Distro Reviews 2

brent

WetGeek starting all the way back to your first thread and up to this: which has been your favorite or that you had enjoyed the most or you'd consider #2 (to Solus?).
(I'm guessin Aquamarine since it is your #2?)

WetGeek

brent I'm guessin Aquamarine since it is your #2?

I've liked a lot of the distros I've explored, although none as much as I like Solus.

You've probably figured it out, though. Aquamarine Budgie is the only one I've bothered to install on a spare laptop and use as a daily driver for a couple days. And frequently updated it.

Some day I'll probably find another distro that I like enough to replace Aquamarine on that machine.

wingman-4

WetGeek
I find most kde distros have graphical glitches in V-Box but Regata runs very well compared to others I've tried. I also tested a game which is the focus of this distro and it ran very well . I never tried a Suse based disrto before.

WetGeek

wingman-4 V-Box but Regata runs very well compared to others I've tried

I'm glad that's working out well for you. I'm not a gamer, so I really wasn't able to use any of the gaming features and give it a good test.

brent

WetGeek I've liked a lot of the distros I've explored, although none as much as I like Solus.

yep that part never changes and never needs to

WetGeek

Regata OS
The next step in my usual evaluation of usability has always depended in part with installing my favorite Linux time-wasters, so I can entertain myself as I spend time with the distro. That means installing three common games that have been available in every other distro that I've worked with. Unfortunately, the Regata App Store contained none of them.

This just emphasizes that distros are almost always aimed at a certain subset of Linux users, and I don't happen to be in the subset that Regata appeals to. We need one or more of us who are in the strong gamer subset to check out this distro. (That probably means folks who are not yet in their senior years.) Let me say that another way: Regata apparently isn't the distro for me. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it.

But it does mean that I'm not going to find it useful to continue with my evaluation. I'm going to continue my search for other interesting distributions to explore. Someone with a serious interst in gaming please take over this thread now. For me, it's time to move on.

WetGeek

NixOS
Distrowatch started out their review with, "Nix is an interesting distro. The operating system largely acts as a method for showcasing the advanced Nix package manager which offers atomic updates, rollbacks to previous generations of packages, and reproducible builds. This makes running a distribution with Nix as the package manager fairly flexible as well as reliable in the face of package upgrade issues."

Well, "interesting" is what I'm always looking for. The Calamaris installer offers the largest selection of DEs that I've ever seen. I think you will all be impressed. Because I'm most familiar with Plasma, that's what I chose for my experiment.

One thing that few distros I've seen is that Nix will resize itself as I enlarge the VBox window. That means that, as I work with the distro, I can easily make it larger or smaller as needed. Other distros have required going into the system settings and changing the resolution in the Display settings. This wouldn't be much of a feature when Nix is installed on hardware, but it's surely "nice to have" for a VM.

This is just a start, of course. I haven't installed any packages yet, or configured anything. There'll be much more before I'm done evaluating Nix. I'm especially interested in exploring the Nix package manager. It's said to provide access to 80,000 packages! (Maybe that will include my favorite games?)

WetGeek

NixOS
Oh, rats! When Distrowatch explained about this distro's being a way to showcase the Nix package manager, I assumed that it would also be usable for other purposes. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that -- can you believe it? -- I found no package manager in this distro. No way to install any of the software that I need to do an evaluation.

Nix is more of a development environment for building package managers. Apparently that's where the access to 80,000 packages comes in. In that sense, it's a remarkable distro, however I'm not currently interested in learning a new language to build package managers, and I can't install Vivaldi, or micro, or nfs-utils, or anything else I need to go any farther with this.

This has been my shortest-lived distro adventure of all, so far. But if building package managers interests you, then NixOS could be just the distro for you to install and check out. For me, this means that I'll continue to look for another interesting distro to explore. Interesting to me, that is. Suggestions welcome.

Moving on ...

elfprince

WetGeek https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/package-management/basic-package-mgmt.html

WetGeek

Hah! I just found a brand-new candidate for the shortest-lived distro exploration.

I was even looking forward to displaying some of my own lion photos that were taken at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. But alas, I got a 404 error after clicking their Download link.

So much for Lion Linux. Moving on to something I can actually install ...

WetGeek

elfprince

Yes, I noticed that. I read it to mean that a package manager one built with Nix could do all those things. Perhaps another interpretation is that NixOS is able to do those things with its own default package manager, but I couldn't find anything in the menus that sounded like a package manager, or a sofware center.

elfprince

WetGeek It looks to me like the only way one can install packages is through the terminal.
Here they quote the main command is nix-env, and its variations.

WetGeek

EdUBudgie
This sounds like it might be a good Budgie distro to explore. Although it's based on Ubuntu, perhaps it will be different enough from Ubuntu Budgie to be interesting to Solus Budgie users. Its description on Distrowatch goes like this:

"EdUBudgie Linux is a version of Ubuntu Budgie Linux pre-packaged with everything that a typical high school or university student should need to be successful in their student career. EBL seeks to bring the legendary stability and versatility of Ubuntu with the simnplicity and comfortable feel of Budgie along with a suite of packages that should suit nearly any student in high school and university with minimal post-install tweaking and package installation."

I'm not a gamer, or a package manager builder, but I have a couple decades of experience being a student. This should be a distro I can enjoy working with, provided I can download an .ISO for it. I'm certain that the Ubuntu repository contains everything I need for one of my experiments, so this one should be easy.

WetGeek

elfprince

Again, I assumed that one would need to use NixOS first to build a package manager, and then it could be controled from a terminal using those commands. I could very well be wrong about that. (After all, it's said that there's a first time for everything.) Perhaps you could give it a try? I've already removed my NixOS VM, and I'm lacking the motivation to build another right now. Perhaps another time? I still hav the .ISO file in my ISOs share.

elfprince

WetGeek I installed a single-user Nix OS. It got installed in the /nix directory. Unfortunately, from there things went sour. I could not find the 'search' for a package command, and I did not want to list all the packages.
The nix search command did not work, ans was listed as 'experimental'. So I stopped there and deleted Nix OS immediately. WIP.

brent

WetGeek elfprince I did my homework (during my spring companion distro auditions) on Nix; it looked overtly complicated so I passed.

I want to install Bodhi soon but I love VenomOS. I still like Mageia a lot too. I thought that would be a keeper for you at the time you reviewed it.

edit: is LispySnake DOA (he asks no one in particular)?

riffer

The only thing I have had a chance to try lately is Lubuntu. I used a ppa to upgrade to LXQT 1.1.0 and it is a pretty nice distro and fast. The downfall of all these distros is the HiDPI settings. You have to fiddle with a lot of mystery commands in Session settings . I almost got it perfect with my 4k monitor but not quite. I should have taken a screenshot for posterity. Of course all this is easy in Gnome and Budgie. In the end I missed my gnome applications and I went back.

Brodie Robertson has a good video outlining some of the frustrations of dealing with this:

WetGeek

EdUBudgie
Some initial observations:

The .ISO file is 5.66GB in size. Line up something else to do while it downloads.
The Installer window is larger than the VBox default VM size, so links like Continue aren't accessible.
If you restart the VM and choose the Try It option (instead of the Install option, you can change the display resolution in the Display settings, Then you can run successfully the installer from the larger window.
The installation takes the figurative "forever" to complete. Line up something else to do ...
Since EdUBudgie is based on the current Ubuntu Budgie distro, it's mostly very polished and smooth.
Although it's Budgie, its default configuration loads the bottom panel at the top of the screen. That's easy to fix using the Budgie desktop settings. It's likewise easy to add some workspaces while there.
The default panel features an Icon Task List that appears to contain an icon for just about every app in the entire menu. It's going to take a while to sort that out. I prefer adding app icons to the task list rather than removing them from it.

Next up: Adding needed packages, configuring stuff, getting set up for a daily-driver type of experience.

Staudey

brent edit: is LispySnake DOA (he asks no one in particular)?

LispySnake is the game company, the Linux distro is called Serpent OS and very much active (though still in the preparation phase, so nothing for you to test yet apart from the basic packaging tooling)

brent

Staudey thanks for the update I had those switched.

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