GeckoLinux Plasma - Revisit, cont.
Once /etc/fstab has been modified to include my NAS shares, and they're mounted with mount -a, Dolphin is not only able to list those shares, but also able to access their contents using the nfs protocol. Solus VMs all allow this to happen, but many distros do not. Gecko gets extra points for this desired behavior.
Prior to that, I'd installed nfs-utils to allow using that protocol, and prior to that, I'd added the Pacman reporitory to YaST, which contains that nfs-utils package. None of Gecko's default repositories contained nfs-utils or nfs-common, either of which would have worked for me. Even the huge Pacman repository didn't contain micro, so for my configuration tasks I had to settle for editing with nano.
YaST is very versatile, but it's complex and can be intimidating at first. I did an update the easy way -- with zypper, the command line package manager. Zypper's syntax is very much like eopkg's syntax. For example, eopkg it = zypper in, eopkg rm = zypper rm, eopkg up = zypper up, and so on. As far as I could tell, only packages that were eligable to be updated were updated.
The list of system settings is the same as any other complete Plasma installation, except for the one at the bottom that launches YaST (Yet another Setup Tool). The only oddity here was that after creating eight virtual desktops in the settings, they did not appear in the bottom panel right away. I needed to edit the panel and add a Pager widget. Most Plasma DEs I've seen do that automatically, once more than one desktop has been created. It was easy enough to add that widget, and to center it using panel spacers, I was just surprised that it was different from all the other Plasma installations I've seen. This image shows the modified panel.
CONCLUSION
In my opinion, Gecko Plasma is just about as bloated as Gecko Budgie had been when we explored that. Subjectively, it feels sluggish, like things take longer than they should. In spite of the bloat, extra repositories needed to be added to the defaults in order to fetch common tools. For example, I've come to expect the micro editor to be available by default, or available in the default repository. In Gecko, I was unable to find it anywhere.
Gecko loads and enables just 36 unit files on startup, which means it's comparatively quick to startup and shutdown. Not as quick as Solus, of course, but I don't know of any distros that are.
My opinion is that I could use Gecko Plasma if I really needed to, but it wouldn't be pleasant after getting used to Solus. I'd immediately be looking for another distro that was much more like Solus.
