If not solus, what distro would you be using

WetGeek

joluveba Budgie is in their repo.

I'll download that second file and give it a try. If it had said anything about offering a GUI, I would have started with that.

The description of 2.2.i Minimal includes: "you can install it and install the desktop you want", so that's what I was trying to figure out. I installed budgie-deskop using pisi, but could find no way to use it.

Since I use Plasma on Solus, that DE will work fine for further exploration. Thanks again!

WetGeek

joluveba I downloaded the second one, 2.2 Beta. It comes with KDE Plasma.

There were a few non-obvious hoops to jump through, but all my guesses turned out to be correct, and I got Pisi running with Plasma in a new VM. The toughest hoop was discovering that the YALI installer is listed in "Favorites," and I needed to find that and run it. There's no icon or link saying "Install" as there is in other live ISOs I've used.

Once I figured that out, it was easy from there. The installer is very straight-forward, and seemed very much like Solus' installer. Hmmm ... I'll bet they're related, or both are descendants of the same ancestor installer. 😁

In order to install VirtualBox's Linux Guest Additions, I needed to run Dolphin as root from the terminal. And if anyone else needs to do that, be aware that the application name is simply "dolphin".

Now I can use it full-screen, and get on with some serious configuration. This has been a very pleasant adventure so far.

WetGeek

WetGeek This has been a very pleasant adventure so far.

If anyone has been following this thread with interest, I'll mention a few first impressions. A lot of other distros have been described as "like Solus, or "similar to Solus," but none that I've tried actually were. A close contender was Gecko, I guess, based on openSUSE. I created a VM to explore Gecko, but I couldn't get much to work for me. Dunno if it just hates to run on VMs or it just isn't ready for prime time yet.

Pisi (Turkish for "cat") however, although it's a beta at this time, seems more like an RC to me. And so far, it seems to provide a very good implementation of KDE Plasma. If you go to the Download section of the Pisi web site,be sure to download the second .ISO file (v2.2). The first one is, as it says, a "minimal" version. I.e., no desktop despite appearing to be newer (v2.2.1).

The Pisi .ISO creates a live version of the distro when it's executed. Once it's started, F2 will allow you to change the language from the default (Turkish) to whatever works better for you. And in order to install it, look for the YALI installer in the ISO's "Favorites" menu.

If you install this on a VirtualBox VM as I did, in order to load the Linux Guest Additions so you can take it full-screen, you'll need to start a terminal and load Dolphin with elevated credentials. The application name is just "dolphin," so the command is sudo dolphin. Once it's up, you can locate the .run script to load the Linux modules. Run that, then reboot, and now Host + F will make the VM full-screen.

Everything I've seen so far confirms that eopkg and pisi (the Pisi package manager) are very closely related. From a command line, every eopkg command I've tried with pisi has worked just fine. I just ran the command sudo pisi up, and got 566 package upgrades. The whole process looked exactly like an eopkg update.

I posted the sizes of my VMs recently, so I checked to see how Pisi compares. In fact, it's not tiny. The amount of space it's currently using of its 32GB dynamic virtual disk is 11.57GB, almost twice the size of the Solus Plasma VM. In fact, it's just slightly bigger than my Windows 10 Pro VM! Keep in mind, though, that if this is really still a beta version, it will probably get much smaller in a release build.

IN SUMMARY
For those who like to explore interesting distros, Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

WetGeek

WetGeek Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at

FOLLOWUP
While in the KDE session, you can load the Budgie DE with this command: sudo pisi it budgie-desktop. Then reboot, and Budgie will show up together with KDE Plasma as an option on the login screen.

Unfurtunately I wasn't able to actually try Budgie on Pisi, because every attempt to log on to a Budgie session failed. That's the first beta-like problem I've seen so far from this beta OS. Hopefully it'll be fixed before long. Maybe in time for Budgie 10.6.

EDIT: Unlike openSUSE and Gecko, Pisi DOES have Vivaldi available for installation. The pisi command is just sudo pisi it vivaldi-browser.

WetGeek

WetGeek Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

In fact, I'm logged on from Vivaldi on Pisi right now. There were just a couple of beta-type bugs that I reported to the Github bug tracker.

I was able to modify /etc/fstab to include my NAS shares, and modify /mnt to provide their mount points, but unable to actually mount them. Neither nfs-utils nor nfs-common were in the repository. A search showed that libnfs was there, but after I installed that and rebooted, i still could not mount those shares, despite the description from pisi info nfs that said that libnfs would allow mounting nfs shares.

And despite setting Vivaldi as the default browser, Pisi still used Firefox by default. I needed to add the Lastpass extension to Firefox in order to log on to my account at Github to post the bugs.

Hopefully those will be fixed in the beta.

WetGeek

WetGeek For those who like to explore interesting distros, Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

My Pisi adventure was fun for a while, but unfortunately, it seems that no one is seriously working on making it viable. I reported some beta issues I'd found, and every time I checked back, my reports were still the top three in the list. And the number of issues had not changed.

I tried to join the Pisi forum, and provided all relevant info, after which I was told to look for an email with a link I should click in order to "activate" my membership. (Typical email verification.) By the nextday that email hadn't arrived, so I added another report noting what happened, and letting them know that if that process was automated, it was apparently broken. I actually got a response a couple of days later thanking me for the report, and telling me that their "web team" was working on it. But as of today, the email still hasn't arrived.

As I said, it was fun for a while, and I thought that Pisi ("cat" in Turkish) looked like it had a lot of potential, especially as a distro supporting Budgie, but it seems to be virtually abandoned. Such a shame. But since I'd encouraged others to take a look at it, I thought I should follow up with a retraction. Probably not worth your time.

WetGeek

WetGeek For those who like to explore interesting distros, Pisi is certainly one you'd enjoy taking a look at.

Just a followup ...

A couple days ago I got a couple of emails telling me that the Pisi bugs I'd reported there had been resolved. I figured it was worth another look, so I downloaded a new .ISO file and created a new Pisi VM. Or, I should say, I tried to.

After selecting US English as my working language (their default is Turkish, of course), I noticed that the installer has been improved significantly. At the end, though, I couldn't actually launch the VM. It just booted to a CLI login. And after logging on and running startx, the screen became trash.

I always offer a second chance, so I reinstalled the new Pisi .ISO file and tried again. I left that .ISO in place as I rebooted at the end of installation, planning to let the installer start again before I tried to reboot and launch Pisi. That's sometimes worked with other VM installations, but not this time. Pisi simply doesn't start with a GUI that works.

That's the end of my interest in Pisi for now. Maybe I'll try again in a few months. Surely this kind of persormance won't escape the team's attention.

Staudey

joluveba (it's in English, despite the Spanish url):

https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/solusos-2-podria-abandonar-debian-y-volverse-una-distro-madre-basada-en-pisi/

Well, it's at least similar to English 😃

Apparently, Ikey is starting to get fed up with developing his distro on Debian due to the work involved in its maintenance, especially in the patched and cleaning packages GNOME3 who break into repositories and threaten to break the desktop of SolusOS, for what you have considered stop developing SolusOS 2 (currently in alpha 5 stage) on top of Debian to rebuild it from scratch, with its own independent repositories, and using the package management system of Pardus, PiSi (what does it mean Packages Installed Successfully as Intended).

brent

Staudey great article. I am looking forward to lispysnake. But that shatters a myth I was led to believe: lispysnake 100% from scratch like bascially Solus. Or is Ikey's teams' reliance on Debian just for the building and writing process of LS?

Staudey

brent That is a very old article about happenings in Solus' past, not about anything currently going on.
Serpent OS (not Lispy Snake, that is his game company) is indeed made from scratch and not based on any other distro / package manager.

brent

Staudey Ack, didn't notice date.

WetGeek

brent Ack, didn't notice date.

Ack, ack, ack, ack. Reminds me of an alien from a movie i watched. Can't remember the name.

brent

WetGeek "All your base are belong to us. Ack."

murbert

WetGeek

brent

Yeah, what that "Alien Attack," or something like that? I remember there was a sequel, too.

brent

WetGeek Whenever I hear Ack and alien in the same sentence there is only one Alien I think of: Dick Solomon.

It's very likely we are on the wrong thread again.....🙂

elfprince

WetGeek This possibly could be a one person project, or a very small team? Juggling work, life and the project can be challenging.

WetGeek

elfprince This possibly could be a one person project

Yes. And I understand and appreciate that. And maybe I'll check back with them in another year or so. (It only takes me 4 or 5 minutes to create a VM.)

But after encouraging others to take a look at Pisi, I wanted to make it clear that this probably isn't a good time to do that, after all. Their experience would almost certainly be the same as mine.

tilaran

WetGeek
Problem with virtual machines(and girlfriends) is the equipment isn't real.
Put that distro on a disk and "uh oh"...may show up before you ever get the thing installed.
I looked at the calendar today. 2022.
SSD's are beer cheap and you can cut and remove partitions as often as you like with no issues.
These tuberz.."Oh this distro is great ! "
Yeah. On a VB.
A poor unknowing soul (Billy boy W10)has to find out real hard that 180 out of 200 on distrowatch are nothing but garbage

WetGeek

tilaran Problem with virtual machines(and girlfriends) is the equipment isn't real.

I'm not sure what your problems are, but I'm thankful that they're not mine. My programs on VirtualBox VMs perform just a tiny bit slower than on my i7 laptop host itself (a TINY bit), and they display on its full HD screen exactly as the host machine does. I'm replying to you from my Budgie VM now, and I can't tell the difference. At human speeds, there simply is no perceivable difference.

I'm sure the performance difference would be more noticeable to a compression utility, or a compiler, but not to a forum, an email client, or a word processor, or most of the other applications I use a computer for. Thankfully, I have hardware machines for those purposes.

Your message sounds like you've never actually used VMs, but have a strong opinion about them, regardless.

elfprince

WetGeek Perhaps he alluded to the potential problem of a distro not running on hardware installation, but ok on VB?

WetGeek

elfprince Perhaps he alluded to the potential problem of a distro not running on hardware installation, but ok on VB?

Seems unlikely, but not impossible. Perhaps he'll clarify that for us. If that really is his problem, maybe he should just make his hardware a VM host, and create VMs for his daily use?

tomscharbach

elfprince Perhaps he alluded to the potential problem of a distro not running on hardware installation, but ok on VB?

I suspect so. The problem with virtual machines (and I currently have 11 available in Gnome Boxes, Zorin 16 Core permanent and the others referential/experimental temporary) is that virtual machines frequently mask hardware issues.

Brucehankins

WetGeek I've had many issues with Fedora. Runs great in my VMs, but won't run at all or runs like garbage on metal with my hardware. I haven't tried Silverblue or some of the community spins, but I also don't really have any desire to.

I've recently got my oldest son on MX Linux XFCE, which he seems to enjoy. Main reason was some of the software he needs is only available for Debian/apt and I want him to learn Linux before trying to compile from source first. Looks like a very nice distro though from what I've seen.

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