 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1113, 17 March 2025 |
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Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Technology is constantly reinventing itself, constantly changing, always moving towards a new concept of what "modern" software should be. Sometimes that is more minimal, or more flashy, or more secure, or the same functionality with rounded edges. This week, in our News section, we talk about changes coming to a variety of projects. These include an easier installation process for Murena powered phones, a new COSMIC desktop edition for Garuda Linux, and small improvements to Haiku. We also talk about Bodhi's new desktop theme, Ubuntu replacing its core utilities with Rust equivalents, and Chimera seeking reliable RISC-V powered computers. Do you run any RISC-V powered devices? Let us know about them in this week's Opinion Poll. First through, we talk about a member of the Gentoo family: MocaccinoOS. The MocaccinoOS distribution is a successor to Sabayon that features its own package manager, called Luet. We talk about MocaccinoOS and what it is like to run this distribution in our Feature Story. Later, in our Questions and Answers column, we talk about how to contribute to the open source community. Then we are pleased to share information on last week's releases and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
- Review: MocaccinoOS 1.8.1
- News: Murena extends its on-line installer, Garuda experiments with COSMIC, incremental improvements to Haiku, Bodhi tries out new desktop theme, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera drops RISC-V builds, Debian publishes 12.10 media
- Questions and answers: How to contribute to open source
- Released last week: FreeBSD 13.5, IPFire 2.29 Core 192, SystemRescue 12.00
- Torrent corner: Debian, Debian Edu, KDE neon, SparkyLinux
- Opinion poll: Do you own any RISC-V powered devices?
- Reader comments
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1
It's been about four years since I previously tried out the MocaccinoOS distribution. The project describes itself as being "Gentoo-based (former Sabayon branch) suited for desktop environments." The distribution also ships with a special package manager called Luet. What does Luet do differently? The project's website tells us: "MocaccinoOS uses Luet as a package manager, which is completely static and fully based on containers." I'll get into more details in a moment.
When I previously reviewed MocaccinoOS the project sounded interesting, with its layered operating system approach and custom package manager, but (at the time) I couldn't find any way to install the distribution. The documentation was surprisingly silent on how to go about installing the operating system and there weren't any obvious tools or icon launchers to help me get started, so Mocaccino went back on the shelf.
In February one of the Mocaccino developers reached out and told me the project had been making progress. I soon found that, whatever other progress had been made, the documentation still hasn't been expanded and there still isn't any information on how to install this distribution. However, I thought maybe I would be able to guess my way through the process and decided to tackle Mocaccino once more.
Apart from being Gentoo-based, the distribution's main feature appears to be Luet and how this custom package manager handles updates: "MocaccinoOS Desktop uses a layered approach. Most common system packages and desktop environments (DE) are packaged as single installable layers, along with libraries. The system set is only composed by 2 core layers." It sounds as though Mocaccino is taking a similar approach to the BSDs and popular mobile operating systems, separating the core system from the applications we can layer on top of it. The website goes on: "Versioned rootfs as layers, delivered as upgrades or multiple single packages. You can choose the format you like. Musl? Server variant? We've got you covered."
This explanation was a light on technical details, but it seemed as though Mocaccino would provide me with layers of an operating system - core, desktop, and applications - and I'd be able to mix and match them as I wanted.
The distribution is available in five editions: Desktop Minimal, GNOME, KDE, MATE, and Xfce. These vary in size from 1.4GB for the Minimal flavour up to 2.0GB for KDE. Something I noticed right away which was odd was all the download options were offered as .tar.xz archives, compressed tarballs containing the ISO files. This is really unusual, maybe unique. Some projects compress their IMG or ISO files, but I've never seen one also place a single ISO file inside a tarball. It doesn't really make a practical difference in download size either. I fetched the KDE edition tarball which is 2,142,132,668 bytes when compressed. Once unpacked the ISO is 2,151,579,648, or about 9MB larger. Which means it takes over ten times longer to unpack the ISO file than it does to download the extra 9MB.
I can't imagine why someone would make a tar archive for a single file when they are almost exactly the same size, but, this mystery aside, I soon had my live desktop ISO ready to go.
Booting from the live media brings up a menu saying we can press Enter to see available video modes or press Space to boot immediately. When I pressed Space the screen went black for about 20 seconds and then the system started a KDE Plasma session.
The project's documentation offers us the distribution's default credentials, but I did not need them. The desktop automatically logged me in and I wasn't prompted for a password while using the live session.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- The Plasma welcome window
(full image size: 1.2MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The live Plasma session runs on Wayland and uses a light theme. A desktop panel is placed horizontally across the bottom of the screen. A single icon sits on the desktop and will launch the Calamares system installer. When we first sign in a welcome window appears. This welcome application gives us a quick overview of Plasma's features, offers to launch the Discover software centre, and then gets out of the way to let us explore the desktop. I found that taking the option to open Discover would launch the software centre, but then the centre displayed an error reporting Discover was unable to find any Flatpak packages. I decided that was an issue for another day and jumped into the system installer.
Installing
The first screen of the Calamares installer offers to let us pick our preferred language from a list and shows us three buttons: Release Notes, Known Issues, and Mocaccino Support. Clicking any of these three buttons accomplishes nothing, not even an error message. The following screens ask us to pick our timezone and keyboard layout.
Next, we move on to disk partitioning. Calamares offers guided partitioning which, in this case, will create one large ext4 partition for our root filesystem and a unusually large swap partition. It looks as though swap is set up to be twice the size of the computer's RAM. This was once a common general rule, back in the 1990s, but these days a swap partition is rarely as large or larger than RAM. The guided option doesn't allow us to tweak the default layout. Alternatively, we can use the manual partitioning approach which is pleasantly easy to navigate.
The final screen of Calamares asks us to make up a username and password for ourselves. Then files are copied to our disk and Calamares offers to restart the computer. The install process took about 15 minutes, start to finish.
The first time I tried setting up Mocaccino, I tried to use the manual partitioning approach. I just took the recommendation from the guided section (root filesystem on ext4, plus swap partition) and made swap smaller. When I was finished, despite having flagged my root partition as being both root and bootable, Mocaccino didn't boot. In fact, it didn't seem to even have placed any boot loader on the system. I went back through the process and tried again, taking the same settings, but using automated partitioning. This worked, setting up the distribution and placing a boot loader on my drive.
Early impressions
Mocaccino booted to a graphical login screen. The distribution uses Plasma 6 running on Wayland as the default desktop session. Plasma on X11 is provided as an alternative. When I signed into my account I was shown the Plasma desktop, decorated in a light theme, and the welcome window opened for me again. There were no icons on the desktop. The interface, while large in memory, was fairly responsive.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- The System Systems panel
(full image size: 1.6MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Hardware
The distribution was capable of booting in UEFI and Legacy BIOS modes. When running MocaccinoOS on my laptop the distribution worked well. It set up audio and networking with no problems and my touchpad worked. The keyboard's media keys were recognized and all of my hardware just worked. Plasma was a little sluggish on my laptop, mostly due (I believed at first) to all the visual effects. Having everything fade in/out or slide around made everything feel slower than usual.
The distribution mostly worked well in VirtualBox too, running smoothly and integrating with the virtual machine environment. I think Mocaccino actually felt faster in the virtual machine because it wasn't drawing as many visual effects in response to my input. Unfortunately, I was unable to increase the desktop resolution of Plasma, either by resizing the VirtualBox window or using the System Settings panel. Plasma's resolution always stubbornly stayed at 1200x800 pixels when using the VMSVGA driver. The VBoxSVGA driver had a similar restriction and the desktop wouldn't resize, but was stuck at an even lower resolution: 800x600 pixels. I had the same problem and resolution with the VBoxVGA driver on my host machine.
The Plasma edition of Mocaccino is huge, taking up 1.3GB (1,380MB) of memory just to sign into the desktop. This is, I'm finding, typical of Plasma 6 which is currently one of the heaviest desktops available for Linux. It really is a memory hog, taking twice as much RAM as Plasma 5 and only challenged for its heavyweight champion status by GNOME and COSMIC. The distribution is fairly average in terms of space used on the disk, requiring 7.1GB of space for the root partition. Swap space takes up additional room, by default double the size of our machine's RAM.
Included software
The distribution ships with a variety of software, some popular and common across most distributions with other, less mainstream, applications in the mix. Firefox and VLC are included along with the Dolphin file manager. The Konversation chat client is included along with two process monitors (btop++ and KDE's System Monitor). KDE's Help Centre is available with documentation on many of the desktop's features and applications. A document viewer and a simple drawing program are featured alongside the Gwenview image viewer.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- The Dolphin file manager
(full image size: 1.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
There is an entry in the application menu called Phonon Audio and Video, which I thought might be a media player, but clicking its launcher did nothing. VLC appears to be the only functional media player on the distribution by default, and even it sometimes encountered problems.
Digging deeper we can find the GNU command line utilities, the system's manual pages, and systemd providing init services. I was surprised to find no compiler on the distribution, given Mocaccino's source-based, Gentoo roots. Behind the scenes the distribution runs on version 6.6 of the Linux kernel.
Software manager and updates
As on the live session, I opened the Discover software centre and it reported there were no Flatpak sources. Discover then offered to enable the Flathub repository. Clicking the offered button to enable Flathub failed with an error which said applications could not be loaded and the error blames a lack of Internet connection. I confirmed the system was on-line and could ping flathub.org. Then I found when I tried to browse applications there were actually plenty available. Discover had set up the Flathub repository successfully and displayed an error saying it had failed. From then on, Discover allowed me to browse categories and search for items.
Browsing categories of applications is easy enough, Discover is a pleasant and simple to use software centre. When I installed new packages, I could see items in the queue and my disk would show activity, but Discover didn't show any progress information. The Flatpak packages would be fetched in the background and eventually be installed successfully, but even opening the queue showed no sign of how much of the Flatpak had been downloaded, just empty progress bars.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- The Discover software centre
(full image size: 1.9MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
While Discover handles Flatpak application bundles, lower level packages appear to be in the domain of Luet. At first I found Luet wouldn't do anything when I was running it as my regular user and I had to invoke it with sudo. I then realized Luet just needed to fetch its repository information (which required root access) before it would do anything useful. Once it had a copy of its repository information stored locally I could run queries against this information without needing to use sudo.
I set about performing searches for some commonly packaged software, all of them returned no results. I tried, with and without sudo, searches using "luet search <package name>" and got zero results for: falkon, nmap, xmms, clang, supertux, firefox, and more. When I checked to see what packages were already installed, using "luet search --installed", Luet gave me no results, suggesting nothing was installed on the system.
I was starting to wonder if, despite having downloaded a bunch of repository information, if the default Mocaccino repositories might not be enabled. I ran "luet repo list" to confirm multiple repositories were enabled and they matched up with the names provided on the website. When I tried to install any package, attempting to install items from the repositories by the names listed on-line, Luet reported it first needed to update the kernel package. This led to a strange interaction where I had run "sudo luet install utils/yq" and, in response. Luet reported it must install mocaccino-lts-full and its dependencies. Who knows why I'd want to install a new kernel when asking to install yq, but I allowed Luet to fetch the new kernel.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- Searching for packages uses Luet
(full image size: 1.1MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
After the kernel updates, I tried to fetch yq, firefox, wireguard-go and other packages I could see in the repositories using the distribution's on-line search function. These all failed to install and failed to be found by Luet's searches. It did, however, trigger Luet to upgrade itself at one point. I thought this might fix things, since I'd be using the latest version of the package manager, but after another repository refresh with "sudo luet repo update" its behaviour remained the same and it never managed to find or download any packages I requested (just itself and the kernel).
Earlier I mentioned I tried to install several packages, including one called "utils/yq", this is because the documentation says Luet needs to be given the package category and name on the command line. For example, "luet install utils/yq" or "luet install apps/firefox". I tried running all commands both with and without the category prefix and all failed to find a match. I also double-checked that all repositories were enabled in the /etc/luet configuration files, in case they had been disabled somehow. Luet remained unable to perform any action apart from downloading upgrades to itself and the kernel.
Other observations
I didn't find anything on the project's website to indicate what Mocaccino's release and support schedule is. Since it's based on Gentoo, my assumption is that the distribution uses a rolling release approach and this appears to be confirmed by the flow of new versions/snapshots.
Earlier I mentioned the copy of VLC which ships with the distribution had some problems. Specifically, it was unable to play video files. I could heard the audio track, but the player's window remained blank when I tried to play a video. With some testing I discovered that the VLC Flatpak package did not share this problem; it played audio and video files, so the issue was only with the native package on Mocaccino.
Further experimenting revealed the blank VLC window bug in the native package only occurred when using Plasma's Wayland session. When I switched to running the X11 session both versions of VLC worked perfectly.
In a similar vein, the desktop resolution limitation I mentioned above (when running Mocaccino in VirtualBox) went away when I switched from Plasma's Wayland session to X11. The X11 session was more responsive to input and could change to any resolution I wanted. On my laptop it didn't make much of a difference if I used X11 or Wayland a the resolution always matched my screen's maximum, though the X11 session felt a little more responsive.
MocaccinoOS 1.8.1 -- The two copies of VLC
(full image size: 910kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Conclusions
MocaccinoOS is developed by a small team, four members according to the project's latest announcement. The team has some interesting ideas about operating system structure and package management. The idea of having system layers which are (ideally) interchangeable and building software using containers to compile packages strikes me as a useful way to keep software management consistent.
It is unfortunate that I didn't get to experience any of the key elements of this vision. Apart from updating a couple of packages, I was unable to get the Luet package manager to do anything. It was unable to find any packages, unable to download any new software, and unable to show me a list of what was installed. This meant that most of the key features advertised on the Mocaccino website were unavailable to me and it left me with, well, just another distribution running the Plasma 6.2 desktop.
To be fair to the project and its developers, the distribution worked well with my hardware and most the desktop experience was positive. Plasma, at least the X11 session, worked smoothly for me. I think it's unfortunate the Plasma Wayland session is the default as it still has some issues, but I'm glad the X11 session is available for when Wayland runs into its limitations.
More than the technical limitations though, the main issue I had with Mocaccino a few years ago was the lack of good documentation and that has remained true through to today. When dealing with new or unusual technology it is important to provide an explanation of how it should work and what to do when it's not working. The Download/Install documentation mentions nothing about Mocaccino's weird choice to hide ISO files inside tarballs. The Luet documentation doesn't offer any troubleshooting tips. It does show command line references, such as "sudo luet search <regex>", but skips giving any examples of these commands in use with their output or what to do when Luet isn't working as expected.
The end result is I'm left with a distribution which doesn't appear to deliver on any of its promised features and no tips on how to deal with this situation.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Murena extends its on-line installer, Garuda experiments with COSMIC, incremental improvements to Haiku, Bodhi tries out new desktop theme, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera drops RISC-V builds, Debian publishes 12.10 media
The Murena project has updated its on-line installer. "Exciting news! Our recently introduced, brand new web-based /e/OS installer is available with the support of new devices and we're thrilled to announce that it has passed numerous successful tests! This marks a significant milestone in making the installation process smoother than ever. In addition, we have great news for Fairphone 5, Pixel 8 and Pixel tablet users - the /e/OS installer now supports your devices! Find the list of devices supported by /e/OS Installer."
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The Garuda Linux project is experimenting with an edition featuring the COSMIC desktop environment. "Hi folks, we now have a new Garuda ISO featuring the COSMIC desktop environment. It is very bare bones at the moment - basically just the stock COSMIC packages on a Garuda base - but if there is community interest in this, we can certainly build it up as people chime in with their tweaks and ideas. Feel free to take it for a spin and see what you think! Please bear in mind that COSMIC is still in an Alpha state, and COSMIC bugs should not be reported to Garuda Linux." Information on how to try out the new COSMIC edition and contribute feedback can be found in the project's blog post.
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The Haiku project has published its monthly newsletter for February. The report lists the changes and development efforts which have gone into Haiku recently, including some small, but welcome changes for keyboard shortcuts: "OscarL merged the 'filteredquery' command-line tool into the 'query' tool, meaning that 'query' can now filter results by directory.
jscipione implemented support for keyboard shortcuts without the Cmd key in the Interface Kit. (Previously all menu shortcuts, no matter what other modifier keys they used, were also required to have Cmd as one of them.) He then modified some applications to make use of this feature, such as MediaPlayer's Playlist window, Tracker's 'move to trash', and others.
jscipione fixed some background color management problems in BTextView."
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The Bodhi Linux distribution is preparing for a new major release. Bodhi 8 will offer a new theme that will feature rounded windows and new visual effects. The project's new desktop theme is called Zenithal. "Zenithal, developed by Stefan Uram and based on the Ice theme by Simotek, introduces a polished light aesthetic that brings a fresh energy to Moksha. It also marks a first for Bodhi: windows and dialogs with rounded edges, pushing the boundaries of Moksha's traditional look. To complete the experience, we're working on a matching GTK theme with a little extra flair and special effects, as well as selecting an icon set that complements the design. Currently, we're exploring Delft-Gray, a continuation of the Faenza icon theme, featuring modern app icons with rounded edges to match Zenithal's style." Additional details are provided in the project's blog post.
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The Ubuntu distribution may soon have a new set of core utilities (coreutils). Traditionally, most Linux distributions (including Ubuntu) have used GNU's core utilities to provide command line programs such as copy (cp), move (mv), and directory listing (ls). This may change with Ubuntu 25.10 which is going to test alternatives to these programs which are designed to be faster and more secure. Jon Seager writes: "Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils' coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right. But... why? Performance is a frequently cited rationale for 'Rewrite it in Rust' projects. While performance is high on my list of priorities, it's not the primary driver behind this change. These utilities are at the heart of the distribution - and it's the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me." More information on the Rust implementation of coreutils can be found on the uutils project page.
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The Chimera Linux project is dropping new builds for the RISC-V architecture due to a lack of suitable RISC-V powered computers able to build packages. "At this point, to have a relatively sustainable base, we'd need a board that is at least as powerful as Raspberry Pi 5. This would still make the slowest builder in the fleet, but it would likely be faster than the current emulation arrangement while also being more reliable.
However, the industry does not seem to be interested in producing such machines and for most part focuses on embedded (low-end) as well as things entirely irrelevant to a distro (AI/NPU etc.) that do not help at all; at this point I don't think we can wait any longer, especially as no remedy has been announced.
We have no such problem with the other architectures; obviously x86 and ARM are at this point mainstream and this does not surprise anyone, but even the likes of LoongArch have perfectly acceptable hardware (not the fastest, but also not a bottleneck) that performs reliably." Additional information is provided in the distribution's blog post.
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The Debian project has published updated media for Debian 12 "Bookworm" which includes available fixes and security patches. "The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth update of its stable distribution Debian 12 (codename bookworm). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available. Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 12 but only updates some of the packages included."
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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) |
How to contribute to open source
New-and-helpful asks: I'm new to coding and am looking to contribute back to Linux. How does a person go about helping open source projects?
DistroWatch answers: At the risk of sounding like a discount fortune cookie, one of the best ways to help the open source community is to help yourself.
What I mean by that is: instead of searching for a project that needs help or a person with a bug which needs fixing, figure out what it is that you wish your operating system and applications did better. Is there a vague error message you see on a regular basis? You could document what it means and how to fix it, or adjust the code to show a better error message! Do you wish your favourite command line tool had more documentation? Be the one to figure out the program's features and document them! Do you wish your package manager had a new option which would make your life easier? You can be the person to create that new option! Do you wish someone would port your favourite program to your distribution? Be that person!
Being a coder who is looking for someone to guide them to a new project is a bit like being a writer and asking for ideas for a story. There are options all around you and, chances are, you encounter them every day in your regular routine. You will be a lot more fulfilled by project which inspires you than anything someone else asks you to do. One of the cool (or frustrating) things about contributing to open source projects is, once you start working on one thing, you'll soon find related projects which need help.
For example, if you decide to port a new application to your distribution, you'll probably find the documenting is missing key pieces of information. Now you have two things to do! While building a new package you'll probably find compiler warnings for the code, and then you've got yet another thing you could be fixing!
Once you have written some documentation, created a package, made a new feature, or patched a
bug the next step is to let people know about it. Join the project's mailing list or forum and tell people what you've been doing. See if anyone else is interested in what you created, updated, or fixed. If other people find it useful then it paves the way for getting your improvements accepted by the original project. The joy of working on open source comes from a mixture of working on something you will appreciate and sharing it with others who will benefit from your efforts.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
FreeBSD 13.5
Colin Percival has announced the availability of FreeBSD 13.5, the final maintenance release of the project's legacy "stable/13" branch: "The FreeBSD Release Engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE. This is the sixth and final release of the stable/13 branch. Since this release is occurring late in a legacy stable branch, there are few new features; rather, the focus is primarily on maintenance. As such, changes since 13.4-RELEASE consist mostly of bug fixes, driver updates, and new versions of externally-maintained software. FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, aarch64, armv6, armv7, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe and riscv64 architectures. FreeBSD 13.5-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded as described below." See the release announcement and the detailed release notes for further information.
IPFire 2.29 Core 192
The IPFire project has announced a new update to its distribution for firewalls and routers. The project's new release, version 2.29 Core Update 192, includes an updated Linux kernel with several improvements: "This release rebases the IPFire kernel on Linux 6.12 which is the latest long-term supported version of the Linux kernel. Since the last version, IPFire is going to benefit from various improvements from the Linux kernel development community: Intel and AMD CPUs that support VAES & AVX-512 will have a 162% faster AES-GCM encryption/decryption which will massively improve IPsec throughput. Memory alignment optimisation has improved TCP performance of up to 40% due to smaller structs that result in more CPU cache hits. TCP fraglist GRO support has been added, allowing chaining multiple TCP packages together which might improve throughput for PPPoE connections on systems which lack basic checksum offloading. A lot of work has been spent on scheduling which result in the system being able to respond quicker to any load spikes. For IPFire this will result in lower latency when processing packets. New driver support has been added and extended for various network devices, both wired and wireless; for example rtl8192du. Overall, there has been a lot valuable work gone into the kernel release which will bring you the most secure version of IPFire - and it is the most snappy one. On various hardware, the system responds a lot faster and provides better throughput throughout." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
SystemRescue 12.00
François Dupoux has made available a new major release of SystemRescue, an Arch-based specialist Linux distribution for repairing computer systems and rescuing data. SystemRescue 12.00 updates the Linux kernel to the latest long-term supported (LTS) branch, version 6.12.19, while the included Firefox web browser was brought to version 128.8.0, the latest extended-support release (ESR). Also, the SystemRescue live image now includes bcachefs, a Linux filesystem with support for volume management. The distribution comes with the Xfce desktop which has received an update to version 4.20.1. "Changelog: updated the kernel to the long-term supported Linux 6.12.19; support for bcachefs (kernel module + file system tools + support in GParted); applied workaround to avoid possible display issues affecting GRUB; updated disk utilities: GParted 1.7.0, nwipe 0.38, dump 0.4b49." See the project's changelog page which has the details of all the recent changes and additions.
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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: 3,176
- Total data uploaded: 46.8TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Do you own any RISC-V powered devices?
This week, in our News section, we talked about Chimera Linux ceasing builds for RISC-V due to limited hardware options. Not many companies sell computers powered by RISC-V processors and those which do typically sell low-specification devices. We would like to hear if you own any RISC-V powered devices. Let us know which devices in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on preferred Firefox alternatives in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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Do you own any RISC-V powered computers?
| Yes - a tablet: | 7 (0%) |
| Yes - a single-board computer: | 63 (4%) |
| Yes - a desktop/laptop PC: | 7 (0%) |
| Yes - a phone: | 8 (0%) |
| Yes - another device: | 12 (1%) |
| Yes - more than one device: | 41 (2%) |
| No - none of the above: | 1551 (92%) |
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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, 24 March 2025. 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 • RISC-V (by Kek on 2025-03-17 01:26:37 GMT from United States)
I have a Raspberry Pi Pico 2. I know it's a micro controller, but it does have two Hazard3 RISC-V cores. My current project is using micropython but I was looking forward to tinkering directly with the RISC-V cores. Personally I think RISC-V is the future for mobile devices, but it's going to be a long and bumpy road to get there given the current tech monopoly landscape.
2 • I like x86, and I'm in no hurry to replace it (by Andy Prough on 2025-03-17 01:29:12 GMT from Switzerland)
Tech news websites seem breathless in reporting year after year how x86 will be retired, replaced by faster, more energy efficient ARM or RISC-V chips. I would like for the promise of fully open-sourced RISC-V devices to be fulfilled, but I'm in no hurry at all to move off from the x86 chips I've been using for decades, which have served me so well, and which have such enormous quantities of freely licensed software written for them. Regardless of the future of ARM and RISC-V, I hope x86 stays with us for many years to come.
3 • RISC-V (by enthical on 2025-03-17 01:39:27 GMT from France)
I don't own any RISC-V device but I'd say that I won't mind.
Not that they are expensive or that I'm kinda broke (even before the inflation), but I don't see which of my device I could hope replacing with a RISC-V device given how little powered they are. The Pinetab-V seems fine but to play with but very slow (and maybe unstable), like a low-end ARM tablet from 10 years ago.
I've experimented few years back with RISC-V (instruction set) and some CPU core using Verilog, but many manufacturers keep using their own extensions which tend to make the ecosystem fragmented.
So maybe in ten years when the first middle-end phones will appear, as long they'll have enough power to run some Android ROM, are pretty cheap and have a good battery life, I'll find some spare time to get me interested into it :)
4 • Mocaccino, KDE and RAM usage (by frc_kde on 2025-03-17 02:43:38 GMT from Brazil)
Thanks to Jesse for this (and for the previous) review on Mocaccino!
I have been using Sabayou in my old PC, prior to 2020, and I feel sad to see it to be discontinued and merged into Mocaccino project — wich I wanted to try, but could not understand how to. — So, I have installed Redcore Linux (Gentoo-based, too), and I liked it, but finally understood that Gentoo is not for me.
Maybe there is some mistake in this statement:
> The Plasma edition of Mocaccino is huge, taking up 1.3GB (1,380MB) of memory just to sign into the desktop. This is, I'm finding, typical of Plasma 6 which is currently one of the heaviest desktops available for Linux. It really is a memory hog, taking twice as much RAM as Plasma 5.
I have both Plasma 5 and Plasma 6, and I could comprove today that Plasma 6 does not take twice as much ram as Plasma 5:
With Plasma 6, I have got these RAM usages at startup, today:
Void (1009 MiB)
Arch Linux (1077 MiB)
Mageia (1094 MiB)
openSUSE (1261 MiB)
Debian (1270 MiB)
Fedora (1365 MiB)
With Plasma 5, I have got, today:
PCLinuxOS (888 MiB)
MX Linux (1155 MiB)
Differences have much more to do with each OS, itself — as far as each distro enables different number (and types) of services. — So, in openSUSE Tumbleweed, I have Snapper and BtrFS maintenance services, for example, and in Debian and Fedora I have some other services enabled by these distro's defaults.
Within Void and Arch Linux, I have the minimal, due to their DIY-characterists. — PCLinuxOS Darkstar is a tiny version — and I have spent some time unbloating Mageia Cauldron.
Also, some distros install and enable the KDE-PIM suite — which automaticly start 17 Akonadi processes — while other distros do not.
In order to somehow "equalize" them, I use to remove / disable PIM, Filesearch and PackageKit (and Plasma Discover) from all my distros.
Another possible source of mistakes are different calculations of RAM usage. When Debian released its 12 Bookworm RC, many people found that it used twice as much RAM than previous Debian 11, but it was not real. — Just, the "free" command from "procps 4" calculates the RAM usage in a different way from the "free" command from "procps 3". Here are some notes on this:
https://byteria.blogspot.com/2020/10/conky-wrong-ram-memory-usage.html
The way I use to measure the RAM usage is absolutely the same for all my distros:
https://byteria.blogspot.com/2023/06/multi-booting-12-distros-linux.html
5 • @2 (by FledermausMann on 2025-03-17 03:00:20 GMT from Australia)
>>Regardless of the future of ARM and RISC-V, I hope x86 stays with us for many years to come
So you enjoy your broken Intel and AMD CPU's, full of vulnerabilities like Spectre/Meltdown which to this day, have not been fixed in hardware? You like CPU's which can be hijacked with their "management engines" and corrupted due to their speculative execution design flaws?
It's fine if you're ok with that. Got to be able to play games after all right?
But for security, RISC-V is the solution.
6 • RISC-V (by penguinx86 on 2025-03-17 03:32:29 GMT from United States)
No, I don't have any RISC-V devices. But pre-Y2K I worked as a sysadmin for a software company that wrote code for UNIX based RISC, MIPS and other systems. These were niche products that never really took off. To me as a sysadmin, UNIX was UNIX and it didn't seem to matter which architecture it was running on.
I think one of the big pushes for RISC-V is China. They are looking for alternatives to x86_64, amd64, ARM, armh processors to avoid possible sanctions. That makes sense from a business standpoing.
I thought of getting a RISC-V single board computer to play around with. But I'm retired not and I don't have the motivation or patients to deal with a an odball compuer project that may not work half the time. This is also why I hasitate to buy a Pinebook Pro laptop with an ARM processor. I spent over 35 years as a sysadmin fixing everybody elses problems. Now I'm retired and I'm getting too old for all that crap.
7 • @5 - I'm still in no hurry to replace x86 (by Andy Prough on 2025-03-17 05:05:29 GMT from Switzerland)
>"But for security, RISC-V is the solution."
I'm all in favor of RISC-V progressing and for us to eventually get some truly open hardware options. But right now, if RISC-V was truly "the solution", then I wouldn't be able to get any work done with the available devices. So that's a big problem.
>"So you enjoy your broken Intel and AMD CPU's, full of vulnerabilities like Spectre/Meltdown which to this day, have not been fixed in hardware?"
Turn off hyperthreading if you are so worried - you'll still be thousands of percent faster than any RISC-V device. And why aren't you using the mitigations that have been freely available to everyone for years now?
>"You like CPU's which can be hijacked with their "management engines"
I use Dasharo Coreboot - any management engine is turned off with the flip of a bit.
>"Got to be able to play games after all right?"
I'm not a gamer, but I do have to be able to get work done.
8 • MocaccinoOS (by Josh Smith on 2025-03-17 05:58:59 GMT from Australia)
I previously was a user of Sabayon and I liked the distribution itself, although I didn't get along with the developers. They always seemed grouchy in the IRC chat room even when I was being perfectly polite. It, therefore, doesn't surprise me at all that the successor to Sabayon only has 4 developers. It would be hard to attract developers when you attack people interested in your distro. But I will admit, Luet does sound intriguing as an approach to package management, and I would like to see it work out. I wish the team luck with realizing it, although it seems far from ready for widespread adoption at the time of this review.
9 • Ubuntu and UUTILS - change is coming (by dePes on 2025-03-17 08:11:14 GMT from Belgium)
The sudden switch to UUTILS has probably something to do with the licensing from GPL, to MIT. The GNU's core utilities use GPL, and UUTILS uses MIT.
The MIT license allows greater flexibility, that allows developers to use open-source components in proprietary projects.
This quick switch suggests that Ubuntu has new plans for their software and services. Good for business, less interesting for those who prefer freedom.
10 • KDE and RAM usage thanks (by BlueIV on 2025-03-17 09:56:51 GMT from United States)
@4 I just wanted to say thanks for all the Plasma memory usage stats you have, plus the additional information. It is appreciated.
11 • parts desert rant (by Clay Hansen on 2025-03-17 10:17:17 GMT from United States)
A food desert for you.? Too bad, wealth for me is more important.
Last October I had 5 computers fail to some malware transmitted by usb sneakernet.
Nothing that hides and tries to get passwords and accounts.
More of a multi-part LInux killer.
USB ports disabled, cannot boot from a live distro on a usb stick.
ls /usr/bin/ls
No such file or directory.
I blamed the helper files, but I have also seen pipe fail error messages.
I thought risc-V might be immune,
maybe I could buy a cheap risc-V board to get a working computer.
But Arrow Electronics only sells to other businesses.
Who wants to deal with the tax requirements of 50 different States.?
You would have to hire more accountants to handle the sales taxes.
Yes, I did buy a new Lenova, but it would not boot Linux, and
would not boot Windows since I do not allow internet in my basement.
So, here I am still trying to fix my computers 6 months later..
A partial recovery running from SSD sata drives.
12 • KDE and RAM usage (by frc_kde on 2025-03-17 10:19:21 GMT from Brazil)
@10 It's always nice to know that those notes were useful! Thank you!
13 • Plasma 5 vs 6 (by Jesse on 2025-03-17 11:17:54 GMT from Canada)
@4: > Maybe there is some mistake in this statement:
>> The Plasma edition of Mocaccino is huge, taking up 1.3GB (1,380MB) of memory just to sign into the desktop. This is, I'm finding, typical of Plasma 6 which is currently one of the heaviest desktops available for Linux. It really is a memory hog, taking twice as much RAM as Plasma 5.
No mistake. Plasma 6 is huge compared to Plasma 5 on every distro I have tried it on. So far Mocaccino probably has the smallest footprint for Plasma 6 at 1.3GB. The others have tyoically been 1.4GB to 1.6GB.
While running Plasma 5, typical RAM usage was in the range of 600MB to 800MB, half the size. This is consistent over dozens of distros over the span of nearly a decade.
14 • Plasma 6 vs Plasma 5 (by Corrado on 2025-03-17 11:55:42 GMT from Italy)
"The Plasma 6 edition of Mocaccino is huge, taking up 1.3GB (1,380MB) of memory just to sign into the desktop." I have calculated about 65% more than Plasma 5.
15 • Contributing to Open Source (by Slappy McGee on 2025-03-17 12:08:45 GMT from United States)
Some of us haven't the ability to go very far with coding. The autism spectrum has a lot of nasty turn-arounds in the brain, and even more distractions in the world. We do try, and many of us are blessed with dedicated, clever, and sincere assistance.
We want so very much to help with this great world of Linux.
The langue of coding seems like the language of reading and typing at times. At other times it seems like Martian Lizard People's hieroglyphics.
Code on the page/screen routinely disintegrates like slow motion fire works in the sky repeatedly.. so I start over later.. much later sometimes. :)
But we keep going. I get a warm feeling trying. But that phrase, "contributing to open source" means money to me, not coding. I go around to distros on the list and PayPal loot to them as often as I can. I try to be regular about that.
So, well I just wanted to add one more way to contribute to open source to Jesse's amazing list of suggestions in the Q&A section.
16 • Bohdi (by Geo. on 2025-03-17 12:43:11 GMT from Canada)
Always happy to see dev teams progressing forward in their projects. It can be difficult and uncelebrated work. But Bodhi holds a special place for me. During the lockdowns I had to resurrect an ancient laptop. I tried all the light distros. Some were too heavy to load and install, or the interface would have been un useable for other family members. But Bodhi not only loaded and installed cleanly and but was an easy transition for the Windows user. A shout out to the Bodhi team for your excellent work. Well done. 🙂
17 • Plasma 6 vs Plasma 5 (by tomas on 2025-03-17 13:23:04 GMT from Czechia)
I have just updated my Artix installation of Linux and get "strange" results.
After reboot the system consumes only 0.54 GiB of memory (according to system monitor).
Now, with Firefox running it is at 0.97 GiB.
@16 Have you tried Q4OS Trinity?
I have installed it on an old notebook with a 1-core 32-bit processor and it is the best distro I could make running on it.
18 • @17 (by tomas on 2025-03-17 13:26:19 GMT from Czechia)
Sorry, I forgot to say Artix is on Plasma 6.3.3 running on Wayland.
19 • Contributing with money (by Flavianoep on 2025-03-17 14:51:32 GMT from Brazil)
I have no programming skill and yet couldn't find the time to contribute with translations, which is a thing I could do. Therefore the more adequate way I found to contribute with free software is with money. I think I should pay for the software that helps me in the same way I would have to pay for commercial software. You know, it's free as in "free speech", not free as in "free beer".
20 • @17 • Plasma 6 vs Plasma 5 (by Wally on 2025-03-17 14:09:34 GMT from Australia)
@17, "consumes only 0.54 GiB of memory" I just downloaded the latest KDE Neon and after login System Monitor alone consumes around 170 MB out of 1.4 GB total. Lowest reading I get is with neofetch at 1.024 GB. With free it's 1.24 GB. Strange indeed.
21 • Plasma 6 vs 5 (by tomas on 2025-03-17 17:08:54 GMT from Czechia)
As already @4 said it seems that the memory consumed depends on distro, better said what services and apps run behind the scenes (that the devs make them default).
In @17 I wanted to add that the values are achieved without any system tweaking, but then realized it is not so. I have always hated the visual effects of windows behavior, so I disabled them, also taking into account that my PC is not new and so it makes the system snappier.
I do not know how much memory is made free by this, maybe someone can tell, but I wonder why the devs insist on having some of the effects on when otherwise they could boast with the snappiness of their system.
To Wally on @20: I find rather strange the 1.4 GB of Neon (evidently the devs do not care about it).
My Arch based distro (ex-Antergos) runs on 0.58 GiB (0.53 with custom kernel), now with 1.2 GiB when Firefox is running. (It is Plasma 6.3.3 on X11.)
22 • Gentoo, hey? (by Kevin on 2025-03-17 19:00:03 GMT from New Zealand)
Just this week, I found the key to a problem I was having - on a Gentoo wiki. So I am happy they are around. Must be one of the earliest Linux distros on the block.
Regarding contributing back (question of the week), I have found that your advice to help yourself works. After a while you end up having a solution or two when others ask. And you never stop learning! I just recently found a way to search inside certain files, that also showed me some new-to-me methods in bash shell scripting.
23 • Moccacino OS (by sephiroth7818 on 2025-03-17 19:01:54 GMT from United States)
The Moccacino OS forums on their github, get good responses to issues you have with the distro. Moccacino is a great distro. It needs some polish though. But they're doing great work.
24 • Plasma 5 vs. Plasma 6 (by frc_kde on 2025-03-17 21:58:35 GMT from Brazil)
@13
> others have typically been 1.4GB to 1.6GB.
> While running Plasma 5, typical RAM usage was in the range of 600MB to 800MB, half the size.
Yes! I still remember when Kubuntu seemed to start up using just 400 MiB RAM, back in 2016! — But since 2014 Linux Torvalds had already subscribed another way to measure RAM usage:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/34e431b0ae398fc54ea69ff85ec700722c9da773
From 2020 to day, most of the tools have already moved to this "new calc". Even KDE moved from its old "KSysguard" to its new "Plasma-SystemMonitor".
An exception is "htop", which still presents smaller numbers than "free / top", "inxi", Conky, Fastfetch and other main tools.
So, it is not possible to compare old numbers (or, "htop" numbers) with the numbers from tools in up-to-date versions.
Well, I have not seen RAM usage increase in my distros, as they moved from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6.
Arch Linux, for example:
2022-06-13 --> 951 MiB --> Plasma 5.24.5
2023-06-11 --> 1085 MiB --> Plasma 5.27.5
2023-12-27 --> 1147 MiB --> Plasma 5.27.1
2024-03-11 --> 1094 MiB --> Plasma 6.0.1
2024-11-17 --> 1193 MiB --> Plasma 6.2.3
2025-03-16 --> 1077 MiB --> Plasma 6.3.3
25 • @11 (by FledermausMann on 2025-03-17 22:26:13 GMT from Australia)
>>But Arrow Electronics only sells to other businesses.
Who wants to deal with the tax requirements of 50 different States.?
You would have to hire more accountants to handle the sales taxes.
You can buy RISC-V systems from many places. The easiest and most obvious vendor is Amazon. Buy direct from RISC-V vendors websites. So many options exist. Why are you only using Arrow?
>>Yes, I did buy a new Lenova, but it would not boot Linux, and
would not boot Windows since I do not allow internet in my basement. So, here I am still trying to fix my computers 6 months later..
A partial recovery running from SSD sata drives.
Why did you buy a new laptop? Why not bring it to an IT support service for repair?
At this time, every computer is still able to boot any OS as long as your BIOS settings are correctly configured for booting said OS.
Sounds like you don't know what you are doing. I strongly suggest you seek some professional IT support assistance for your issue.
If your SSD is infected, even if you can get your new laptop running, you would just reinfect your new install while trying to recover data.
If I misunderstood, provide more information in a reply.
26 • RISC-V (by lincoln on 2025-03-17 23:01:55 GMT from Brazil)
Today, the great Achilles' heel for the RISC-V architecture lies in performance, but we already have good examples of the architecture's potential, such as:
- "Lichee Cluster 4A (LC4A) is a high-performance RISC-V cluster computing platform [...]. A single Lichee Cluster 4A can be equipped with up to 7 LM4A core boards. Each LM4A core board contains an NPU with 4TOPS@int8 AI computing power. A single core board supports up to 16GB LPDDR4X memory and 128G eMMC storage." ( https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/th1520/lc4a/lc4a.html )
- "XiangShan - Highest performing open-source processor series" ( https://tutorial.xiangshan.cc/hpca25/ )
- RISC-V vector extension
27 • Bodhi Linux (by gnikyt on 2025-03-18 19:45:55 GMT from Canada)
Havent used Enlightenment in probably 20 years now. I used to love it. Anyone using it these days?
28 • Enlightenment (by Devlin7 on 2025-03-18 22:02:49 GMT from New Zealand)
@27 - Enlightenment is my preferred DE/WM. It is incredibly light and fast. I admit that the default install is ugly as sin. The great thing is that is easily configurable and I can make it look like almost any other DE. I run mine in Tiling mode, t I can configure it using a GUI and I don't have to edit text files for key bindings or behaviour. Memory wise it is lighter than most WMs after you have added menus, notifications and other useful features. It is also portable. Install enlightenment on a new machines, copy two folders and it looks like it did before. The downside is that a lot of distros don't have it in their repos and if you don't want systemd your pickings are few. Just love enlightenment!
29 • Appimage/Flatpak/Snaps (by FledermausMann on 2025-03-19 00:19:13 GMT from Australia)
This is the best thing about Appimages/Flatpak/Snap packages on Linux:
An easy way to deploy any piece of software (benevolent, malicious, useful, useless, trojan horse, malware, spyware) to the uninformed users as efficiently as on Windows now exist thanks to these package formats.
Anybody can download any Appimage/Flatpak/Snap package make it executable and run it. However, these packages are rarely, if never checked for malicious code and although they do come with warnings for the user, the warnings purpose is supposed to do what exactly? Dissuade them from using it?
One takeaway is that deploying malware/spyware on Linux machines has now become as trivial as it has always been on Windows machines.
Cases of people having their crypto wallets drained for example by fake wallets on Snap have already happened.
I am wondering whether this "evolution" of package management solutions is indeed a step back for Linux, not a step forward as so many people believe.
Thoughts? Comments?
30 • Moccachino (by Joseph on 2025-03-19 00:28:39 GMT from United States)
Sabayon was part of my first attempt to convert to Linux full-time and almost drove me back to Windows. :-) They tried to do so much with so few and so little testing....
The creator of Sabayon loved to write package managers for some reason and Sabayon went through a few of them. All of them had ugly, unintuitive interfaces, little in the way of instruction, were slow as sin and often wanted to update half the OS just to install a single package. It sounds like not much has changed. I remember a blog post back in the day warned that the package manager of the moment would give different results *depending on the order in which you listed the packages to be installed on the command line*! The blog said that "This shouldn't matter, but it does". :-)
One time an update made it impossible to log into the KDE desktop. I had another system I could access to get to their forum and their solution was the usual list of 13 command line instructions to fix it. I asked why they didn't just roll back the bad update and there was lots of head-scratching. Someone pointed out that many people would not have access to a second system to get to the webpage and learn about the fix. I also learned that all their software was compiled automatically and pushed out to a "dev" or "testing" repo and if they didn't hear about errors "in a few days" they just shoved it out to everyone else. I don't think they had any idea if anyone was using the test repo or if anyone had tested any particular package pushed out to it.
I thought this was madness and largely at my insistence with some others joining in they created another repo that was behind the main repo by a few days so people could roll back to it if an update screwed up their system.
I was also encountering a situation where memory pressure would cause the system to keel over and die. Worse, they allowed you to use the JFS file system and I foolishly did based on outdated information I'd read elsewhere. JFS was a journaling file system but it did not checksum the journal. This meant that when the system crashed all the data might be fine but the journal instructions might get corrupted. On reboot JFS would dutifully try to execute the corrupted instructions, destroying the data. :-(
Everyone at Sabayon insisted that the cause of my problem had to be bad memory on my PC, even though testing suggested it was fine. I installed OpenSUSE and the crash at high memory usage immediately stopped. Combined with not letting me make the mistake of using JFS and the Linux world's most advanced and customizable installer and the power of the YaST config tool, I left Sabayon for Opensuse after a few months of hair-pulling and never looked back in almost 15 years (and am now using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
The one cool thing about early Sabayon was that the live ISO took so ridiculously long to boot that it actually played a song during the boot process (Pornophonique's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)! I remember building a new PC after a motherboard died and when I thought I finally had everything together I popped the Sabayon ISO from my desk into the drive and fired it up. Eventually the electric guitar intro of the song started blaring out of my speakers and I cheered! :-) The custom artwork and colors of the Sabayon of that era was also some of the best I've seen. Weirdly and sadly, the Sabayon people themselves never saved any images from that era and I've been unable to find one archived anywhere.
31 • RISC-V (by Justin on 2025-03-19 14:24:31 GMT from United States)
I'm on the "needs better performance" bandwagon. Power efficiency is great but sometimes you need performance. A free i486 would give me great price to performance (it was free) but I can't realistically replace a modern system with it.
Starting with embedded makes sense in that less performance is required, and adopters take on less risk trying it out (they spend less money). However, at some point you have to scale up. Raspberry Pi's are running into that problem where it was a cool $35 tinker board, but if I'm going to spend $200 to get a "almost desktop-equivalent," at that price point there are so many options that RPi's often aren't worth it.
32 • @30 (by bob on 2025-03-19 16:54:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
Fond memories of just how crazy Sabayon was as a distro. I confirm everything Joseph in post 30 said. Despite working terribly, it did have a coolness to it.
33 • Risc-V and MocaccinOS... (by rhtoras on 2025-03-19 18:21:32 GMT from Greece)
I want the monopoly of X_86 architecture to break. I like freedom which is not offered from Intel and Amd... So Risc-V could be an option to what i am looking for. It is not ready yet or even usable but i am looking forward for a machine compatible with this architecture. Operating systems i am using are mainly Void linux and openbsd. I am glad openbsd offers a Risc-V option. Also there are some attempts in the void-packages repository although not sure if they work or how. I guess they are experimental ? Anyways, real nosystemD has the options and it's a shame tribblix does not offer a risc-V option too.
p.s i dont't get what's so special on MocaccinOS. Nice review Jesse but to me it is just a gentoo with different package manager, similar to redcore linux i suppose but maybe with immutability in mind.
34 • Enlightenment (by rhtoras on 2025-03-19 19:26:45 GMT from Greece)
@28 Devuan, Artix, Void, PclinuxOs, Slitaz and Parabola offer enlightenment. It is also available on freebsd, netbsd, midnightbsd, Open Indiana and Tribblix. It is also offered on Gentoo and MX but they are not hardcore nosystemD options. It also works on Antix if you modify repos and exists on slackware via slackbuilds which i am not familiar with to speak on. So it is offered on nosystemD systems. However i am not 100% sure if i can recommend it. I mean it does not depend on systemD (although some of it's dev's use systemD distros) but in most cases it seems an outdated port is offered on various repositories. And in the end of the day although it is called a wm it looks more like one on steroids. Maybe a desktop environment suits better. If you ask me i prefer Lumina with it's flaws but that's just me.
35 • @33 (by FledermausMann on 2025-03-19 22:21:07 GMT from Australia)
>>It is not ready yet or even usable
Usable can mean a lot. There are plenty of RISC-V solutions, SBC's like from Milk-V (Mars/Jupiter) which are usable for everyday computing tasks like browsing, media playback, coding etc. So, usable for most daily things. Obviously not as fast as some ARM boards, but good enough. Really, the amount of time the CPU is sitting idle and doing very little is a lot for most people. You don't need a Corei7 to browse the web or code Python.
However there is the SPACEMIT K1/M1, Octa-core X60™(RV64GCVB) which can process 2.0TOPS and the board can come with 16GB Ram, so perhaps this a more powerful RISC-V platform.
Now these solutions are not usable for gaming or running LLM's locally. I am sure that will come in the next few years.
But for almost everything else I would say yes, you can buy a RISC-V SBC and use it for everyday computing tasks.
>>openbsd offers a Risc-V option. Also there are some attempts in the void-packages repository although not sure if they work or how.
Armbian offers support for RISC-V boards
On the channel ExplainingComputers, there is a good review of some RISC-V boards if you're interested.
36 • Risc-V (by rhtoras on 2025-03-19 22:59:34 GMT from Greece)
@35 you seem to know Risc-V quite well. You know better than me for sure tbh. I surf the web, watching tutorials, coding and editring images and even stream radio, That's what i am doing. I have seen the video from explaining computers. I was not convinced. Some boards if i remember correctly were too weak to do all these tasks. Others were expensive. Any suggestions ? A pc witrh Risc-V you recommend to do my daily tasks ? Btw internet these days is way too heavy so at least 8 gb is recommended.
p.s Armbian is not an option. It relies on systemD. I'll stick with openbsd which is lighter and safer unless one day someone can audit systemD and prove me it is not bloat, buggy and unsafe.
37 • @36 (by FledermausMann on 2025-03-19 23:47:32 GMT from Australia)
I try to keep up with what's coming out, but not that well versed with RISC-V development.
No suggestions really, just that the last board reviewed by EC was the Milk-V Jupiter, powered by the Spacemit K1/M1 SoC, and that the results were usable. You can get that board with 16GB Ram, so it should be enough.
But yes, for anything intensive or multitasking I don't think it would be that good of an experience.
As for Linux support without systemD, well, that's a whole other can of worms. Who knows if and when that will happen from VOID or Devuan etc.
Gentoo is supporting RISC-V and is systemd-free. Find more info on the Gentoo Wiki
38 • Enlightenment (by GreginNC on 2025-03-20 01:16:53 GMT from United States)
(@34) Strike PClinux from that list. I just abandoned their distro after over 15 years because of this. First they passively aggressively removed the Enlightenment forum and when the maintainer of the community release asked why he got a smart answer. Then after an update Enlightenment was broken and when I asked for help also got a dismissive and smart reply. So no Pclinux does not support Enlightenment and as will only use rolling distros I had to settle for Trinity.
39 • @36 (by GT on 2025-03-21 14:41:34 GMT from United States)
"I'll stick with openbsd which is lighter and safer unless one day someone can audit systemD and prove me it is not bloat, buggy and unsafe."
Philosophically speaking, it is not possible to prove the absence of something. Pratically speaking, all of the major distros (Red Hat, SUSE, Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have been using systemd by default for years and have not suffered from it. In the case of Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE, corporations rely on their software to operate their enterprises, and no collapse of IT departments worldwide due to systemd being buggy, bloated, and unsafe has occurred. The proof is in the pudding.
No one is going to audit open source software for someone else unless they are paid to do it, and convincing those who oppose systemd for philosophical reasons instead of technical ones will never be convinced by any audit, no matter its findings, so there really is no point in that sort of undertaking.
It has been a proven fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed JFK ever since the three independent investigations concluded shortly after the event. The FBI, local law enforcement, and Congress all came to the identical conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Despite all of the related government documents being released in recent time and "the proof of a cover up" not existing in those documents, those who believe that the Russians, CIA, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, and the mafia were all somehow involved will never be swayed. Beliefs are much harder to change than ideas.
40 • systemD (by rhtoras on 2025-03-21 20:18:02 GMT from Greece)
I disagree with everything you wrote. Excluding the JFK thing which i don't care and is beyond the scope of my comment.
"Pratically speaking, all of the major distros (Red Hat, SUSE, Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have been using systemd by default for years and have not suffered from it"
This never happened. Because #1 there major distros that do not use systemD and never had issues. The oldest one being slackware while Alpine is another one example. Never had issues with openrc while systemD coukd not work with musl. Also Debian was sliced because of this thing. Bruce Perens the #2 debian lead dev said Devuan is better engineered. Snaps relying on systemD is a major headache on Ubuntu systems. Don't tou know it ?
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=systemd Here i see a lot vulnerabilities not to mention the lroblemd caused in the lzma vulnerability which affected only rolling distributions using systemD. There is also an article called:"the real motivation behind systemD" you can read it. Just search in you favourite search engine. Also if we are going to speak technically YES i can do it. I know what i am talking about and i have listened to the opposite opinions. I am just not convinced. And NO we are not
conspiracy theorists we are open source enthusiasts. And when the source is open people should have access in every byte of it.
Then again i was not talking about systemD but for risc-V isos. This was my criticism kn something that hold linux back.
Number of Comments: 40
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