Other Interesting Distros, part 3

brent

Brucehankins Though you may find that Mate is a perfectly acceptable replacement. I guess I could see how you could make it more Budgie like and maybe look not like Windows XP......

Acceptable is the highest praise I got right now, Mate was not built to be phenomenal. Echoes of XP for sure but nothing has happened glitch-wise and I've no resistance or strain getting where I need it (not necessarily like) it. When you come from Solus Budgie expectations maybe too high!
I did see Endeavour Budgie. I liked it. I just threw 22.0.4.1 on the Ventoy

joluveba I know we are all fans of Solus here, but believe me, in Solus KDE this doesn't happen (at least not in my computers). I would have moved to Solus MATE a long time ago if it did.

It's a no-glitch subdued world here in Mate🙂.

WetGeek r, and not one has ever exhibited anything resembling these troubles. Just solid, reliable performance, year after year.

I'm listening...

joluveba It's not the first time I have read about this problem with Baloo, I wonder why some people suffer from it, and others don't

I have extreme prejeduice against anything K, it always gives me a terrible K-Infection. That prejeduice aside, I've liked LKDE, LXQT and DE's like that. Plasma didn't do anything for me and I've used it testing distros. I didn't see what all you guys see in it. It's not a daily driver, so I know I haven't given Plasma anything more than a day. It was just a shoulder-shrug environment to me. Maybe someday.

elfprince

brent Fewer needs and expectations - less stress. 😄

joluveba

brent It's a no-glitch subdued world here in Mate🙂.

No wonder you like it, Solus Mate rocks. The most underrated version of Solus.

brent I didn't see what all you guys see in it.

Plasma is beautiful, I'm in love with its effects. It's a frivolous reason, I know, but they never get old for me. And if you want to change anything, Plasma never tells you no.

Mate by default is ugly, but the Solus Mate customization is very beautiful, kudos to the Solus team for that.

Brucehankins

brent I didn't see what all you guys see in it

I didn't either for a long time. I loved Unity back in the day, then it was Cinnamon for a while, then came Budgie. I even had a fling with Gnome on openSUSE and Pop! And thought it was amazing back then. I've even said on these forums before that the amount of options in Plasma was overkill and I didn't get it either.
One day messing around with Solus Plasma in a VM from my Solus Budgie install, it just kind of hit me. Plasma is really good, and I like all the settings and granularity. Similar to joluveba I like the animations and eye candy it provides, and it did all that using less resources than my Budgie install. So I wiped that laptop and switched to Plasma full time.
Now, don't take this the wrong way, I've tried many different distros take on Plasma, and I think most of them stink out of the box. Solus was the only one I've installed so far that if there were no changes or customizations made, I'd be happy with it as-is. But again, the possibility of customization is HUGE! I mean, who hasn't wanted a Zero Two animated wallpaper at some point?

brent

elfprince Fewer needs and expectations - less stress. 😄

that is a remarkably healthy way to look at the situation, thank you. I have not stressed at all in Mate.

WetGeek

Brucehankins everything just runs a bit slow.

I wanted to like it, too. I used SuSE, followed by openSuSE, followed by openSUSE Tumbleweed for years. I liked how one could start YaST with just one password, then iinstall software, do updates, and do all kinds of other maintenance without being bothered for another password. But I installed and tried Gecko, and I have to believe my own eyes.

PSA: If you didn't care for Gecko, stay away from Debian. It's even worse. I'll never understand how so many distros that are based on Debian are so much better.

viyoriya

I have seen all your choices are systemD instead of hopping distros you should try different init systems.
try void or artix for runit Init systems
gentoo for openRC/s6
nixOS/alpine for musl lib
for fun - kisslinux

Brucehankins

viyoriya musl brings a whole new set of learning curves 😄.
MXLinux also uses SysVinit (default with D in there too), but only XFCE, Plasma, and Fluxbox.

brent

Brucehankins viyoriya I thought the different inits were conspicuously absent from these threads til I remembered that I've tried a lot of different non-systemd distros and did not notice any difference on a performance level (terminal, gui, i/o etc) but didn't dig deeper than that. msul never heard of.

viyoriya

Brucehankins forgot to add suckless sinit init system

viyoriya

brent you shoud check with pstree / htop for the process difference, as well as memory
Last time I replied to you when you were making Curtido I guess 🙂

stalebrim

brent The number of systemd units on startup is the absolute measure for distro performance so non-systemd distros inevitably perform better since they've got none 😃

Brucehankins

viyoriya I haven't tried that one. I've been meaning to try a void and nix install since the way they handle packages is so different, but haven't had time yet.

brent

stalebrim The number of systemd units on startup is the absolute measure for distro performance so non-systemd distros inevitably perform better since they've got none 😃

I know all that. It didn't make the init distros I checked out noticeably faster (boot, launch FF, launch Libre Writer, etc) to my untrained eye with no stopwatch.

WetGeek

RebeccaBlackOS - Observations

Posting this mostly for grins, but it may actually turn out to be something worthwhile. The name got my attendion because I fell in love with Becky Robinson when I was in Kindergarten. We were both 4.

I believe this OS offers the largest selection of DEs that I've ever seen. No surprise I'd pick Plasma.

So, why does the next page look so much like GNOME? Maybe I'll find out soon.

I was hoping there might be an installer in here somewhere, but I can't find one. Oh, well. So much for RebeccaBlackOS. I guess it was never going to work out for us.

brent

WetGeek wow that is some crowded gnome there. you did Miley Cyrus(?) distro some time back so there's that consistency..

WetGeek

brent wow that is some crowded gnome there

Yeah. I get wound-up every time a friend tells me that all the distros that give me grief are based on trying them out on VMs. But in this one case, it may be true. When the .ISO was launched, it didn't respond to a full-screen command, and when the VM window was enlarged, the OS didn't adjust itself to fit. And there was no way in the "live" session to get to a Displays setting and enlarge it from there.

So. maybe if I were installing it on hardware instead, I might have been able to find some kind of installer somewhere. This is the first time I've ever been able to actually blame a distro's issues on trying to install it on a VM.

WetGeek

Was anyone able to download a Kaisen Linux KDE .ISO file? I tried several times, but the downloads were happening at single digits of Mbps, and the progress indicator said 5 hours to finish.

I have a gigabit Internet connection, so I believe the problem was probably on their mirror's end. Even an openSUSE .ISO file doesn't take me 5 hours to download.

brent

joluveba Mate by default is ugly, but the Solus Mate customization is very beautiful,

you can't doll this up like you can Budgie that is for sure. I just left most everything alone appearance-wise and worried about minor prefs and browser hardening.
The absolute lack of fireworks, animatons, and fuss is a refreshing thing for me...I like it...calm and zen is just fine.

WetGeek

Bluestar Linux 6.0.12 Plasma - Observations

I was attracted to Bluestar because it's a fairly new release of an Arch-based distro, and it provides a Plasma DE. The .ISO file is either 4.1 GB or 3.83 GB, depending on who you believe (maybe one is GiB and the other is GB?). The download only took me about 6 minutes, though, so at least there's that.

I believe it's the first distro I've ever seen start up this way when the .ISO is launched. No problem finding an installer here, so I"m off and running. The image above resized itself to fit the VM window when I enlarged it, so the installer should have plenty of room to operate.

Indeed, all the buttons are available, so this should be no problem at all. With a bewildering assortment of options, I think I'll just go for a "desktop" installation. That's about how I use my laptop anyway.

It's been a very ordinary installation up to this point, but it's the first time I've seen this feature in an installer. The lighthouse image looks pretty soothing, so I think i'll go with that for now, and change it later if I get tired of it.

The next page was just the usual summary, followed by the usual dire warning about losing everything on my empty disk if I should go ahead, but I just gritted my teeth and bravely clicked [Install]. The installation seems to take a good long time, so it must be installing a lot from that 4 GB .ISO file. Towards the end it becomes apparent that it was installing updates, which I thought was a good idea.

Oh, well ... all good things must come to an end, I guess. It's time to get dinner ready, so I'm going to close for now, but I've liked a lot of what I've seen so far, and I'll try this again tomorrow (maybe without all the pics). So long for now ...

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