surprised me as Cinnamon is usually stable for me in my tests, regardless of the test environment.
Hardware
As advertised, Liya ran on my test equipment in both UEFI and Legacy BIOS modes. The distribution offered good performance on the desktop. Sometimes systemd would hang for a minute while shutting down, but otherwise the experience was smooth sailing on my workstation. The experience would have been mostly good in VirtualBox too, if Cinnamon hadn't crashed several times per hour.
Liya N4Si -- Cinnamon crashing in VirtualBox
(full image size: 134kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
The distribution is average in resource consumption, using about 620MB of RAM when signed into Cinnamon and consuming 8GB of disk space.
Applications
The Liya distribution ships with an unusual collection of desktop software. For instance, where most distribution ship Firefox, Liya provides Brave; where most distributions might offer LibreOffice, Liya provides OnlyOffice; while many distributions offer either Transmission or KTorrent, Liya includes Deluge. Similarly, the virtual terminal is Alacritty instead of GNOME Terminal or Konsole. I also noticed the distribution ships with zsh as the default shell rather than the more wildly used bash.
Some of the included software is more standard. Liya ships with the Nemo file manager, Thunderbird e-mail client, Rhythmbox audio player, and mpv media player. Multimedia codecs for most media formats are included. We're also given the Persepolis download manager, Timeshift for making system backups and snapshots, and the Cheese webcam utility.
Exploring further I found Liya includes manual pages, the GNU Compiler Collection, and systemd. Version 6.2 of the Linux kernel runs in the background.
It's not often I use OnlyOffice. The suite works with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. OnlyOffice seem to strive to both look like Microsoft Office and be compatible with the proprietary suite. While I'm not a fan of its ribbon-like menu system, I do like that it defaults to document tabs rather than opening new documents in their own windows. This behaviour can be changed, giving each document its own window.
I enjoy Cinnamon's settings panel. The layout is easy to navigate, most configuration modules are grouped together by category, and clearly labelled. My one concern is that some modules have similar names and purposes which is likely to confuse people new to Cinnamon. For instance, it's not immediately clear what the difference is between applets, desklets, and extensions. These are handled by three separate modules and the modules don't explain the differences between these desktop features.
Liya N4Si -- Exploring the settings panel and enabling the firewall
(full image size: 640kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
I found working from the command line was unusually slow. Whenever a program finishes and exits, the terminal seems to hang for a few seconds and then displays how long the last program took to execute. These delays are pretty noticeable and add up over time. Also with regards to the terminal, Liya ships with several aliases. Some of these are useful, but a few conflict with commands I already use and can result in errors or unexpected behaviour.
Liya N4Si -- Installing updates and running the Brave web browser
(full image size: 725kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
Software management
Liya ships with the Pamac software centre which is labelled "Add/Remove Software" in the application menu. The software centre is divided into three tabs: Browse, Installed, and Updates. When I first tried using Pamac it showed no software in the Browse tab, other than items already installed on the system. Of course, the Installed tab (as expected) also showed installed items exclusively. Attempting to refresh the package database did not resolve this, making it impossible to install new applications.
The Updates tab displayed a listing of available updates with low-level packages lumped together as "OS Update". In total, there were 1.1GB of updates available. I tried to install these waiting items and Pamac crashed early in the process. When I restarted Pamac, the software centre locked up when I tried to install updates and refused to either proceed or exit.
Liya N4Si -- Trying to fetch updates with Pamac
(full image size: 565kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
I switched to the command line where we can use the pacman package manager to handle software. I found it was unable to perform actions as pacman was unable to place a lock on the package database, though its error message did not say why. Working under the assumption Pamac still had the package database locked, I located and removed the package database lock file (/var/lib/pacman/db.lck). With this file removed I was able to use pacman to fetch and install updates. It reported a few packages which had already been fetched were corrupted and helpfully removed them and reacquired new copies for me.
I'm not sure if an update fixed a problem with Pamac or if using pacman updated the package database and corrected an issue in process, but from then on I could browse for new software in Pamac's Browse tab. I was able to install a few new items and remove unwanted ones using Pamac.
Later in the week more updates became available and I gave Pamac another shot at fetching them. Pamac reported it could not find all necessary packages and dependencies to perform the update and aborted, even after I had clicked Pamac's Refresh button to update its information. Once again I turned to the command line and pacman was able to perform the upgrades successfully.
After this second wave of updates, I restarted the computer and upon trying to sign into my account the screen went blank. The system did not respond to any input and I could not switch to a text console. I forced a restart and Liya worked normally after that, without requiring that I fix anything.
Conclusions
Something I found tricky about evaluating Liya was the project didn't list much in the way of specific goals or features. The website mentions it is intuitive with a graphical package manager and open source. All of these points are true. However, beyond being an Arch-based desktop distribution, Liya doesn't seem to be trying to fix a problem or fill a niche.
Liya does some things well. It offers good performance and some useful (if uncommon) application choices. Its hardware support on physical hardware seems to be good.
There were a few areas where Liya struggled in my trial. The system installer crashed and aborted a couple of times before I managed to get it to finish an install successfully. When running in a virtual machine Cinnamon crashed frequently, interrupting work. These crashes didn't occur on my physical workstation, so this seems to be an issue with a video driver.
Package management was the consistent weak point once the install was finished with Pamac repeatedly failing to apply updates and locking up or crashing a few times. Package management from the command line worked well.
In short, Liya seems like a pretty typical Arch-based desktop distribution, just with a few unusual choices - such as running Cinnamon instead of Xfce or Plasma, and using OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice. The project doesn't seem to have found a specific goal yet and it still needs some polish. It's off to a decent start for a young project, but I feel like it needs more time to mature before I'd recommend it over other Arch-based desktop systems.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo desktop with the following specifications:
- Processor: Hex-core Intel i5-10400 CPU @ 2.90GHz
- Storage: Western Digital 1TB hard drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 wired network card, Realtek RTL8822CE 802.11ac PCIe wireless adapter
- Display: Intel CometLake-S GT2
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Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Ubuntu plans Snap-based desktop variant, Purism launches new free hardware server, Red Hat dropping LibreOffice packages, a look at the status of MINIX
An article on OMG! Ubuntu suggests that a future desktop version of Ubuntu will be available as two separate editions: the classic Deb-based version and a new, immutable edition featuring Snap packages. "An all-snap Ubuntu desktop is coming - and sooner than you might think! According to Canonical's Oliver Grawert, the next long-term support release of Ubuntu will be available to download in two versions: a classic, Deb-based version (default) and, for the first time, an immutable, Snap-based build for enthusiasts to experiment with." Work going into the Ubuntu Core desktop edition can be observed on GitHub.
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Purism has announced the availability of a new version of the company's server which is built using freedom respecting components. "We've taken some of the best server hardware and hardened it with PureBoot, our fully-auditable secure boot process that replaces the existing BIOS with coreboot, disables the Intel Management Engine, and adds tamper detection for the BIOS, kernel, and all files related to the boot process using keys fully in the owner's control. Combined with our Librem Key at boot time, tamper detection is foolproof with an LED (designed to be bright enough to view over a security camera) that continually blinks red if the BIOS is tampered with." Details on the new servers can be found in the company's news post.
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For years the Red Hat Display Systems team has maintained LibreOffice suite packages (and their many dependencies) for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Fedora distribution. The Display Systems team is shifting its priorities, working more on Wayland and will no longer be building new LibreOffice packages. This has the side effect of orphaning the Fedora builds of LibreOffice. "The Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat's desktop efforts) has maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of our work to support LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what's needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community.
The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
While it will be possible for community members to volunteer to take over the LibreOffice packages for Fedora, Red Hat suspects most users will want to switch over to using the LibreOffice Flatpak package.
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There have been no new releases of the MINIX operating system for about nine years. While development has continued, with a few development snapshots published since 2014, serious work on the MINIX microkernel and userland tools has mostly lost momentum. OSNews reports on the status of the project: "It seems like MINIX 3 has pretty much stalled, and digging through the Google Groups group isn't of much help either. There's certainly interest in the platform, but even the people frequenting the list state while MINIX 3 isn't dead, because open source projects technically rarely die, it is in a 'coma', in a post from 2021. There's been various proposals for improvements or new directions - notably this very detailed one - but nothing has come of them. It probably does not help that MINIX's creator and steward, Andy Tanenbaum, retired in 2014 from VU University, my alma mater, where he and a team of doctoral students worked on MINIX 3 for a long time."
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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) |
Cleaning up crowded directories
Cleaning-out-the-closet asks: I have a directory full of family photos and vacation pictures. I know lots of them are probably duplicates, but we're talking tens of thousands of images. Is there any way to go through and remove duplicates to free up space?
DistroWatch answers: There are a few tools which can locate duplicate files. Some of these tools will offer to remove, or perform other actions, on duplicate files found.
One of the most straightforward, and widely available, command line tools for cleaning directories is rdfind. The rdfind program will locate duplicate files, make a list of which files it believes are duplicates, and optionally take an action. The action is usually either to remove extra copies of files or replace them with links. A link will take up less space while basically making a bookmark or short-cut to the original file. This can be handy if you want to keep one document or photo in multiple places, but want to avoid taking up additional space on the drive.
The rdfind command is typically run with one action instruction and then one or more directories we want to clean. The action portion of the command usually indicates we want to do one of three things: simply locate copies of files, remove copies of files, or replace copies with links. Let's look at some examples.
To get a list of duplicate files in our Photos directory, but not take any action, we can tell rdfind to perform a "dry run":
rdfind -dryrun true Photos
The above command searches the Photos directory and creates a text file named results.txt. The results.txt will contain a list of duplicate files found, along with a note indicating which one rdfind thinks is the original file and which ones are copies. This is a handy way to get a sense of how many duplicate files you have and how much space will be freed by removing the copies.
Often, my preferred way to clean up duplicate files is to replace copies of files with hard links. This requires less space while leaving a shortcut back to the original. This is especially handy if we have group pictures saved under multiple sub-directories. To replace copies of files in the Photos directory with hard links we can run the following command:
rdfind -makehardlinks true Photos
Finally, if we wish to really remove copies of duplicated files, we can run the following command. This is destructive and will wipe out any duplicates the rdfind tool locates:
rdfind -deleteduplicates true Photos
The rdfind command is one of several tools which will seek and remove duplicate files. The fdupes command, for example, is also widely available and offers the same features.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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Released Last Week |
Armbian 23.05
Armbian is a Linux distribution designed for ARM development boards. It is usually based on one of the stable or development versions of Debian or Ubuntu and it supports a wide variety of popular ARM-based devices. The project's latest release is version 23.05.1 which adds the i3 window manager as a graphical user interface options. The project's release announcement offers additional details: "We are pleased to announce several improvements and enhancements at the user level: Armbian Bookworm based images: We are introducing Armbian Bookworm-based images, providing the latest features and updates from Debian community. i3 supported: i3 has been added as the fourth officially supported desktop environment, expanding the options available to our users. Fixes and Enhancements: We have addressed issues in key tools such as armbian-installer, armbian-config, and armbian-firstrun, ensuring a smoother user experience. Streamlined Packages: We have optimized our package base, making it nearly identical across different underlying package bases and desktop choices. This standardization improves predictability and enhances security. Consistent Application Packages: Regardless of the chosen package base or desktop environment, the application packages remain the same. This ensures consistent functionality and ease of use." Further details can be found in the changelog.
NixOS 23.05
NixOS is an independently developed GNU/Linux distribution that aims to improve the state of the art in system configuration management. The project's latest version, NixOS 23.05, mostly provides updates desktop enviroments and a newer Linux kernel. "In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights: Core version changes: default linux: 5.15 -> 6.1, all supported kernels available. systemd has been updated to v253.1, see the pull request for more info. It's recommended to use nixos-rebuild boot and reboot, rather than nixos-rebuild switch - since in some rare cases the switch of a live system might fail. glibc: 2.35 -> 2.37. Cinnamon has been updated to 5.6, see the pull request for what is changed. GNOME has been upgraded to version 44. Please see the release notes for details. KDE Plasma has been updated to v5.27, see the release notes for what is changed. Python implements PEP 668, providing better feedback to users that try to run pip install system-wide. nixos-rebuild now supports an extra --specialisation option that can be used to change specialisation for switch and test commands. libxcrypt, the library providing the crypt(3) password hashing function, is now built without support for algorithms not flagged strong. This affects the availability of password hashing algorithms used for system login (login(1), passwd(1)), but also Apache2 Basic-Auth, Samba, OpenLDAP, Dovecot, and many other packages." Additional details are offered in the pojrct's release notes.
NixOS 23.05 -- Exploring the Plasma application menu
(full image size: 1.1MB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
TrueNAS 13.0-U5 "CORE"
Pee Jay Latombo has announced the release of TrueNAS CORE 13.0-U5, an updated build of the project's specialist, FreeBSD-based software designed for NAS (Network-Attached Storage) computers. The new release brings improvements in ransomware protection: "Building on the Enterprise quality of prior versions, the third update of TrueNAS 13 was released today. In addition to greater maturity and test coverage, Globally Distributed Storage provided by iX-Storj is also now included in this release. Compared to TrueNAS 12, TrueNAS 13 includes significant new components and has improved performance, scalability, and reliability in subsequent releases. In the two months since TrueNAS 13.0-U2 was released, it has already become the 2nd most deployed version of TrueNAS. TrueNAS 13.0-U5 builds on the maturity of the prior version with 30 bug fixes and security updates. It also includes enclosure management updates for the TrueNAS R50 Gen3, which was announced two weeks ago." See the release announcement and the release notes for detailed information about the product.
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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: 2,873
- Total data uploaded: 43.3TB
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Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
Summary of expected upcoming releases
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Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Which branch of openSUSE do you prefer?
The openSUSE team will be releasing a new version of the project's Leap edition later this week. The openSUSE developers maintain several branches of the project, including Leap (a fixed release), Tumbleweed (a rolling release), and Aeon (an immutable branch). Which branch of the project do you prefer?
You can see the results of our previous poll on seeing colourful text in the output of terminal programs in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Which branch of openSUSE do you prefer?
Aeon (previously MicroOS): | 58 (3%) |
Leap: | 338 (18%) |
Tumbleweed: | 498 (26%) |
I do not use openSUSE: | 1028 (53%) |
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Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 12 June 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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1 • Fedora ditching LibreOffice (by Pumpino on 2023-06-05 00:37:45 GMT from Australia)
Red Hat has lost the plot. Not building the most popular office suite for Fedora in particular is laughable. I'm glad I moved away from Fedora years ago.
2 • LibreOffice (by bassoon on 2023-06-05 02:25:15 GMT from Australia)
@1 agreed, it is laughable and RH has lost the plot - but watch the remorseless push to flatpaks continue. If this was Ubuntu, the critics would be having a field day, but RH seems to be able to get away with much more.
3 • AppImage, Flatpak, and Snap: Linux's universal package managers. (by Greg Zeng on 2023-06-05 03:39:22 GMT from Australia)
As usual, the first comments here come from Australia, on the world time clock. The outsiders of the industries seem to not understand overall computer trends. RH now recognizes the binary codes need to be either Appimage, Flatpak or Snap. Most insiders, including RH, are gambling that Flatpak might be better than the other two packages.
This weekly Distrowatch examined two minor Arch based distributions. Calamares is slowly gaining more confidence and popularity. Old timers still are suspicious of Calamares. Small-timers use Calamari badly. Small-timers have small development teams, so cannot prepare their final release versions for most Linux end-users. So the usual Virtual Box, variable hardware incompatibilities and upgrade problems.
This explains why the major distributions are chosen as the core base of the more adventurous creations. Manjaro-base, rather than Arch. Ubuntu or Mint base, rather than any of the three Debian bases.
Linux has the common teething issues with display managers. Old timers just stay with the shortcomings of the X displays. Some dare to be 'modern', so experiment with Wayland, which is generally ok, sometimes. Others might try X-Wayland, which might also sometimes be workable. This is the current state of Linux, known seemingly to experts.
4 • LibreOffice (by EH2 on 2023-06-05 03:52:42 GMT from Mexico)
To be honest, no one's been able to tell me what exactly is wrong with flatpaks, to the point where RH pointing you to the LibreOffice flatpak could be "losing the plot". I think I have more issues with my current physical desk than with flatpaks.
5 • Slint review (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-05 05:06:28 GMT from France)
I am the Slint maintainer and having read the review of Slint-15.0-3 by Jesse Smith, I am puzzled, especially by the issue he reported, quoted below:
"After a few minutes the installer reported it could not proceed because a package file on the media was corrupted. It also reports it cannot extract file and then bails out. I confirmed the install media had the correct checksum, indicating the problem is with the included package itself, not the install media on which the package is located. This brought my experiment with the accessibility-focused Slint to a close. This was the same problem I had with the original release of Slint three months ago and it's discouraging to see the corrupted package issues has not been fixed, despite refreshed media being published."
I just tried in a Qemu VM the most recent ISO: http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/iso/slint64-15.0-4.iso as well as all previous ones for version 15.0 in http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/iso/previous_iso/ without such issue. For the records the file /usr/bin/aria_chk is shipped in a maria-db package coming from a Slackware repository and I could mount the latest ISO on /mnt and from there install it on bare metal without a hitch. As far as I know nobody brought up this issue so far in a Slint support channel (Jesse did not either). Bugs not reported will not be investigated ;)
Anyway I encourage all interested to try he latest Slint iso (links in https://slint.fr) and report their findings. It can be installed in an 64 G USB stick. Yo can send your reports in one of the support channels or send them to me: at slint dot fr.
Incidentally the review mentions a "setup" command which does not exist in the installer of Slint-15.0 (it existed in the installer of the previous Slint version available in http://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-14.2.1/iso/). In all ISOs for Slint-15.0 the installer instead first suggest to type "start" "doc" and after user has typed "start" tells them to type either "a" for "auto partitioning" or "m" for "manual portioning", so I am even more puzzled..
6 • RE: Fedora ditching LibreOffice (by Operius on 2023-06-05 06:14:13 GMT from Netherlands)
@1 "Not building the most popular office suite for Fedora in particular is laughable."
Why? They want to focus on Wayland and HDR support, that will benifit all linux desktop users, while Libreoffice is available and working just fine as a flatpak everywhere. If you have (apparently) limited manpower this makes perfect sense to me.
7 • @6 (by Pumpino on 2023-06-05 06:22:08 GMT from Australia)
Why LibreOffice in particular and not the thousands of other packages? It just seems like an odd decision. It's kind of Ubuntu-ish in a way (ie. switching only a few packages to Snaps). Snaps are a disaster,
8 • Slint review (by Roger Brown on 2023-06-05 08:52:00 GMT from Australia)
@5 Attempted to install Slint in VirtualBox - worked perfectly although the installer is rather cryptic at times. Also it booted up post-install in Mate when I had chosen LXQT - LXQT was present however.
But my first impression is that this is quite a decent Slackware based distro. Well worth a shot.
9 • Duplicate file finders (by DachshundMan on 2023-06-05 09:25:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
I have been using jdupes ( https://github.com/jbruchon/jdupes) for some years after it was recommended to me by a customer. It seems very quick and up to now I have never found it making a false positive. Like rdfind it uses a form of content comparison. I also like that it is available in a version for Win64 so I can use the same tool when I am asked by friends to help them find duplicate photos on their disks.
10 • Snaps and Flatpaks (by Albert on 2023-06-05 09:59:55 GMT from United States)
Ubuntu is creating a version based solely on Snaps while still maintaining the traditional .deb based one -for now only I dare to think. At the same time the RHEL people are pushing the use of Flatpaks into Fedora workstation. In the field of debian derivatives, the Endless OS seems to be using Flatpaks for package management exclusively.
@3 Greg Zeng points out this week that the trend now is the adoption of these universal package formats. I searched the internet for 'Snaps and Flatpaks' on Firefox and the second site that the DuckDuckgo engine found dealing with this subject, published on January 2023, maintains that these two system packages "are more popular than ever among linux users who no longer prefer native binary packages ..."
All this worries me a bit because, based on my own experience with Snaps and Flatpaks, I can see that they require a lot -really a lot- more disk space as compared with traditional formats. I recognize however that technology advances rapidly and bigger disks are becoming available, but I wonder if this is happening fast enough to keep pace.
Another thing I've seen is the ever increasing appearance of systems with read-only root partitions and I wonder how this affects us linux users who like to tinker with our systems.
I would like to know what other readers think about all this.
11 • Slint (by pat on 2023-06-05 10:05:30 GMT from United States)
Never heard about this one, gonna try it because it has screen reader. Looking for something like this for awhile. Thanks.
12 • Slint review (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-05 10:11:19 GMT from France)
@8 Roger Brown: Thanks for your input.
About LXQt vs MATE: yes this has been already reported. Actually the choice of the desktop done during installation stands for users starting the system in console mode (then after login typing startx if they want to start a desktop). When users choose to start in graphical mode directly (as you probably did) they can select the desktop from the lightDM greeting screen. I will make that more clear in next ISO. Also I tried to find a way to make the initial choice of the user the default also for lightDM but didn't succeed so far. Will try again.
13 • Re: LibreOffice (by jesterclub on 2023-06-05 10:37:51 GMT from Mexico)
@4
What Flatpaks, AppImages and Snaps offer is the possibility of running a given program on any Linux distro, be it Debian, RHEL, openSUSE or an independent one, such as Solus, as long as they support the required framework. A "universal" solution offered by a "universal" package manager, achieved via running a piece of software in a "pocket dimension" -or sandbox- which provides it with the necessary files to execute without using those offered by the base operating system, unlike natives, which do rely on available OS libraries, thus limited to work in such environment.
However, they do have their own set of issues -e.g. flatpaks suffering from slower response times when compared to their native peers (https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+slow), or snaps throwing errors when handling special characters, such as accented vowels (https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1576411)-, for that reason, they require time and energy to apply patches, perhaps more as they might be triggered by the app itself, the sandbox or when both interact. Based on what was commented at Fedora forums' thread, supporting, in this case, native LibreOffice files alongside their universal counterparts was perceived as redundant, as each defeat the necessity of maintaining the other. In other words, Fedora is transitioning from supporting native apps to offer universal apps. Perhaps, this is what fellow comments mean as "losing the plot".
You might have heard about "inmutable" operating systems, such as Fedora Silverblue. That is the base OS branding, amongst other things, a Flatpak package manager to seek and install programs without adding any more files than those used by the distro. Such is what companies like Red-Hat and Canonical are aiming for, currently.
14 • rdfind - wow (by Gazz on 2023-06-05 11:24:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
flippin eck - how have I missed rdfind all this time? Just saved myself 2.5TB of space on my desktop box alone
15 • I can't get no satisfaction (by Trihexagonal on 2023-06-05 11:28:13 GMT from United States)
I don't use OpenSuse, LibreOffice, AppImage, Flatpak, Snap, Stint, Fedora or any other distro reviewed this week.
I know what I like and stay with one that does what I want it to without all the searching for the Holy Grail or installing one after another as an exercise. in frustration
Kali GNU/Linux is what I like. It's stable in that it doesn't change every week and has the basic programs like apt, and Leafpad that I like to use. It's easier to maintain than FreeBSD, too.
But that's just me and I got satisfaction.
16 • Flatpaks, Snaps (by RetiredIT on 2023-06-05 12:03:47 GMT from United States)
Both of these are slow, memory hogs and don't work half the time when trying to run the desired package. Plus, installation of a package takes a very long time. Trying to run LibreOffice with Flatpak would be similar to a crawling snail in the middle of a Minnesota winter!
17 • Slint (by Tran Older on 2023-06-05 12:18:34 GMT from Vietnam)
For people who are not visually impaired, I would like to suggest download absolute 15.0, also available at slackware.uk. After installing it to bare metals, you can replace IceWM with MATE or LXQt.
18 • About arch distros (by Acelga on 2023-06-05 13:41:19 GMT from Spain)
I don't get why there see so many arch based distros that are just a collection of the maintainer's favorite de or wm, theme, and apps.
Arch is literally a bare bones distro. Create a bash file to install the things you like, and stop building things that are doomed to fail.
I understand it's their hobby, but they are putting their users' computers at risk.
19 • Ubuntu move towards immutable base + Snaps (by Kazlu on 2023-06-05 14:51:14 GMT from France)
I guess if the default version of Ubuntu becomes an immutable core with only snaps for the user applications (same could be said for Fedora Silverblue and the future Red Hats using Flatpaks), it will grow closer and closer to being a king of "mostly open source Windows". Which... makes sense, I guess.
To explain my point: using more applications as snaps means all those applications will bring their own dependancies bundled with them, instead of relying on the mutualized libraries of the base operating system. As a result, the applications are easier to maintain, saving time to, maybe, support more applications or spend more time on developpment. It is also interesting for application developpers, who only have to make a working Flatpak to distribute their software to every Linux distribution, instead of having to distribute packages for every major distribution (each with its own package manager). That can be an incentive to distribute more software to Linux. The drawback is that users need more disk space and RAM for every duplicate of each library (keep in mind that with snaps, any given library can be used at a different version for each application). This is closer to the Windows way of handling applications.
As long as both systems coexist (standard package management and Flatpaks/Snaps), I think it's probably a good thing. It gives us more variety, we may chose whichever way we prefer depending on our priorities.
Personnaly I prefer standard package management as much as possible, so that I can keep an oldish computer running for longer instead of buying a new one, that is better for the planet :) I do not mind running a Flatpak or two if necessary. Debian is still firmly following the standard way, which is perfect for me. Should that change, I guess I might turn my head towards a rolling release distro on computers that have limited resources, since I suppose the need for Flatpaks or the likes is less obvious there. I do not believe this trend will reach all Linux distros though.
20 • RHEL and LibreOffice (by Scott Dowdle on 2023-06-05 16:09:00 GMT from United States)
If you look at the versions of LibreOffice available in the various supported releases of EL, you'll see they are quite dated. Anyone wanting a contemporary version of LibreOffice on EL is already using the flatpak, which I recommend. On Fedora, its a bit different. They always provide relatively current versions of most everything but I didn't know a RHEL group was doing the work of packaging it for Fedora. If I have to switch to the Flatpak version of LibreOffice in future Fedora releases, and that remains to be seen, I don't think it'll be that big of a deal.
21 • Opensuse variant (by Robert on 2023-06-05 16:15:26 GMT from United States)
As an arch user and fan of opensuse's tools, tumbleweed appeals to me. However, every time I've tried to use it, it breaks horribly very quickly. I think of TW like other people think of arch
I do use Leap on my server though, and that has been solid. So it gets my vote.
No experience with MicroOS. I was interested in possibly using instead of Leap, but documentation or really any information at all is nonexistent.
22 • openSUSE variants (by SuperOscar on 2023-06-05 18:29:04 GMT from Finland)
I’m a long-time Leap user, and its upcoming demise fills me with sadness. No such distro is to be found anywhere else.
Tumbleweed is OK, it’s the most stable rolling distro I’ve used, but I hate having +2000 packages to update weekly.
Immutable distros could be great for people who don’t maintain their own systems. I’m not sure why I would want to use one, though. At least the MicroOS experiences I’ve had where not good: a forced reboot after every single installation, no matter what was installed!
23 • RHEL and LibreOffice (by Scott on 2023-06-05 18:59:53 GMT from United States)
Unless I missed it, no one seems to have mentioned that there is another option besides flatpaks. You can download from LibreOffice's site click download and get to a page that lets you download the rpms. I haven't done it in a while, but if I remember correctly, you change to an rpm directory and just do rpm -ivh *rpm and it will install it without taking up all the space that a flatpak would.
24 • containers (by mircea on 2023-06-05 20:37:23 GMT from Moldova)
It would be cool to try an immutable based os + snap. Cause all immutable OSes based on flatpak are not usable for developement and CLI apps. Flatpak doesn't support cli apps, so no way to install go, node, rust and other compilers. so you need to install them through system package manager, which loses all the points in using immutable oses in the first place.
While snap supports CLI apps too, so your base os is small and cool.
25 • updating (by Bobbie Sellers on 2023-06-05 20:41:36 GMT from United States)
I see no excuse for Flatpaks, Snaps and use PCLinux OS 2023 currently at Linux 6.3.5. I don't mind using tools like Synaptic where I know which packages are being updated. I read of unhappy users of Snaps and Flatpaks on Usenet in Linux newsgroups. But I may be a bit old fashioned which sounds right at 85 yoa.
The so-called Immutable distributions are not. You just have to make bigger downloads to get the later images. What is the point? Aside from false advertising. Maybe it will make the Enterprise version users feel more secure. They will not be more secure unless they extend their efforts in that direction. So many enterprises have suffered copied data and malware attacks that they must not be able to effectively keep intruders out of their systems.
Just my opinion and I won't offer online references to back it up because searching Usenet for the posts that influenced my opinion is too much.
Thanks for the hard work of reviewing 3 distributions this month.
26 • Libreoffice (by nsp0323 on 2023-06-05 21:20:13 GMT from Sweden)
It's depressing to see the state of things. Flatpaks, Snaps or whatever will never run on my machines. The same goes for immutable OSs.
27 • Slint review (by Hugo Carvalho on 2023-06-05 21:37:19 GMT from Portugal)
To install Slint the command to use is "start" not "setup" as mentioned in the review by Jesse Smith. The lastest of Slint-15.0-4 ISO works well. No issues here!
28 • Flatpaks (by Hoos on 2023-06-06 02:14:29 GMT from Singapore)
While I try to limit my use of flatpaks to where it's absolutely necessary (large sizes, theming mismatches, prefer packages compiled for the native packaging format of the distro preferably directly from distro's/parent distro's repos), it is at least more universal than snaps.
Flatpak is more init-agnostic and you are not restricted to using systemd, unlike Snaps. So I have one or two flatpak applications installed on respectively runit, sysvinit and systemd distros.
29 • flatpaks (by Titus Groan on 2023-06-06 03:40:47 GMT from New Zealand)
@26
some applications are only released as an appimage for linux. or if you prefer, an .exe for M/S that will maybe run under wine*,**. or -mac.pkg, guessing for apple range of product - not familiar myself.
if you dig around, you can sometimes find a tar.gz, and if you have the time/inclination, install yourself. Just hope your dependency finding skills are up to it.
or just download the appimage / flatpak / snap and put up with excess baggage.
* wine is not an emulator ** depends on how much is left in the bottle
30 • @23 LibreOffice rpm (by Kazlu on 2023-06-06 09:42:19 GMT from France)
If I am correct, one big difference is that when you install this way, LibreOffice just stays there and you have to update it manually, while with Snaps/Flatpaks you can centralize and automate updates for all Snaps/Flatpaks. Some distros even have a unified interface for updating traditional packages and Snaps/Flatpaks.
For the record, Appimages have to be updated manually too. I just heard of AppImageUpdate which might manage that, but I did not try it.
31 • "Portable" packages (by nsp0323 on 2023-06-06 10:38:41 GMT from Sweden)
@29 if it's open sourced, I'll compile it myself from the source code. If not, I won't use it anyway.
Dealing with dependencies can take sometime but, as a package maintainer, I tend to find my way around.
Btw, I don't use Windows, MacOS or Linux. I don't like the direction things are going so, I've moved to BSD four years ago.
32 • glad the discussion is back on topic (by Matt on 2023-06-06 11:43:56 GMT from United States)
Last week's comment section stunk. It was the first time I have seen so many posts praising Microsoft and even one calling Linux a handicapped OS. I guess even the mention of Azure Linux brings out Linux haters. Does that make me a conspiracy theorist, or am I just and observer of objective reality?
Anyway, back on topic: Flatpak doesn't always work for me either. It is the reason I had to give up on Void Linux and return to Debian. I love using Void and the runit system. I just don't have the time and energy to compile all the extra packages I need. I thought Flatpak was the solution, but it is not. I have to use Zoom for work, and the Flatpak version of zoom will not allow me to use SSO login. Fedora abandoning Libreoffice and leaving it to Flatpak is probably a big mistake. Most users will prefer to use packages maintained by their distribution.
33 • Slint review (follow-up) (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-06 12:53:38 GMT from France)
Having read this comment https://forum.salixos.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=8629&p=49219#p49219 from George Vlahavas aka gapan on the Sling forum (that he kindly hosts) I could somehow reproduce the issue mentioned by Jesse doing this:
1. Create a (voluntarily too small) virtual hard disk with this command:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 JesseSmall 5G
2. Start the installer with a Qemu command including these lines:
-m 1.9G \ -drive file=JesseSmall,format=qcow2,media=disk \ -cdrom /repo/x86_64/slint-15.0/iso/slint64-15.0-4.iso
To overcome the limitation of 50G fore the size of the drive, a soon as I got the bash prompt I used nano to edit the file /sbin/functions replacing line #46: GCOUNT=50 by GCOUNT=4
I then typed "started" he pressed "a" for "auto-partitioning mode, which leads to a "just installed" system size of about 9G (using brtfs with zstd compression) as I checked in another test.
As expected the same error as Jesse albeit a little later in the installation process (the package noto-fonts-ttf could not be installed). Indeed less than 27M was available in the target file system.
So I think the this conclusion quoted from the review is inaccurate: ". I confirmed the install media had the correct checksum, indicating the problem is with the included package itself, not the install media on which the package is located." Still other possibilities exist, like a bad USB stick, or a bad USB connection. Not knowing more about the exact context of the review makes hard to give a definitive conclusion. It would be interesting to know if an installation was also attempted in a VM, using the ISO directly as a virtual cdrom, and then its outcome.
34 • Slint (by George Nielsen AKA hitest on 2023-06-06 14:27:18 GMT from Canada)
I just installed Slint 15.0 in a VM; it was an error free installation. Thanks for your service to our community, Didier. First rate distribution!
P.S. I really appreciate what you've done here, Didier. I like the fact that you can opt for manual and or automatic partitioning. Choosing a graphical or console log-in during the installation is very slick.
I opted for the MATE desktop and a graphical log-in. Everything just works.
35 • Opensuse Aeon (by Faxe on 2023-06-06 15:07:33 GMT from Germany)
Aeon is promising and I have installed it for testing its RC-status, as I have done with Fedora Silverblue. Performance seemed to be fast but the show stopper happened when I tried to add my old Epson SX435 printer/scanner device. I plugged in the USB and the message appeared that a printer is added. So I tried to print a test page and got the message that I need to install a driver. I had to google how to install it via short terminal acrobatics, downloaded the driver, installed it, reboot and tried to print again. I got the message "Print job is stopped" and that I need a driver. Perhaps the firewall caused the trouble? I stopped all firewall services and tried again without success. The same happened with Silverblue before. After that I deleted Aeon and installed my beloved LTS-distro, which adds my printer without problems and just works. I am not a fan of Aeon or Silverblue right now.
36 • flatpak, snap or reality??? (by tom joad on 2023-06-06 15:09:59 GMT from Germany)
@ 32 "Most users will prefer to use packages maintained by their distribution."
Hallelujah!!! Simple and elegantly stated.
Reading the reader comments over the years have just reinforced that simple fact stated by Matt.
Maybe the purveyors of flatpak and snap maybe should reflect on considering possibly improving their creations...perhaps?
Until then I will stay with what has repeatedly and consistently worked for me.
37 • Slint review (by Jesse on 2023-06-06 15:15:06 GMT from Canada)
@33: " It would be interesting to know if an installation was also attempted in a VM, using the ISO directly as a virtual cdrom, and then its outcome."
Yes, I attempted to install Slint in a virtual machine with a verified ISO download. The disk size was 64GB and Slint was given the entire thing. (The installer claims it needs 50GB, but there is no way a 4GB ISO will require half that much space.) The installer fails with, apparently, a corrupted package file.
38 • Linux makes agreat server and is the biggest junk as a desktop (by Yoko on 2023-06-06 15:33:48 GMT from Japan)
@32 • (by Matt from United States) @36 • (by tom joad from Germany)
You two seem to be misunderstanding that all people want is that their applications work. Most people have no idea what an OS is. Linux? Cancer?
39 • Slint review (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-06 17:04:40 GMT from France)
@37: "Yes, I attempted to install Slint in a virtual machine with a verified ISO download. The disk size was 64GB and Slint was given the entire thing. (The installer claims it needs 50GB, but there is no way a 4GB ISO will require half that much space.) The installer fails with, apparently, a corrupted package file."
50 G is not for the system alone just after installation. In "auto" mode it needs about 9 G as stated in my previous comment (double that with ext4 of xfs in "manual" mode), but then I assume that users will need much more space for the files in /home (which is not a separate partition but a btrfs sub-volume if installing in auto mode). Then if the user keeps old snapshots of / (also mounted as a sub-volume) this can take a lot of space and to avoid that the btrfs file system suddenly becomes read-only one have to keep always a few un-allocated space (roughly 5 to 10G) as indicated for instance by "btrfs fi us -T /" Maybe 50 G is an overkill and I could make that just a recommendation. At least no Slint user complained about a btrfs file system suddenly becoming read-only
As I posted this "apparently corrupted file system" most probably "not enough space on the drive to install this package as I have pointed out in my previous comment.
I still do not understand why far you are the only one having reported this issue (and believing it is due to a corrupted package) while several (not to say many) uses the same ISO to install and didn't come across it.
40 • Linux still so fragmented (by John on 2023-06-06 18:06:09 GMT from United States)
I bought a Mini PC the other day, since it only had minimal specs I decided that Windows 11 was just too heavy for its capabilities. I started trying different Linux distributions. Fedora, Pop OS, Ubuntu, Mint. All of them have one thing in common they all tend to do some things just slightly different then another. Things like FlatPac vs Snap, or even ways of using a similar Desktop environment. It reminded me of how people get overwhelmed with choices they sort of end up choosing nothing. This is especially true with Linux distributions. There are so many with basically slight spins on one another seems rather ridiculous since Linux in general is so customizable anyway. I finally ended up with Ubuntu 22.04 just because it seems so many other distributions sort of work off that basic premise. Why use a copy when you can use the original was my theory. But then again I guess a true original would sort of be Debian. Anyway, I can see why many who even consider Linux will eventually give up and go back to Windows or Mac OS. It's just simpler, no real choices to make, it is what it is and most seem very satisfied not having to choose.
41 • What's wrong with flatpaks (by bluep on 2023-06-06 18:16:33 GMT from United States)
@4 "To be honest, no one's been able to tell me what exactly is wrong with flatpaks" Try install any 700kb package and see how flatpak downloads 1.5GB on runtime libraries for nvidia and countless other stuff. Just for a 700kb package. And this will happen for every package. Flatpaks are a great idea, if you want to waste time and disk space.
42 • Linux still so fragmented (by DaveT on 2023-06-06 23:43:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
@40 All you did is make bad choices of distro. Yes, a true original would be Debian, if you hate systemd you choose Devuan. Better still, abandon linux and move to one of the flavours of BSD. OpenBSD is my daily driver, the Devuan desktop does all the heavy audio stuff not ported to BSD.
43 • Linux fragmentation and stuff (by El Guapo on 2023-06-07 06:36:05 GMT from United States)
@40, "simpler, no real choices to make" In the movie "My Cousin Vinny," In the morning, Vinny and Mona Lisa walk up to the counter of the local greasy spoon. Vinny asks: "Do you have a menu?" The owner gets a card, wipes it off with a rag and puts it on the counter. There are two items on it: 1- Breakfast, 2- Lunch. Vinny says: "Let me think." And after a while: "I think we'll have the breakfast." If breakfast and/or lunch fulfill your desires, you are in paradise. Otherwise, you might want to look for a place offering a more varied menu.
Too many distros? Not too many and not too few, just as many as there are people willing to create them. This as ordained by the GPL and Richard Stallman in his infinite (or infamous) wisdom. No one is obligated to create any software because you or I or anyone else like it, not are they obligated to stop creating it because you or anyone else dislike it. Hate or love, complain and moan all you want. Makes no never mind
It's no so difficult to find a distro. Search with Google or your preferred engine for "Linux distros for newbies" and you'll find useful curated and short lists which should be easy to install and run. Should you need hand-holding, a search will again provide plenty of people willing to help with how-tos, videos, or whatever. If you are incapable of searching on internet, or of learning basic things about OSes and computers even with your hand being held, then you have no business installing Linux. Have someone do it for you, or stick to breakfast or lunch.
I love the variety of Linux, and even after many years I still try the odd and sometimes strange offerings, even if just for entertainment value. As in biological evolution, it's diversity that tends to lead to innovation. I customize the distros I use to fit me, and I also love that about Linux. I'm not just 1% of the 1% of the 1%. I'm probably somewhere in the .000001%. And frankly, I could not give less of a damn what the other 99.0000xxx% do or think.
@42,The only bad choice of distro is one that doesn't work for the user, not one that lacks the seal of approval from DaveT.
44 • Slint (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-07 07:27:22 GMT from France)
@ Tran Older: Yes Absolute is a good one. This not withstanding, Slint is not only for the visually impaired: I am sighted and (not so surprisingly) use it every day ;)
45 • @40 Linux fragmentation (by Kazlu on 2023-06-07 08:08:43 GMT from France)
I used to think the same: "Why do developpers spread resources that much creating so many looking alike distributions?". With time, I learnt more about how this software world works and realized why it was so. I could talk about it for hours, but long story short, the GNU/Linux world is not one global company with organized goals. It's just that there are distros out there, and sometimes here and there someone thinks "that one is nice, but I need this and that done differently, I will adapt it to my needs ; now that it's done, why not share it with others, who may have the same needs!" and BAM you just witnessed the birth of another distribution. Sometines the difference is in aesthetic details, sometimes it looks the same but has functional differences underneath.
It's not a bad thing: fragmentation does not mean isolation, and most distros still use more or less the same pieces, there are heavily intertwined, so they are still contributing together to the development of the base bricks used to make distros.
Now, about choice: I acknowledge it may be overwhelming, especially since web searches will return individual opinions of plenty of people recommanding different things! But here is a good thing: there are actually very few bad choices. There may be many distros tailored for beginners, but almost any of them will do just fine, you hardly can go wrong with them as a beginner. In the list you provided, I would steer clear of Fedora for a Linux beginner, but all others will do just fine. My personal recommandation would be Mint but since you already went with Ubuntu 22.04, which is also a very fine choice, don't bother changing, the differences are too thin to justify it. Keep using Ubuntu until you see a reason to look for something else. Maybe with time and after learning a bit, you may realize you need something different and you will want to change, be in in a month, a year or in five years. Or maybe you'll be fine and will keep using Ubuntu forever and that would be just fine!
The best choice would be the recommandation of someone you know, who will be able to give you a hand if you need help. If you don't have that, any "beginner friendly" Linux distro is fine.
Final words: It's better to have too many choices than to be forced to use only one option that does not work well for you, don't you think?
46 • Flatpacks, Snaps etc (by Name (mandatory) on 2023-06-07 08:35:46 GMT from Slovenia)
Once they become the standard and everyone start using them, you can expect lots of infestation, since you will not have safety net of shared libraries through official repositories.
I'm not using either of them. And if forced, I may even try to learn BSD, which I would like to avoid at this age, I'm getting too old to learn new tricks ;)
47 • Libreoffice on Fedora, Flat Fatpacks (by Hank on 2023-06-07 08:49:14 GMT from Switzerland)
Fedora can remove what they like, I tried it and left fast.
Buntu can also do what they like, with the bloated packaging they propose even more so.
After a long time searching for my personal best distro I settled on the debian based antiX.i Lightweight fast and with modern kernel runs on pretty much any recent device. Presently running and enjoying antiX23 beta.
48 • @41 • What's wrong with flatpaks (by bluep from United States) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-07 10:11:16 GMT from Netherlands)
"Try install any 700kb package and see how flatpak downloads 1.5GB on runtime libraries for nvidia and countless other stuff. Just for a 700kb package. And this will happen for every package.Flatpaks are a great idea, if you want to waste time and disk space." You might be right when it comes down to the space needed, but you are still generally wrong as you completely missed the reason why Flatpak is needed. Linux makes a great server but a terrible desktop—unless all you want to do is do some surfing and fiddle with system files. Most people use their PCs because they have work to do that requires the corresponding application. It is far better to have the application one needs that uses an extra 1.5 GB of platform files than to have no application at all.
49 • @46 • Flatpacks, Snaps etc (by Name (mandatory) from Slovenia) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-07 10:21:31 GMT from Netherlands)
"Once they become the standard and everyone start using them, you can expect lots of infestation, since you will not have safety net of shared libraries through official repositories. I'm not using either of them. And if forced, I may even try to learn BSD..." Well, if you understood the main principles of Flatpak, Snap, and "immutable," you would also understand why you are wrong—in theory, as in practice, every system can be hacked if if there is enough will and someone knows what and how to do it. Everything is sandboxed. The main issue here is that imperfect people write imperfect OSes and imperfect applications, and smart people can always find some workaround.
50 • @47 • Libreoffice on Fedora, Flat Fatpacks (by Hank from Switzerland) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-07 10:27:56 GMT from Netherlands)
"Fedora can remove what they like, I tried it and left fast. Buntu can also do what they like, with the bloated packaging they propose even more so. After a long time searching for my personal best distro I settled on the debian based antiX."i
While antiX might be great to revive some 20-year-old PCs and might be fine for you and a few dozen lookalikes, one can't really compare it to a modern OS. This would be like comparing the Trabant that you drive with a Ferrari or Rolce-Roys. Yes, they all drive. 😉
51 • @45 • @40 Linux fragmentation (by Kazlu from France) (by Leonie on 2023-06-07 14:39:49 GMT from France)
The long story short is that the GNU/Linux world is not one global company with organized goals, and that's why it'll always stay irrelevant on desktops. 300 "freakstributions" for "freaks" who would rather fiddle than work and keep complaining about Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, Flatpak, Snap, Wayland, and Systemd—the only things that work for most people. Make EVERY Windows application since 1985 work on Linux, every game, every application, every... you name it; be it 128-bit, 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit, 4-bit, 2-bit, 0-bit... and you've got a "winner." NO-BODY and NO-SOUL cares for the OS, but all people care to get their job done or that they can play the game they want to play—NOT the one that runs on some freakstribution after fiddling all day long. "Final words: It's better to have too many choices than to be forced to use only one option that does not work well for you, don't you think?" Final words of billions of users: It's better to have ONE choice that just works than TO BE FORCED to try hundreds of not working "freakstibutions."
52 • @48 Flatpaks VS nothing? (by Kazlu on 2023-06-07 16:46:54 GMT from France)
"Linux makes a great server but a terrible desktop—unless all you want to do is do some surfing and fiddle with system files."
That was true until, what, 2005? 2010? I have been using Linux for work and entertainment alike for more than 10 years now and it has better served me as a desktop than Windows ever had. I am talking office work (mostly letters and spreadsheets), scanning, printing, accounting, watching movies, listening to music, picture sorting and storing, image editing, video editing, sound editing, video calls, gaming... and more. The only thing I have not been able to do on Linux is using some specific games and one planning software. For the rest, Linux desktop did everything while working better than Windows.
"It is far better to have the application one needs that uses an extra 1.5 GB of platform files than to have no application at all. " Agreed. Originally, the goal of Flatpaks and the likes was to bring software where it was not available. And it's a good thing! However, the starting point here was a situation where LibreOffice *was* available via a standard package, but will now be *replaced* with the Flatpak version. Same thing with this "all-snap" version of Ubuntu. In this case, the technical pros and cons become relevant. Especially because we are not talking about one or two 1.5GB Flatpaks, but dozens and dozens.
53 • @51 fragmentation (by Kazlu on 2023-06-07 16:59:22 GMT from France)
"Make EVERY Windows application since 1985 work on Linux, every game, every application, every... you name it; be it 128-bit, 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit, 4-bit, 2-bit, 0-bit... and you've got a "winner." " Ah, yes, that would be great. But it's not possible, because most of it is closed source. The only ones that could do it would be the editors of those applications. Building yet another Linux distribution and making some software compatible with Linux are very, very different tasks. It would be like asking the designer of the bodywork of a car to take care of the retrofit of a thermal car to electric. Not the same job.
"It's better to have ONE choice that just works than TO BE FORCED to try hundreds of not working "freakstibutions." " If the ONE choice worked fine for everyone, there would have never been more choices. The only reason why Linux exists is because other OSes were not satisfying. If one is 100% satisfied with Windows, which is working fine and fulfilling every need without issues, there is *absolutely no reason* to try anything else. Personnaly, I switched to Linux because Windows was not satisfactory (because mainly of performance and ethics). Now, I am more satisfied with Linux than with Windows... and I do work with it.
Who is forcing anyone to try hundreds of distros? If you want, try one. If it does not work, try a different one. If it gets too boring, you can always come back to the original situation. In the end of the day, the choice is always yours. Chose whatever fits your needs. But that choice might be different for someone else.
54 • Slint 15.0-4 installation (by keithpeter on 2023-06-07 18:27:10 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm typing this comment on a fresh installation of Slint on an ancient Thinkpad X61s using the whole 60Gb SSD. I read the copious documentation, set my keyboard and all and typed 'start' and opted for auto partitioning with an encrypted drive, setting 54GiB out of 55GiB reported aside for the root partition. Installation completed successfully. Seems to be working fine with the MATE desktop. The installation takes the form of a dialogue with options being presented at each stage.
Might be worth mentioning that when setting the pass phrase for the encrypted drive, the script requires that the pass phrase must include at least one capital letter and at least one punctuation mark. When setting the root and user passwords there is no similar requirement.
My main reason for trying a bare metal install is to explore the btrfs filing system and to experiment with making snapshots and rolling back to a previous state. A second objective is to see how the compressed swap drive behaves: top is seeing over 8Gb of swap space.
The stock install provides a very usable desktop on this core duo laptop - Firefox/Thunderbird/LibreOffice together with Audacious and VLC for media as well as GIMP and the MATE applications (Pluma, EoM, Atril &c).
PS: 'Setup' is the Slackware command to start the installer script - perhaps a slip of the keyboard?
55 • Slint 15.0-4 installation (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-07 19:31:21 GMT from France)
@keithpeter: you wrote "Might be worth mentioning that when setting the pass phrase for the encrypted drive, the script requires that the pass phrase must include at least one capital letter and at least one punctuation mark. When setting the root and user passwords there is no similar requirement." True. The rationale (or excuse, as you may prefer call it) if that if someone has a physical access to the computer (or drive where the system is installed), if this drive is not encrypted it is very easy to access all its files from a live system or initramfs (like a distribution installer), regardless of the passwords. If it is encrypted is is way more difficult to do that (unless the system be running, of course), but only with a very good passphrase.
To experiment with snapshots and their rollbacks you my use (as root or using sudo) absm, included in Slint and also available on GitHub. It doesn't have as many features of similar software yet but wrote it as I thought that snapper was a bit of an overkill and timeshift's GUI is hardly accessible with speech. However you can build and install timeshift typing "slapt-src -u && slapt-src -i timeshift" if you prefer.
56 • Slint 15.0-4 installation password complexity (by keithpeter on 2023-06-07 19:41:26 GMT from United Kingdom)
@Didier Spaier
I didn't intend to question or criticise your choices and I understand the need to use a strong key for encryption.
I mentioned it just in case it took others trying an installation by surprise. My key phrases usually substitute length for variety of characters if you see what I mean!
Thanks for the pointer to absm - I need to read up on the general principles a little first.
57 • Slint 15.0-4 installation password complexity (by Didier Spaier on 2023-06-08 05:11:57 GMT from France)
@56 keithpeter I am fine with someone questioning my choices, this is how I can make Slint better. And I am grateful for your comments ;)
It is hard to guarantee the safety of a LUKS passphrase anyway: as Matthew Garrett aka mjg59 pointed out in a recent blog article @ https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html as of today only a LUKS2 key with an Argion2id KDF (key derival function) is not known to have been deciphered at least once by a state actor, and in Slint we are still using a LUKS1 key so I should probably upgrade now that GRUB supports LUKS2 (not sure if it supports Argon 2id yet, though). On the other hand Argon2id needs more RAM, so not sure I that would not lead to prevent encryption on boxes with few installed RAM. Sorry for the digression.
58 • password complexity (by Sergio Akira on 2023-06-08 05:23:08 GMT from Brazil)
@keithpeter
"My key phrases usually substitute length for variety of characters if you see what I mean!"
In terms of security, a LONG passphrase made of just one kind of character (e.g., lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet) might be better than a SHORT password made of two or three kinds of characters (decimal digits, lowercase/uppercase letters, and special symbols).
By the way, a good password must have at least 30 characters. A strong password must be greater than 50 characters of several kinds.
59 • 50 • @47 FUD Posting regarding antiX (by Hank on 2023-06-08 07:47:58 GMT from Germany)
50 • @47 wrote While antiX might be great to revive some 20-year-old PCs and might be fine for you and a few dozen lookalikes, one can't really compare it to a modern OS. This would be like comparing the Trabant that you drive with a Ferrari or Rolce-Roys. Yes, they all drive. 😉
Above is Total FUD.
antiX is based on latest Debian and uses Runit or system V init. It is a modern semi Rolling OS.
On a very recent computer comparing performance to an Ariel Atom V8 is way more descriptive than a very collectible vintage DDR trabant.
60 • @59 FUD Posting regarding antiX (by Hank from Germany) (by Ayleen on 2023-06-08 08:36:25 GMT from Switzerland)
"antiX is based on latest Debian and uses Runit or system V init. It is a modern semi Rolling OS. On a very recent computer comparing performance to an Ariel Atom V8 is way more descriptive than a very collectible vintage DDR trabant."
antiX doesn't have Gnome-Shell or systemd, and it has no global-search functionality... antiX is like Windows 95 compared to Windows 11. Also, are we talking about a modern, good-looking OS with sophisticated features or about speed? I can easily add IceWM atop of my Fedora, and it'll be just as quick, as there will be no more animations left.
61 • @60 FUD Posting regarding antiX (by Kazlu on 2023-06-08 10:58:17 GMT from France)
"I can easily add IceWM atop of my Fedora, and it'll be just as quick, as there will be no more animations left. " Just like you can install KDE Plasma on antiX and get a good looking OS with global search... So how is Fedora more "modern" than antiX?
62 • @61 • @60 Another FUD Posting (by Kazlu from France) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 11:26:15 GMT from Netherlands)
"Just like you can install KDE Plasma on antiX and get a good looking OS with global search... So how is Fedora more "modern" than antiX?"
When my neighbor goes to https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/download/, it'll get a good-looking and modern-looking OS with the fresh software versions.
When my neighbor goes to https://antixlinux.com/download/, he'll get something looking like it's fresh from '95 with some 2-3 year old software versions.
When my neighbor goes to https://www.salixos.org/download.html, it'll get something looking like '99, but it'll be more usable and performant as antix.
Just in case you missed it, we're not talking about what one can make out of some OS, but what one gets upon downloading and installing the 'default' without the need to do anything else but start using it—which is what 99,999% of all people expect.
63 • Installing IceWM on Fedora vs installing Gnome-Shell on antiX (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 11:54:22 GMT from Netherlands)
@Kazlu
BTW, you should also check how much time it takes to install IceWM on Fedora and remove the (dependency) IceWM Themes package, and how long it takes to install Gnome-Shell, systemd, and all of the dependencies upon antiX (which makes extra effort to prevent systemd).
Upon installing IceWM on Fedora, you just pick up some of the best IceWM themes from pling.com, like the Dracula theme for IceWM—DraculIce, Fatale Pink IceWM Theme, Gruvbox IceWM Theme (dark panel), ice_ux_pro, Midday IceWM Theme, or Ubuntu 20.04 IceWM Theme. At least, those are the ones that I'm using on my Fedora 38 under IceWM a couple of times per year when I just get nostalgic for some '95 computer looks.
64 • @62, @63 antiX vs Fedora talk (by Kazlu on 2023-06-08 12:31:40 GMT from France)
@62 "Just in case you missed it, we're not talking about what one can make out of some OS, but what one gets upon downloading and installing the 'default' without the need to do anything else but start using it"
@63 "Upon installing IceWM on Fedora, you just pick up some of the best IceWM themes from ..."
Huuuuuh... :D I was actually replying to @60 "I can easily add IceWM atop of my Fedora, and it'll be just as quick, as there will be no more animations left. ", precisely because I *thought* we were talking about the OS and not what you can make of it, but not everyone was on the same page.
-------------------------- "BTW, you should also check how much time it takes to install IceWM on Fedora and remove the (dependency) IceWM Themes package, and how long it takes to install Gnome-Shell, systemd, and all of the dependencies upon antiX (which makes extra effort to prevent systemd)."
Ah, yes, I did not try that but I was suspecting it would be more difficult to install GNOME Shell on antiX due to the systemd ties! Which is why I mentioned installing KDE Plasma instead ;)
65 • @64 antiX vs Fedora talk (by Kazlu from France) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 12:51:34 GMT from Netherlands)
"Ah, yes, I did not try that but I was suspecting it would be more difficult to install GNOME Shell on antiX due to the systemd ties! Which is why I mentioned installing KDE Plasma instead ;) "
I am fully aware why you mentioned KDE (which looks and feels like 2005 Windows). ;)
66 • antiX vs Salix (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 12:53:39 GMT from Netherlands)
@Kazlu
On a serious note, antiX just does not perform.
I am one of those "victims" who bought Nokia Booklet 3G in 2009. A beautiful-looking 10-inch device with a slow Intel Atom processor but with an integrated 3G modem seemed to be a usable device for a traveling person who could sit in the shade of some street cafe, drink a beer, and write an article.
The first versions that came out with Windows XP worked fine. Soon, Nokia was delivering them only with Windows 7 Starter.
I used it for a short time until it got unbearably slow, and I let it lay for some years—too petty to throw away but basically a completely useless piece of crap.
Somewhere around 2016–2017, I dug that IT failure out of the box, and I thought I could try to give it a second life with the help of some Linux—that's why we got Linux at the end of the day.
Trusty Thar wouldn't even start. Many other "lagstributions" were just lagging. Then I decided to try antiX, and it would install, but despite the horrible look and primitive WM's, it didn't offer any better performance.
The last thing I was willing to try before throwing it away was Salix 14.2. The first and only Linux distribution that actually worked on that ultimate piece of crap HW. What was probably the biggest crap of HW ever made still lives because Volkerding and Gapan did a much better job than anticapitalista.
Not that it's a perfect job, though, as the Linux brain works just as far as the Linux brain works, and one gets four virtual desktops on the taskbar that 1% of users will need but no audio applet that 99% of users need, but that's thankfully easy to fix in Xfce. Adding or removing applets in IceWM isn't that easy.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Nokia-Booklet-3G-Netbook.59959.0.html
67 • P.M. @Kazlu "We" (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 13:06:48 GMT from Netherlands)
I understand "we" as anybody writing here anything to anybody else—it's "we" (all of us commenters), and nothing really personal. In other words, I was just reading the context of what you and the other person were talking about—I can read the contexts. ;)
68 • @66 performance (by Kazlu on 2023-06-08 13:26:30 GMT from France)
Huh, interesting. I can somewhat relate, having myself bought a 2012 eeePC with Intel Atom inside. A bit more recent, I give you that, but same end of the stick :D It was delivered with Ubuntu and the, then, young Unity desktop was extremely sluggish, even without effects (I don't remember the name, Unity2D, classic, whatever). Xubuntu worked well for a time, until it became clear the whole OS was sluggish. I ended up installing MX Linux on it, probably around 2015. It has the same base as antiX but different choices of applications and an Xfce desktop. Still using that. With time, it became clear that the show stopper on such low end hardware would be the web browser anyway. Whatever fast or superfast OS or desktop I tried, browsing the web with Firefox has always been painfully slow. The rest of the software in MX works just fine and at decent speed (keeping in mind it's a 2012 Atom underneath...). I tried a collection of lightweight browsers, some work for casual browsing on some sites, but most of the time something is not displayed right. And I don't even want to try to log in anything with that :D
So all that to say I am a little surprised about the performance you experienced with antiX as a whole, but well, I was not exactly in your shoes. I had a brief experiment with Salix some years ago, left me with a very good impression, especially regarding performance. Same with Q4OS, for the record. But since I did not solve the browser problem and MX has been satisfying everywhere else until now, well, I did not bother.
--------------------------------------- @67 PM "I understand "we" as anybody writing here anything to anybody else—it's "we" (all of us commenters), and nothing really personal.
In other words, I was just reading the context of what you and the other person were talking about—I can read the contexts. ;) "
That is also how I understood it, no worries here ;)
69 • @68 • @66 performance (by Kazlu from France) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 15:43:30 GMT from Netherlands)
"Huh, interesting. I can somewhat relate, having myself bought a 2012 eeePC with Intel Atom inside."
The processor was the same, but if you checked the review, you noticed two tiny but very important details. The Nokia had a bigger screen (1280 x 720 instead of 1024 x 600), and it did not have active cooling—Nokia had to reduce the processor power to approx. 60–70% (to reduce overheating) of the same processors with active cooling. Both together mean that there was not 50% speed left compared to your eeePC.
I know very well what one can or can't expect from some HW, and so I didn't even expect that Firefox and three tabs should work, but what I'm talking about here is that (rather) slow typing in a text editor didn't work in antiX, while it was kind of still usable in Salix. To be fair, it wasn't anticapitalista's failure or Gapan's "magic," but "Slackware magic" vs. "Debian failure." Debian was always only good as a server or the Ubuntu base.
70 • Proprietary snap server limits all-snap Ubuntu (by no-snap on 2023-06-08 15:46:24 GMT from United States)
All-snap Ubuntu sounds interesting but as long as the snap server remains proprietary I doubt it will get any broader usage. If Fedora's immutable images can be fully open source then surely Ubuntu's immutable images can be too.
71 • @Kazlu (aka Webbrowser) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 16:00:20 GMT from Netherlands)
"But since I did not solve the browser problem..." Maybe check "surf." https://suckless.org/rocks/
72 • @70 • Proprietary snap server limits all-snap Ubuntu (by no-snap from United Sta (by Cubehead on 2023-06-08 16:19:31 GMT from Netherlands)
Canonical's Snap server is not more or less "proprietary" than the Flatpak; but nobody else has put any other Snap server online. It is 100% open source, and you can also make a Snap server and put it online. No matter who wins the "fight," Snaps are the better choice. https://itsfoss.com/flatpak-vs-snap/
73 • @71 Surf (by Kazlu on 2023-06-09 10:08:31 GMT from France)
Interesting. Not as practical as a "regular" browser, but it seems to work even on annoyingly complex websites, so definitely worth a long time trial on that spare machine.
Oh, and thanks for the website! Most of the stuff mentioned is too barebones for my taste but it's nice to know that those options exist.
74 • @72 flatpak VS snap (by Kazlu on 2023-06-09 10:20:36 GMT from France)
The site you linked to starts with a bunch of peremptory and unbacked claims, when they are not totally irrelevant. Very poor start when you're about to read a technical analysis.
I still read it, out of curiosity. And if I only look at this list of arguments, Flatpak looks better than Snap to me :D
75 • @74 • @72 flatpak VS snap (by Kazlu from France) (by Cubehead on 2023-06-09 12:22:39 GMT from Netherlands)
"I still read it, out of curiosity. And if I only look at this list of arguments, Flatpak looks better than Snap to me :D "
It usually comes down to where one is discussing the topic. ;)
If one does it on DW, then "The users who have strong feelings on Snaps will inevitably be a small (if vocal) minority." ;)
The thing is that 99.99% of humanity doesn't want what 0.01% of people on DW want, and most of those DW people also don't know what they're talking about. ;)
Take a look @41 (by bluep) for example. Don't want it? Don't use it, but don't spread FUD. Sure, Flatpak and Snaps do need more space, BUT...
"For example, let's see how the snap package for a common tool compares to direct installation:
The difference is sometimes significant. If we download the youtube-dl software directly from the developer's website, the script occupies only 1.8 MB on the hard disk. But the snap package of the same program, including all the libraries, weighs a whole 93 MB.
BUT: If I now want to use youtube-dl without Snap, I am missing a whole lot of packages, among others it is a Python script, which also needs some extensions. If I now install youtube-dl using apt packages, things look quite different and occupy 651 MB of additional disk space. Of course the packages can be used for other applications and scripts. However, you can see the advantage of the snap package here. In addition, the youtube-dl snap package had taken only 4 seconds to install, but to load and install all the packages via APT took several minutes."
https://www.renefuerst.eu/ubuntu-snap-gut-oder-schlecht-sicher-oder-unsicher/
Or take a look @70 (by no-snap). Don't want it? Don't use it, but don't spread FUD.
Proof of concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgmwcdxr88 https://gitlab.com/lol-snap/lol
This also showed why Linux Mint spreads FUD.
"Still, anyone can distribute their own Flatpaks. If Flathub decides they don’t want to do this or that, anyone else can create another Flatpak repository. Flatpak itself can point to multiple sources and doesn’t depend on Flathub.
Although it is open-source, Snap on the other hand, only works with the Ubuntu Store. Nobody knows how to make a Snap Store and nobody can."
This is a double-edged sword, as how do I know that I can trust the source or that it is actually still maintained if one app can come from multiple sources, like in Flatpak? That was the exact problem with Ubuntu's PPAs.
What one wants is a centralized store under someone's supervision who will take care that not everything and anything will be distributed and that it will be regularly auto-updated.
Another thing that Snap and Flatpak can't do is provide software for IOT devices.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/ubuntu_remixes_drop_flatpak/ https://hackaday.com/2020/06/24/whats-the-deal-with-snap-packages/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xcboxh/snaps_can_be_self_hosted_outside_of_snap_store/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8MgktKqjsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLm3HkZ-sMs
76 • Correction (by Cubehead on 2023-06-09 12:50:40 GMT from Netherlands)
"Another thing that Snap and Flatpak can't do is provide software for IOT devices."
Another thing that Snap CAN but Flatpak CAN'T do is provide software for IOT devices.
Number of Comments: 76
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Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
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Archives |
• Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
• Issue 1095 (2024-11-04): Fedora 41 Kinoite, transferring applications between computers, openSUSE Tumbleweed receives multiple upgrades, Ubuntu testing compiler optimizations, Mint partners with Framework |
• Issue 1094 (2024-10-28): DebLight OS 1, backing up crontab, AlmaLinux introduces Litten branch, openSUSE unveils refreshed look, Ubuntu turns 20 |
• Issue 1093 (2024-10-21): Kubuntu 24.10, atomic vs immutable distributions, Debian upgrading Perl packages, UBports adding VoLTE support, Android to gain native GNU/Linux application support |
• Issue 1092 (2024-10-14): FunOS 24.04.1, a home directory inside a file, work starts of openSUSE Leap 16.0, improvements in Haiku, KDE neon upgrades its base |
• 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 |
• Issue 1090 (2024-09-30): Rhino Linux 2024.2, commercial distros with alternative desktops, Valve seeks to improve Wayland performance, HardenedBSD parterns with Protectli, Tails merges with Tor Project, Quantum Leap partners with the FreeBSD Foundation |
• 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 |
• Issue 1088 (2024-09-16): PorteuX 1.6, migrating from Windows 10 to which Linux distro, making NetBSD immutable, AlmaLinux offers hardware certification, Mint updates old APT tools |
• Issue 1087 (2024-09-09): COSMIC desktop, running cron jobs at variable times, UBports highlights new apps, HardenedBSD offers work around for FreeBSD change, Debian considers how to cull old packages, systemd ported to musl |
• 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 |
• Issue 1074 (2024-06-10): Endless OS 6.0.0, distros with init diversity, Mint to filter unverified Flatpaks, Debian adds systemd-boot options, Redox adopts COSMIC desktop, OpenSSH gains new security features |
• 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 |
• Full list of all issues |
Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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Random Distribution |
Caos Linux
Caos Linux NSA was a light-weight, fast, efficient, stable, and secure distribution of Linux that was appropriate for servers, compute nodes, network appliances, and even the latest desktop and laptop computers. It was maintained and managed by a team of computer science experts with numerous proven skills. With resources pooled together, they created a multifunctional operating system with mission critical dependability. Caos Linux was designed to run on all x86_64 and i386 hardware ranging from clusters and servers to production level appliances to personal desktops and laptops. Supporting a wide variety of software, Caos Linux was based on the best aspects of GNU/Linux and has full binary compatibility with the most popular enterprise distribution of Linux.
Status: Discontinued
| Tips, Tricks, Q&As | Tips and tricks: Compiling the Linux kernel |
Tips and tricks: Play nicely, drop secure shell sessions cleanly, check init's name |
Questions and answers: Linux distributions for musicians |
Tips and tricks: Basename, for loop, dirname, aliases, bash history, xsel clipboard |
Tips and tricks: A journey to get Falkon 3.1.0 running and problems with portable packages |
Tips and tricks: Creating, removing, modifying, and ignoring aliases |
Questions and answers: Working with doas and Nextcloud |
Questions and answers: Merging directories of files |
Questions and answers: All about cron jobs |
Questions and answers: What is Tor and why is it important |
More Tips & Tricks and Questions & Answers |
TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
|
Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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