Distro Reviews

tomscharbach

WetGeek You might need to consider a bigger flash drive in order to get reasonable performance. I did. But I still would like a distro that will install without a lot of default applications that I don't want or need.

Keep what you need and take out the rest. I'd experiment in a VM though, to get it right. Linux dependencies can be tricky and you might end up having to keep something you don't want to keep the dependencies you need for other things. I run into that once in a while.

WetGeek

tomscharbach Keep what you need and take out the rest.

Yep. Solus makes that easy to do safely with their eopkg rmo option. I'm not sure if the same service exists in, say, Aquamarine, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me.

It's also occurred to me that with a bigger flash drive than needed, it might make sense to create a 32GB partition to install the OS in, and partition the rest of it for a data partition that could be mounted in the OS as needed.

Or create 4 32GB partitions and install four distros on it? So many possibilities! I don't think I'll get bored again for days. And although flash drives don't last forever, the better ones do pretty well these days. If one scheme doesn't turn out to be interesting, it can be re-used to try different schemes.

kuki

I have tried many distros and i think that distro doesnt matter, but my choice of favorits is Mint, Pop, Endeaovur and Solus. Pop is great, I have Optimus laptop with nvidia and that is only distro that i have managed to run nvidia(hybrid), gnome and wayland together with out any issue and tinkering.I have to say first distro what I like most is linux Mint its is so stable and good and I think its only distro that you can run all with gui, so close to Win in good way.

murbert

WetGeek What would be your best guess for the fastest Linux distro I could put on a 400 Mbps flash drive?

I bought a UGreen NVME drive enclosure and a cheap 500GB NVME drive for portable OS installation and storage. I think it's rated around 500MB/s. I partitioned 350GB for storage in exfat and installed Solus on the remainder of the drive. I am typing this from Solus using the portable drive connected to my wife's little Windows laptop via USB C 3.whatever. It is fast enough. I do not pine for the speed of my own laptop. If the little drive you bought gives anything like the stated performance don't bother looking for a small distro that'll be fast enough. Go straight to your standard Solus configuration, that should suffice.

WetGeek

murbert I bought a UGreen NVME drive enclosure and a cheap 500GB NVME drive for portable OS installation

Interesting. I happen to have an SSK NVMe enclosure that suports USB 3.1 and USB C. I've removed the NVMe Windows drives from her last couple of laptops and saved them, just in case we'd ever want to make them Windows machines again. We never have, so those drives became strictly surplus.

I put a 128GB NVMe in that SSK enclosure, and so far I've only formatted it as a data drive and not used it for anything yet. It's bigger than a flash drive, and came with two short cords to connect it to a USB 3 or USB C port. It could be carried around in a pocket, but the metal enclosure and cord is a lot heavier bulkier than a plastic flash drive.

So, I'm still fascinated by the idea of a working OS on a tiny flash drive. Maybe that idea will turn out to be less than practical, and I might fall back on that NVMe as an alternative. Thanks for reminding me of that!

murbert

murbert If the little drive you bought gives anything like the stated performance don't bother looking for a small distro that'll be fast enough

Of course, this is a thread about trying new OSes, so maybe go ahead and look. 😆

murbert

WetGeek It's bigger than a flash drive, and came with two short cords to connect it to a USB 3 or USB C port. It could be carried around in a pocket, but the metal enclosure and cord is a lot heavier bulkier than a plastic flash drive.

So, I'm still fascinated by the idea of a working OS on a tiny flash drive.

Indeed, a flash drive OS is what I would consider to be the best option. I might have to buy one of the thumb drives you pointed out earlier as I had no idea they were so fast for so little money these days.
edit for clarity

tomscharbach

WetGeek I happen to have an SSK NVMe enclosure that suports USB 3.1 and USB C. ... I'm still fascinated by the idea of a working OS on a tiny flash drive. Maybe that idea will turn out to be less than practical, and I might fall back on that NVMe as an alternative.

Either way, keep in mind that you are setting up a dual-drive, dual-boot (or maybe multi-drive, multi-boot) and you are going to have to pay attention to what you are doing when you set up the external drive lest you tangle the bootloaders. I do my usual ID-10-T avoidance routine, and install on the USB with all other drives unplugged.

I use Windows on my laptops, but I have a Solus install on an external 64 GB USB 3 "thumbnail" drive.

It isn't quick (200 mbs) and like all "thumbnails" it runs too hot for my taste, but it works when I need it. I keep it in my laptop travel case, and update it every month or so.

I've also used a spare NVMe M.2 drive in a case for that purpose, but it was clumsy for a laptop, so I don't do that any more.

brent

tomscharbach WetGeek
what's missing from this great conversation is the fact there are no usbs born to be hard drive operating systems. there are distros like Zephix born to be on a USB, but there is no inverse to this. Truth still remains an operating system on a USB is stll a finite, short-term thing. That's the nature of a tiny piece of plastic with a little micro soldering on it.

murbert

tomscharbach I keep it in my laptop case, and update it every month or so.

This was my stumbling block, updates take so long.
edit to add: I think a very stable point release is the way to go with a thumb drive, less updates

tomscharbach

murbert I think a very stable point release is the way to go with a thumb drive, less updates

It get you. It hasn't been a big deal for me because I don't update it often. When I do, I just stick it into one of the desktops, boot it, sudo eopkg up and do something else on the other desktop until it wheezes to the finish line.

tomscharbach

murbert I think a very stable point release is the way to go with a thumb drive, less updates.

I was thinking about the stable versus rolling update difference the other day, wondering if there is a significant difference in the number of files updated over the course of a year.

The only stable point release I'm running right now is Zorin 16 (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS), and it updates frequently, just as Solus does. The kernel, of course, doesn't migrate, but between security updates, application updates (browsers et al) and so on, Zorin 16 seems to update 25-50 or so files every week.

I did a bit of internet searching on the topic last week, and couldn't find a decent explanation of what updates and what doesn't update in a stable point release.

tomscharbach

brent There are distros like Zephix born to be on a USB, but there is no inverse to this. Truth still remains an operating system on a USB is stll a finite, short-term thing. That's the nature of a tiny piece of plastic with a little micro soldering on it.

That's absolutely right. A USB isn't designed for use as an OS drive, and will wear out before its time from all the reads/writes. NVMe and SATA drives are designed for OS installation, and are the better choice for a permanent external installation.

The USB design issue doesn't concern me personally, because the only USB installation I have is for emergency use should I absolutely, positively, without question need to boot Solus on my laptop rather than Windows. It hasn't happened yet.

WetGeek

brent there are no usbs born to be hard drive operating systems

For sure. I'm more curious about whether it can actually be made to work, not whether it could be used full-time as an OS. You make a good point.

brent

tomscharbach that said, I downloaded the Zephix zip ISO and those 2 .zx files on their .zx page. I have a new 16GB PNY and ready to have some fun🙂

PS: Project Ventoy journey...feels like Capt Willard pulled down the river to meet Col. Kurtz🙂

tomscharbach

brent Project Ventoy journey...feels like Capt Willard pulled down the river to meet Col. Kurtz🙂

ROTFLMAO 😀

zmaint

I've got Endeavor and Tumbleweed in VM's currently. Both are decent, but I've never found anything as good as Solus. The history, rollback, and check/repair features make it way better than any other distro when things go wrong. The team also does a fantastic job of making sure things work before pushing packages to the repo.... so I've almost never needed to even use those tools. Lastly, the documentation here is easier for me to understand (good hand holding🙂)

I hope Solus never goes away, and I hope the new package manager builds on what I already consider the best (and keeps all those nice easy to use tools).

WetGeek

I learned a lot from today's adventure but it didn't have a very happy ending.

Since I had the NVMe drive in its enclosure already, and wasn't using it for anything else, I thought I'd install Solus on it while I was waiting for my new flash drive to arrive tomorrow. That turned out to be a worse idea than I'd thought.

After selecting the installer from the F12 boot listing, I started the installation process. When I selected the target to be installed, it was suggesting a 256GB drive, and I was pretty sure that must be the NVMe drive, because I was had thought that the SSD in this laptop was 500GB. That was a mistake.

I finished the installation and rebooted, and was not surprised to see a new installation with nothing configured yet. That's what I expected to see. But after configuring what I thought was the NVMe drive, I wasn't able to boot the laptop without the NVMe plugged in. That's when my general comfort level changed quite a bit.

Long story short, you know by now what happened. I've installed Plasma on so many computers here that it was pretty quick and easy to install it once again. And likewise, I've configured Vivaldi so many times, and I was able to sync that easily. I have a copy of collected addresses saved on my NAS, so Thunderbird was easy. And likewise, my bashrcAdditions and fstab additions are stored there, so those were easy to implement as before.

But what I DIDN'T find easy to do was to get Bluetooth working again. It's part of the Wi-Fi system, and the Wi-Fi is working fine. But Bluetooth, which should be controlled by the same switch, does not come on. I don't know why the software mishap I suffered today should have nuked my Bluetooth, but something did.

I'll order another Wi-Fi radio from Amazon for delivery tomorrow, and hope that installing it (a trivial task) will restore Bluetooth. The BIOS is set to activate both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with the Wi-Fi switch, but turning it off and them back on controls just the Wi-Fi now.

The reason Bluetooth is so important to me is because I usually use one BT mouse and one BT keyboard to work at this laptop, control the media computer for the TV and occasionally text with my phone. (I'm no good at two-thumbs typing, but with the mouse and keyboard connected to the phone, I can text like a teenage girl!)

If you don't hear a lot from me in the near future, know that I'm workin' on it.

zmaint

WetGeek Yeah I love Signal and that it's in the repo.

jppelt

Dang - Josh is adding Budgie to Fedora:

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