Distro Reviews 2

riffer

I upgraded my hard drive last night and decided to try Solus Mate. Same problems I've had with other Mate distros. I have a 1080p laptop and a 4k monitor and want to mirror. Gnome can handle this no problem - Laptop at 1080p, monitor at 4k. Mate can only run the 4k monitor at 1080p without screwing up the scaling on one or the other. Still, it's my go to distro for slow computers, and I am sure it would be perfect with a 1080p monitor. The Solus theming and panel is very well done.

Regardles, a nice detour but I have to get some work done today so back to Gnome.

WetGeek

riffer Regardles, a nice detour but I have to get some work done today so back to Gnome.

I use a separate computer (Solus Plasma) to stream content to my 4K flatscreen, and it's always worked perfectly. I've never tried to use my laptop for that purpose, because it's inconvenient here. (I use my laptop across the living room from my TV.)

That said, I also run Plasma on my little travel laptop (ACER TravelMate), with very limited resources (e.g., Celeron CPU, limited memory) with no issues. And my comparison VMs show that Plasma is the "leanest" of the Solus DEs. Have you ever given Plasma a try on your laptop? I have no idea how it would work with differrent settings for two monitors, but it might be worth a shot. It's generally very configurable.

riffer

WetGeek Note the priorities - Pizza first, work second 🙂

riffer

WetGeek Tried it. I didn't like it much. I might try it again.

joluveba

WetGeek RebornOS. It's a rolling release, based on Arch, and said to have an easy installer.

I heard that RebornOS is the closest distro to the defunct Antergos, closer than EndeavourOS. The cnchi installer, for example, came from it. I have very fond memories of Antergos. If Solus ever gets discontinued (I hope not), it might be one of my options.

WetGeek

joluveba I heard that RebornOS is the closest distro to the defunct Antergos

That's probably true, as they are/were both based on Arch. It's been so long since I've tried Antergos, I don't remember much about it. Didn't it have a really weird logon screen?

It's hard for me to think of a world without Solus, but based on what I've seen from RebornOS Budgie, it might make a worthwhile replacement if the worst were to happen. Some comments on DistroWatch make it sound like it's not very stable, but I didn't have any particular problems with it when I tried it. Of course, that was a very short-term experience.

Maybe something like Ubuntu Budgie would be better in terms of stability, but I don't believe Solus is going anywhere any time soon.

Brucehankins

Staudey WetGeek have either of you tried Drauger OS?

WetGeek

Brucehankins have either of you tried Drauger OS?

No. I'm not much of a gamer (Mahjongg solitaire is my speed), so I hadn't heard of it until you asked.

Staudey

Brucehankins No, hadn't heard of it before. Funnily they mention Solus in their "What Drauger OS is NOT" section:

Furthermore, Drauger OS is NOT based on Arch, Fedora, or Solus.

Brucehankins

Staudey WetGeek If you try it out, let me know what you think. I never made it past install.

wingman-4

brent

Solus Budgie is silky smooth as always and I've been testing Ubuntu of one flavor or another for years. I wanted to get back to an Arch based distro for a while and EOS offers Budgie and many other DEs .

WetGeek

Brucehankins

Drauger OS
I was gonna take a short vacation from all this, but with a challenge like that, how can I resist? I assume that it IS possible to install and run it, or it wouldn't be released online. I'm done with lawn mowing for today, and have lots of time to explore another distro for the first time. You're on!

Sigh ...
I apparently had the same luck you did.

The installation seemed to go okay right up to the end, but instead of the usual "Please reboot now," I got the above error. I looked at the system installer log, but couldn't identify anything that I could do to fix it. It might be more useful to its team.

Looking on the bright side, Drauger will have won first prize for the shortest-lived VM I've ever created.

WetGeek

Drauger OS
By the way, there were no showstoppers during the installer process (until that last fatal one), but it was the most complicated installation I've ever seen. Not only did I need to select my language (English) and region (US), but I needed to select from what looked like about a hundred dialects -- starting with "Cherokee." Other options were similarly complicated. My keyboard setting seemed to work, but I don't know whether it was correct. My laptop has its own keyboard, of course, but most of the time my laptop is on a stand, and I use a Bluetooth keyboard on my lap. Both seemed to work.

I downloaded (very slowly - about 20 minutes on a gigabit connection) the recommended version. An older one was also offered in case of problems with the current version, but installing an unsupported obsolete edition didn't seem like an attractive idea, even if it did actually work.

WetGeek

Drauger OS
We're having a heat wave now, so I stayed inside with the AC on and took a little nap. When I woke, I thought I'd try installing this once more, and if it failed again, I'd take the option to send the error report to the team, in case it might help them. It bugs me to let a distro get the better of me.

All went as before, although I did access the display setting first and increase the resolution. Default for the VM is 800x600, and that's barely large enough to hold the installer. The installation process went as before, and when I got to the error message I tried to send it, but I got yet another error message telling me there was no Internet connection. Horse puckey. I knew the VM was connected via a bridged connection to the host, which was having no network problems.

To verify that, I used the Applications menu to launch Firefox, installed the LastPass extension, and logged on to Amazon.com. (This was in the "Live" session.) So, it couldn't send the error message to the team, but I could log on to my account at Amazon. This OS is now just a bad memory, something that will be forgotten soon.

brent

I used the live iso, recently, to explore the Bunsen Labs distro and I really like it.
Like your adventure above ^ alot of these no-names are not ready for prime-time but many are surprisingly creative and ready for daily use. I'd put Bunsen in the latter category based on the iso.

WetGeek

brent I used the live iso, recently, to explore the Bunsen Labs distro and I really like it.

BunsenLabs Lithium
Oh, well, here we go again. The BunsenLabs web site points out that this is a "hobby" distribution (based on Debian 10). A hobby sounds like something you do for fun, so how could I not want to take a look?

There's no mention on the web site of which DE to expect, or how many are available, or how to install one if I need to do that. Maybe that's what "Lithium" is in this context, but if so, it's a DE I've never heard of. Maybe it's just a name for this version of the distro.

I'm pretty sure I'll find out in about 9 minutes. That's how much download time remains.

brent

WetGeek Oh, well, here we go again.

I glossed over "hobby" and just started using programs and enjoyed it. Didn't seem an enthusiast-only type deal but if I saw the word hobby I would be wary too. Maybe there will be some built in limitations then. Did not mean to mislead.

WetGeek

brent Did not mean to mislead.

On the contrary. I'm not looking for a Solus replacement ... I'm looking for something interesting to play with for a while, and maybe learn something.

It was the "hobby" description that got me interested in Lithium. Thanks for mentioning it.

WetGeek

WetGeek It was the "hobby" description that got me interested in Lithium.

BunsenLabs Lithium

No, I haven't answered all my questions yet. I still don't know whether "Lithium" is a DE or a version of the distro. I needed to refresh my xrandr knowledge in order to change the video resolution to 1920x1080. I haven't needed to do that for a long time -- nearly every other distro has a Displays setting with a list of available resolutions for the attached monitor. Instead, this one simply provides a copy of the RandR man page. If you want to try Lithium, and need a refresher, the command you want is sudo xrandr -s 1920x1080. Or substitute the size you need for your monitor.

Because Vivaldi is such a large part of my daily life, I wanted to install that right away, sync it, and configure it. But I haven't figured out how to do that yet. I searched for "browser" in the Synaptic Package Manager, but I ended up with hundreds of results that were simply libraries, language packs, and other dependencies I could use to build a browser. Judging by the scroll bar, I got about halfway through the results when I got really tired of it, and it didn't help that the list wasn't sorted. I couldn't just jump to near the end.

Since this is based on Debian 10, I'm pretty sure there will be more ways to explore the repository, so I'll take another shot at it tomorrow.

Oh, by the way ... the installer was one of the nicest I've ever seen. Very straightforward, very smooth, with labels that explained just what was being asked for in a way that would be easy to understand even for a Linux novice. I found it a very pleasant installation.

Until tomorrow ...

tomscharbach

BunsenLabs Lithium - Vivaldi

WetGeek Since this is based on Debian 10, I'm pretty sure there will be more ways to explore the repository, so I'll take another shot at it tomorrow.

You might be able to install Vivaldi using the official Vivaldi .deb file. Installing from a .deb file usually works with Debian-based releases. Not always, of course.

You might be able to explore the BunsenLabs Lithitum repository using the search function on the "Repository" section of the BunsenLabs website.

WetGeek

tomscharbach You might be able to install Vivaldi using the official Vivaldi .deb file.

BunsenLabs Lithium
Indeed. Thanks for the reminder. I've needed o do that several times before, with either the .DEB or .RPM file. I'm pretty sure that will work.

Now, if I can just figure out how to keep it from tiling that background file.

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