If not solus, what distro would you be using

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

I find myself in the same spot. I need to run Microsoft Edge on the laptop I use at the railroad, and it has become clear to me that Microsoft is not going to develop either a Snap or a Flatpak version any time soon.

I am temporarily using Zorin 16 Lite (XFCE) and it is working fine, but I'm looking at Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu (LXQT), Ubuntu MATE, and Xbuntu (XFCE) for a longer-term solution after 22.04 is released, because Zorin 16 is based on 20.04 LTS and will not move to 22.04 LTS until the summer of 2023.

The laptop is low-spec (AMD A6/R4, 4GB, 32GB) but ran Solus Budgie acceptably. I suspect, given Ubuntu's general sluggishness, that I'll not be able to run Ubuntu Budgie comfortably on that laptop.

A side note: Ubuntu Budgie lists 60GB hard drive space as recommended. I asked about that, and got this response from fossfreedom (one of the team members of both UB and BuddiesOfBudgie): "Most distros quote out of the box requirements. This isn't realistic. When folk use a desktop, lets say for 2 or more years, all sorts of apps are installed together with lots of data accumulated. 60GB is a fair figure in a realistic real world calculation." An interesting observation on his part, although I comfortably run Linux under 30GB except on my primary Solus desktop, where Gnome Boxes distro images eat up 197GB.

Brucehankins I'm a huge fan of Lubuntu. It works wonderfully and it's very light on resources.

I think so, too, although the desktop is a different motif and is taking some time for me to work with comfortably. As I understand it, 20.04 is LXDE, 21.10 transitional, and full LXQT implementation coming with 22.04. I think that I'll focus on Lubuntu 21.10, building several instances in Gnome Boxes with different adds/removes, testing and probing until I get it right. That way I'll be ready to cut over to 20.04 in May with minimal fuss.

Brucehankins It can get a bit heavier if you start adding Plasma bits and bobs, or switch to a wm like kwin, but out of the box it's not bad so those are more for aesthetics.

I'll be using the laptop 3-4 hours a week, and only at the railroad, so I'm going to add Microsoft Edge, remove Firefox/Trojita, LibreOffice Draw/Impress, and other unneeded items, but otherwise run out-of-the-box. I want to stay as light as reasonably possible, given the laptop's specs and I'm content with basic.

WetGeek I've had great luck with the "refurbished" computers I've bought on Amazon.

I use Optiplex and Latitude, and, like you, I buy refurbished and have had good experience.

In my case, I buy then-current 7000-series models sold by Dell as "certified refurbished". The computers come with a standard Dell business Optiplex/Latitude 3-year next-day on-site repair warranty. All are computers were returned by enterprise customers, some needing component repair and others just returned for whatever reason.

When I decide is it time for a refresh, I pick out the model I want from the Dell retail site, and then keep my eyes open at the Dell Outlet until the exact model I want comes along. Usually that happens within a month. I typically pay about half what Dell is selling them for retail. The reason I buy refurbished is that I can get a decent new business computer without busting the bank, and because I got the computer at about half price I don't feel guilty refreshing every 2-3 processor generations.

The $129 Inspiron 3180's (I bought two) were "throwaways", bought specifically for use at the railroad. The first died when the keyboard got sprayed with hydraulic fluid, and the other one died with a pop this morning, presumably of natural causes.

I bought a slightly better A9/R5/4GB/64GB Inspiron 3180 about a year after I bought the "throwaways". It was 2018's "get 'em in the door" special and I picked it up for $149. I bought it to play Red Alert 2 The Aftermath. It is the only computer I have at this point that will handle Red Alert 2's oddball graphics (I've never gotten Red Alert 2 running on Intel graphics), so I'll be careful with it if I take it to the railroad. I might use the Latitude 7390 (2018) I just replaced with a Latitude 7520 up there instead. The 7390 was more expensive than the 3180 by a factor of ten, but the 3180 is priceless.

I think that it is fun to learn about each other's buying habits and preferences. The more I learn, the more I discover that we are all a bit, uh, odd.

Dinimixis_DEMZ TROMjaro.

"This is a trade-free project"

Huh, never heard of that movement before. In that case I guess Solus is also trade-free, since it doesn't collect money or data from users either (except voluntary donations).

edit: holy moly, they have a 1144 page comic to explain the concept
https://www.tromsite.com/books/#flipbook-df_6562/1

Staudey holy moly, they have a 1144 page comic to explain the concept

It was probably written by a lawyer, LOL.

I think I will test MassOS. Do you know it ?