GeckoLinux Plasma - Addendum
WetGeek My opinion is that I could use Gecko Plasma if I really needed to
I wanted to provide an informal addendum to this comment. While it's true, that I could use Gecko if I really needed to, that might be putting it a bit too mildly. The last thing I want to do is mislead anyone about this.
I'm an early riser, and today I was up at 2am, wide awake, and I knew I might as well get up for the day. I was thinking about the Gecko VM I'd created, particularly because I'd not populated it with the applications I use on a daily basis, as it was a re-visit to a distro I'd fully explored before. With nothing more important to do for a while, I decided to go ahead and complete my usual daily-driver setup.
That meant installing Vivaldi, and sync'ing it, which adds 50+ icons to my start page. I configured Thunderbird, and added accounts for Jerry and for Wetgeek. I added Google calendars to Thunderbird for my wife and me, using the Lightning add-on. I normally play three solitaire games -- Spider, Shisen-sho, and Mahjongg -- when I'm bored, to keep my mind active, so I added those. And Dolphin and Konsole for doing occasional maintenance.
This is how I prepare a VM for a trial where I run it full-screen and pretend it's my main laptop for a while. How long depends on how well the VM works. Some I use for a couple days, some for a couple minutes instead. For the ones I really like, I keep an icon on my desktop, and update them occasionally, so I can keep track of new developments for that distro.
Once Gecko was fully populated, so that it could mimic my main laptop (it's host), the slowness I'd mentioned before became really noticeable. Every package-management task began with loading the many repositories in its list, so every such task took much longer than I'd expected. Most applications I'd launched from the menu or a task manager icon took several seconds to first appear.
Playing any of the solitaire games was a chore. I had to slow my mouse usage to a very deliberate pace, or I had to repeat the motion, as whatever I'd tried to grab with the mouse remained where it was. A Mahjongg game that typically takes me about 6 minutes to finish took 9 minutes this morning.
I could go on (and on), but that's probably not necessary. I'm sure my familiarity with Solus colors my perception of how quick and responsive a distro should be in a VM, but that aside, Gecko is slow to the point of being unpleasant to use for any extended time. There's no way I can work with it and forget I'm on a VM, as I can with all the Solus VMs and many others. If I'd misled anyone with my original conclusion, I hope I've clarified that now.
