Other Interesting Distros, Part 4

Brucehankins

WetGeek it's funny because two days ago I downloaded and installed Mint 21.1 Vera because it's been close to 10 years since I really looked at Mint or the Cinnamon DE.
Over all, I was impressed with how easy the DE was to set up and configure to my liking. I found I could get along just fine with Cinnamon, though I don't like it quite as much as Budgie.
Mint, on the other hand, was not my favorite. They have some good tools, and there's nothing particularly wrong with it, but it wasn't my favorite. It was slow to boot and shutdown, and it felt like I was watching the splash screen for far too long. If I could kill grub, I'd probably like it more.

stalebrim

WetGeek My main concern with a distro is "whether it feels like home right away" (and I've always found Solus to be good in that regard). That made me eventually choose Fedora KDE over things that looked good on paper, like Tumbleweed.

brent

WetGeek . Always with the provision, "if anything happens to Solus."

murbert Fedora Cinnamon is prolly where I'll go if Solus dies.

It's sad we're all making contingency plans..

elfprince

brent Some, not all. 😆

Brucehankins

brent yeah not all. Some of us just have severe distro hopperitus even if Solus is home.

brent

Brucehankins strange, contingency or hopping, even me exploring Ubu Budgie--nothing has felt like home llike solus. I thought Bodhi was once but they were real behind on printer/scanner/peripheral support. I even feel like a tourist in Ubu Budgie right now. For those of us Budgie-inclined, it's exciting to have the lovely and snappy Budgie experience back...but it ain't home/solus.

stalebrim

brent Really interesting to see how the Budgie Fedora Spin will turn out.

brent

stalebrim Wetgeek looooves fedora (fork) budgie Ultramarine, and I almost installed it but but did not, but I really enjoyed using it. it's pretty sharp. I still can't believe Josh signed off on the awful arcolinux budgie they seemed to take great license subverting it but yeah looking forward so fedora's.
(wonder if SerpentOS will use Budgie? I wonder if SerpentOS will ever be released?)

WetGeek

stalebrim Really interesting to see how the Budgie Fedora Spin will turn out.

Anybody know if it will be an official release, or a community "spin"? The Fedora 37 KDE spin pretty much sucks.

tomscharbach

brent I wonder if SerpentOS will use Budgie?

I'd be very surprised.

Doherty left Solus and Budgie behind almost five years ago. Since then, he's shown no interest in either project as far as I know.

Doherty is building Serpent OS as a ground-up, non-GNU, stateless OS layer, vastly different in design from existing OS layers like Arch, Debian, Fedora, Solus and Ubuntu.

I doubt that Doherty would be interested in making the compromises entailed in grafting on existing DE layers designed to be deployed on top of traditional OS layers. My guess is that Serpent will have a new DE.

brent I wonder if SerpentOS will ever be released?

Your guess is as good as mine. An alpha (well, partial alpha, anyway) seems to be in the works, but the alpha is more proof of concept for some components of the Serpent design than distro, as I understand it. Keep in mind that Serpent OS is more-or-less a one man show, and Doherty comes and goes.

Axios

brent You scare me..lol I was reading on there site (serpentos) early today seems they might be getting close to an iso from what they said. but havent be able to pull up there website all afternoon.

stalebrim

WetGeek A community spin.

I personally haven't noticed virtually any difference between Solus and Fedora KDE implementation, except for the underlying system but that's a given.

WetGeek

stalebrim I personally haven't noticed virtually any difference between Solus and Fedora KDE implementation, except for the underlying system but that's a given.

I personally am writing this from a Solus KDE Plasma VM, and I started creating a Fedora 37 KDE Pasma VM this morning. I personally can see a lot of difference. The Solus version doesn't suck.

brent

tomscharbach Josh joined the SerpentOS team (part-time I'm sure) right after he left Solus (according to the 1-1-22 Strobl resignation dispatch) so I thought the Budgie question only followed suit. But the more I think about what you said the more I agree: Doherty would want something his own as the DE I am positive.

(edit/source for my facts is my memory but I did doublecheck https://news.itsfoss.com/solus-co-lead-resign-budgie-serpent/)

murbert

tomscharbach I doubt that Doherty would be interested in making the compromises entailed in grafting on existing DE layers designed to be deployed on top of traditional OS layers. My guess is that Serpent will have a new DE.

He said in a forum post that Gnome and Plasma were going to be the DEs included. I gather there will be plenty of derivative distros soon

brent

Axios I been checking in about once a month since the beginning of the year, then at their blog a couple times. they have been teasing this iso thing out for about a year at least. he has a stable of ex-solus maintainers it appears but serpent never seems to move forward. I still believe Ikey is a visionary genius but life keeps getting in his way it seems.

stalebrim

WetGeek Thanks for the detailed insight.

tomscharbach

brent I still believe Ikey is a visionary genius but life keeps getting in his way it seems.

Doherty seems to be the bottleneck. Fair enough. SerpentOS is Doherty's vision. The last I heard, Doherty had returned to the UK, set up a small development area, and was coding again after several months away from the project. I think I last checked in late Summer, though, so I'm out of date no doubt.

murbert [Doherty] said in a forum post that Gnome and Plasma were going to be the DEs included

I missed that ... thanks for the information.

brent

tomscharbach I missed that ... thanks for the information.

as did I. sure there will be a surprise in addition to gnome and kde (when that day comes)

stalebrim

tomscharbach Eh, not really. If you look at the blogposts you see the project has been steadily progressing all the time.

minrvovrfc

@WetGeek

I can't find the topic now where you showed off Debian with Calamares installer ROFL. Thank you for it. This surprised me, after 10 times I hit my head against the wall with Alacarte. My recklessness with trying to put in Bunsen Labs Lithium was the reason why the first out of two times suddenly I couldn't boot into Solus anymore. This was back in July.

Presently I'm checking out "Bookworm testing". I found an alternative that I think is much better called Spiral Linux. Had to settle for that with KDE Plasma because I tried with Debian but Konsole refused to let me create a profile and other problems.

Note that I cannot have a "virtual box" on my computer. Oracle software doesn't work and Bottles was a joke I don't want to go through again. So I have to install, more often to external USB disk and, if I have room and in the mood, to a partition on the groaning internal HDD.

Again thank you for your valuable information about other distributions. 🙂

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