Distro Reviews 2

Harvey

For Edubuntu desktop icons issue. I would check if budgie-desktop-view is installed/available, maybe they are using nautilus instead of nemo which I think Ubuntu Budgie uses as nautilus has not supported desktop icons in a loooooong time.

minrvovrfc

Drawn in by the topic started LOL.

Checked out Mageia 8 and liked it but many packages are rather old. Couldn't do anything with Wine 6, 64-bit or not, no Windows installers, and it was the only distro which refused to run this particular music-creation program. This was last month.

I have Manjaro besides Solus and Windows on the hard drive (not SSD) of my laptop. Decided to update that once in a while, but I don't use it much. Also have Fedora 36 MATE on external USB drive but I will not upgrade, don't like their big-guy-like pressures. I use Fedora more than Solus for music and programming. I had the previous version with GNOME but it was disgusting except the terminal "help" that prevented me from using "yum". Liked that better than whatever was the software installer/remover for any distro so far.

A short time ago I managed to install Void Linux successfully. Tried "musl" version first but Wine was only 64-bit, and it was the same as with Mageia. So dumped it for "glibc" mode. Everything has been OK so far. Can't have Brave browser there, so...

Liked Bunsen Labs Lithium but kept putting it off for others like AV Linux and Void Linux. Had Debian Bullseye MATE but couldn't figure out how to get Wifi, and I dislike its text-mode installer notorious (for me) for screwing up right at the "grub" bootloader stage. I have an external USB disk with AV Linux with persistence but I'm thinking about erasing it because it doesn't recognize my touchpad and I just don't like its ugly looks and its overloading Thunar's menus, a few things that I cannot customize.

Finally before Solus, I wanted to like Ubuntu Studio "Jammy Jellyfish" for two weeks but I guess it's too powerful for my computer. It walks the walk for what I do for music, that's for sure but I don't like what is turning out with all the "untus". Right now Manjaro is the only one I will tolerate with Plasma, otherwise I hate that desktop environment because it's slow and RAM-greedy, it takes a lo-o-o-ng time to start especially after supplying the password. I cannot assign and remove keystroke shortcuts away from Dolphin and Gwenview and other programs because they could crash. I'm blaming it on the DE, not on the distro.

Tried others that were eventually dumped including Linux Mint, Slackware Puppy and Ubuntu Budgie. As you might have perceived, being able to run Wine 32-bit and 64-bit without problems is a terminal requirement for me. I don't play games but that's how it is. Sorry unlike many of you guys I just don't like anything "forked" from GNOME or Plasma. I was supposed to post on the "show desktop" thread instead of this.

Sorry if this is TL;DR

BTW wrote a review about Solus on "Distrowatch" site. Had to tell the truth there, I hope you guys don't mind.

tomscharbach

minrvovrfc BTW wrote a review about Solus on "Distrowatch" site. Had to tell the truth there, I hope you guys don't mind.

Why would anyone mind? The point of posting a review on Distrowatch is to give an honest review, the good, the bad and the ugly. Distrowatch isn't a fanboys club. My problem with Distrowatch reviews is that far too many of the reviews are written by people who dip into a distro for a day and think that they know enough about the distro to write an accurate, useful review for the general public.

brent

minrvovrfc liked mageia a lot but loved bunsen lithium

WetGeek

tomscharbach many of the reviews are written by people who dip into a distro for a day

Or they fire up the "live" version and play with it for a while, then dash off a review.

minrvovrfc

tomscharbach
I felt I had to write something on the other site, but I resent Solus falling out of the top 20...

Anyway, I clarify that I cannot have "Virtual Box" or anything like that on my computer. So I had to install a few distros onto external USB disks. I don't like it, I'm being spoiled for choice. If I had to change anything, I would have made Solus partition at least 10GB larger and the EFI partition over 1GB. I can't do it without knocking out Windows. I would have to stop doing things with music altogether so I could go Linux only but I'm not ready for it yet, at least while I have Internet which won't be for very long though. Definitely there would be no doubts if I could purchase a large SSD drive to replace this slow, weary one that actually exists on my computer.

BTW today I discovered a "distro" called KolibriOS from Russian developers, it's very small only 40MB 7-Zip file and 32-bit only. Seems to be a real throwback. But now I don't have a computer anymore that is entirely 32-bit.

Brucehankins

WetGeek yeah, I try to at minimum keep a virtual machine around for several weeks before deciding to form or write an opinion. I think it's also pretty telling what people say versus what they keep around.
VMs that have stayed around and I keep updated:
Garuda LXQt Kwin on the Zen kernel
Lubuntu
MX AHS xfce
Solus Plasma on the unstable repo

WetGeek

Brucehankins VMs that have stayed around and I keep updated:

For me right now, it's:

BunsenLabs Lithium
RebornOS Budgie
Windows 10

all four Solus DEs
Ultramarine Budgie on the spare laptop

WetGeek

The VM of things to come?

Clear Linux

That has to be the cleanest, most elegant, and easy to use installer I've ever worked with.

WetGeek

Clear Linux
I have a bad feeling about this adventure. It turns out that Clear Linux boots up to my least favorite DE.

I'm not giving up on it right away, but it sure would be nice if I could convert it to any other desktop environment. I do maintain and update a Solus GNOME VM, but that's different. It's Solus.

I'm surprised that Intel didn't offer any choice in this regard, as they've done everything else so well, so far.

tomscharbach

WetGeek I'm not giving up on it right away, but it sure would be nice if I could convert it to any other desktop environment. I do maintain and update a Solus GNOME VM, but that's different. It's Solus.

I suspect that you'll be as unimpressed as I was with the desktop, after you've worked with it for a bit. The reason, I think, is simple enough. The desktop is intended/designed for system administrators to use as a front end rather than as a desktop environment for consumers. I don't think that Intel has any interest in changing that focus. I'll be curious to see if you can get Vivaldi installed. I think that you can use the rpm for that purpose, but I'm not sure.

WetGeek

tomscharbach I suspect that you'll be as unimpressed as I was with the desktop

I suspect I may be. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get Vivaldi installed on the VM. Clear Linux doesn't honor any of the usual package manager suffixes, and I can't find vivaldi-stable in flathub. For some strange reason, Bold is available in the software installer, and I saw four or five other browsers there, but not Vivaldi. How ridiculous is that!

I still haven't given up. I left a query in the Vivaldi Linux forum, but it may take a while to get an answer.

Did I mention there's no /fstab in /etc? No hostname or hosts files there, either.

WetGeek

WetGeek I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get Vivaldi installed on the VM

Clear Linux
Hello, from Vivaldi now running on my Clear Linux VM. The Vivaldi Linux forum came through with an installation script simply called install-vivaldi.sh. I made a Vivaldi folder inside my home, put the script there, and ran it. The installation worked perfectly, and even added Vivaldi to the GNOME menu.

If anyone needs to install Vivaldi on a distro that doesn't understand .deb or .rpm files, let me know and I'll get this script to you.

That's all for now. It's almost tme for me to retire and read for a while. See y'all tomorrow ...

WetGeek

Clear Linux
And thus ends my newest adventure into the world of Linux distros. I managed to resolve a lot of issues, and created something resembling a daily-driver VM of Clear Linux. The reason I couldn't spend any more time evaluating its usability is down to the clumsiest DE in the world. It's one thing for me to fire up my Solus GNOME VM once a week to do an update. It's quite another to try to spend an entire day with that DE.

Overall, this was probably one of the most educational of my distro adventures. I learned how to solve problems I didn't even know existed. For example, I learned about (and acquired) a script that quickly and easily installs Vivaldi on any Linux system, regardless whether they install common package files.

If the rumors that GNOME DE will be replaced with something more integral come true, I'd like to take another look at Clear Linux after that happens. For now, I'm going to find out how BunsenLabs is doing with their new edition. That could be a lot more interesting and enjoyable.

tomscharbach

WetGeek If the rumors that GNOME DE will be replaced with something more integral come true ...

What rumors have you heard, and where? I haven't run across anything that suggests that Clear Linux OS is planning to replace Gnome with something else.

WetGeek

tomscharbach What rumors have you heard, and where?

Actually, I don't remember. I'm pretty sure I got that impression from something I've read during the past couple of days. At any rate, it doesn't seem like I'm going to want to pursue Clear Linux any farther.

I agree that we can ignore it now. In fact, I started doing that a couple hours ago.

Harvey

Clear Linux do not care about the desktop use case anymore.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-Divesting-Desktop
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-GNOME-3.36-Coming

tomscharbach

Harvey Clear Linux do not care about the desktop use case anymore.

Thank you for the links. I half-remembered reading that Clear Linux was abandoning desktop development when I looked at the distro 12-18 months ago, and the links confirm my recollection.

@WetGeek A companion announcement suggests that Clear Linux customizations to the Gnome desktop have been removed:

https://community.clearlinux.org/t/clear-linux-os-desktop-ui-to-adopt-a-more-vanilla-gnome-desktop-environment/4373

I haven't looked at Clear Linux OS in over a year, but it looks like it will be generic Gnome going forward, deployed as a front end for system administrators, if anything. Clear Linux OS will not develop as a desktop distribution. We can ignore it.

wingman-4

Ending my Plasma tour with Endevour OS. Next to Solus Plasma it's my favorite, all the latest packages like Neon without the Ubuntu Base. If you want cutting edge enable the Aur. This is terminal-centric distro , but a package manger is available.

WetGeek

Manjaro Budgie
I found a Budgie implentation I'd never looked at! This is one of Manjaro's "community" editions.

I had used Manjaro for a number of months during my distro-hopping days, probably because it would give me some of the advantages of Arch Linux, without requiring me to participate so much in its installation.

I can honestly say that the installer is very straightforward, although it seems to take quite a while to do its job. At first glance, this seems to be a competent implementation of Budgie. Like others I've explored, the context menu offering Budgie Desktop Settings and System Settings works only for the former. To change the Displays resolution, you'll find System Settings in the Other sub-menu.

I haven't yet started on my usual configuration, so I'll get back to you in a while.

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