Other Interesting Distros

WetGeek

Recently a system crash on my primary laptop caused me to lose the VMs that were hosted there. First, I recreated the four Solus VMs, and my Windows 10 VM. More recently, I recreated my Ultramarine Budgie Vm, because it was my favorite interesting non-Solus distro originally, and I was curious to see how things are going there.

The nice things I said about Ultramarine before still apply, such as my NAS shares being easy to set up, without permission errors that seemed to defy debugging. (Although it requires me to enter my password over and over again in order to acces the content of those shares. Seems excessive to me.)

And one bad thing I said about Ultramarine is now somewhat less bad. At one time it loaded and enabled 152 unit files upon startup, making it a very slow distro to start up and shut down. (As you may recall, Solus loads and ebables 3 or 4 unit files, depending on the DE, and it starts up and shuts down very fast.) Ultramarine now loads and enables 104, almost a 1/3 reduction, and an indication that their devs are addressing that slow startup/shutdown issue.

Ultramarine does a great job with Budgie 10.5.3, and it's still beautiful.

brent

WetGeek I'm glad you still use it. Its always been gorgeous and I've tried it. This is Ubuntu-based?

WetGeek

brent This is Ubuntu-based?

It's based on Fedora. Currently Fedora 36.

brent

WetGeek learn something new every day. did not know budgie was on any fedora forks

WetGeek

brent did not know budgie was on any fedora forks

And it's quite compact. Solus Budgie VM uses 14.16 GB. Ultramarine Budgie VM is 8.17 GB, when both are installed with Vivaldi and Thunderbird added.

EDIT: I forgot to mention it, but both VMs also have Terminology, Aisleriot, Kshisen, gnome-mahjongg, and Restic installed, so they're not bare-bones installations. The only thing I wanted that was missing on the Ultramarine VM was Gwenview.

I wanted to use that to resize the image I posted here, but I couldn't find it in the DNF repository there. But since VirtualBox allows the host and guests to share their clipboards, I was able to take the screenshot on Ultramarine, and copy it to the clipboard there, then came back to solus to paste it into my /home folder here. Then I resized it using Gwenview.

riffer

I wished I had remembered your initial review of this when I installed fedora yesterday. After a couple of years it took a bit of thinking to remember how to do everything. I now remember a lot of this is done by Ultramarine out of the box. I have a hankering to try Pantheon again so I might install Ultramarine on the weekend. I just don't want to deal with Elementary or any other ubuntu based distro right now.

WetGeek

riffer I wished I had remembered your initial review of this when I installed fedora yesterday.

I also forgot to write that Ultramarine Budgie seems to have avoided the recent GNOME nonsense. At least I didn't notice anything wrong that might be attributed to it, but I'm not normally a Budgie user, so I may have missed something. Perhaps their devs are just waiting for things to settle down a little more before they make the change.

Cloak

An interesting distro I always keep in an office machine is not even Linux - GhostBSD. The binary repo has just about everything you could want which is backed up by a comprehensive port tree, very useful.

stalebrim

I've been keeping eye on Nobara. It's Fedora, but with added user-friendly fixes and aim to be a good gaming experience out of the box.

https://nobaraproject.org/

WetGeek

stalebrim I've been keeping eye on Nobara. It's Fedora, but with added user-friendly fixes and aim to be a good gaming experience out of the box.

I'm not much of a gamer, unless you count a few solitaire games, but you got me intrigued with another Fedora 36 offshoot. Of the three available editions, I was interested in the "Official" release, which is GNOME-based but with a UI that's said to work more like Plasma. I think it's a lot more like Budgie, but I'll find out more tomorrow. It's nearly bedtime now.

There's also a GNOME edition that has a purely GNOME UI, and a Plasma edition (which I also downloaded). The installer is the familiar Anaconda installer, but it took about 20 minutes to install Nobara onto its VM ... longer than any other distro I've tested.

tomscharbach

WetGeek I also forgot to write that Ultramarine Budgie seems to have avoided the recent GNOME nonsense.

Ultramarine 36 was released last May and predates "the recent GNOME nonsense". No surprise there.

brent

tomscharbach I thought geek once upon a time said something about rolling or regular updates but one look at distrowatch and I can see there is...umm...ahhh...never updates. what does 'fixed' mean again?

tomscharbach

brent what does 'fixed' mean again?

Um, it is an idiom for spaying or neutering.

brent

tomscharbach I hear Johnny Carson's studio audience as the drummer does the thing with the snare and the cymbal. rat-a-tat-ta🙂 then Doc laughs til he wheezes and Ed McMahon forgets to stop laughing. Don't get me started with Carnac...

riffer

I would assume Ultramarine uses Gnome 42. I believe fedora 37 with gnome 43 will be available in a few days. EOL of Fedora 36 is May 2023. I would assume Ultramarine will stick with the Fedora 36 base for a while.

WetGeek

riffer I would assume Ultramarine will stick with the Fedora 36 base for a while.

Their web site says that they ordinarily advance to the next release about a month after Fedora does. I.e., Ultramarine 37 should appear about a month after Fedora 37 does.

Solarmass

WetGeek looks like it's a famous Dash to Panel Gnome extension https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

I tried it (manual installation) on Fedora Gnome. I noticed some UI glitches and issues with it, not a pleasant experience...

WetGeek

Solarmass looks like it's a famous Dash to Panel Gnome extension

I'm pretty sure that's right. As I was searching for a way to access the virtual desktops from the UI, I noticed that expression when I right-clicked on the bottom panel. Not being an experienced GNOME user, I just assumed that the Dash part referred to a dashboard.

WetGeek

Nobara Observations

Unlike in my earlier examinations of non-Solus distros, I don't plan any step-by-step reports as I install the distro, and how I set it up as a daily driver. Instead, I'll just provide a brief summary of my observations.

I created a VM as usual (32GB virtual drive, typical settings) and installed Nobara using the Anaconda installer. No problems resulted, other than the installation's taking a long time to complete. Nobara opens with a Welcome message that's typical, although I did't see the usual option not to show it on future startups.

I used DNF to do an update (150-some packages), and to install apps that I would need in order to do various configurations (micro, Terminology, nfs-utils). I did not install any games or Restic, as I don't plan to keep this VM very long. I mainly wanted to resolve my curiosity about a GNOME installation that doesn't look or work like GNOME.

I had no trouble with updating /etc/fstab to include my NAS shares, but like Ultramarine, Nobara required me to input my password nearly every time I accessed any of those shares. I was unable to use Anonymous to access them, as I'm able to on many other distros. I was able to use the system settings to create 8 virtual desktops, but was unable to find any way to access those from the UI.

I'll keep the VM available for a while, in order to answer any questions anyone may have. I'm now going to create a VM for Nobara Plasma, a DE with which I'm far more familiar.

stalebrim

WetGeek Are your shares NFS or Samba?

Solarmass

WetGeek I was able to use the system settings to create 8 virtual desktops, but was unable to find any way to access those from the UI.

Yea, Gnome DE, that oriented for heavy use of virtual desktops doesn't even have any visual indicator of what virtual desktop you're currently using, the workaround is to use some 3rd party extensions...
Well, that DE doesn't even have a tray... 🤦

I am glad, that Budgie has such a cool virtual desktops applet 🙌

WetGeek

stalebrim Are your shares NFS or Samba?

My NFS server (Synology) supports both, and on Linux systems I set up /etc/fstab to use nfs. (From Windows, it defaults to smb.) With Files, I'm able to select the Network location and access them via smb without providing a password.