Other Interesting Distros, Part 4

brent in this instance ventoy failed. first time ever. made a rufus usb and installed that way

I've been giving more thought to Ventoy, and I've just about concluded that it still probably won't be useful to me. I assume that over time it fills up with .ISO files. Then, when you want to add another, you'll need to remove something to make room. And that could be just because you want to check out the newest version of something you've installed before.

The more I consider it, the more I'm convinced that one small USB flash drive and Etcher are all I need.

EndeavourOS Cassini - Observations, cont.

My next task was to scan through the system settings, and create some virtual desktops. The defaults were mostly agreeable, but I shut off the various screen dimmers and blankers, since this laptop host is always running on A/C. Considering the kernel in use, I strongly suspect that this distro is not based on an LTS version.

The next item on my task-list is to modify the bottom panel to move the new virtual desktops (which were placed there automatically upon creating them) to the center of the panel with two panel spacers. I've done this so many times that I'm getting really good at it.

Uh oh! Dolphin found Shared Folders (smb) when I clicked on Network, but then claimed there are no shared folders found. That's bullox, of course, as we all know by now. On the off-chance that the NAS hadn't awakened yet today, I repeated the request four times. I can't wait to see what happens when I mount the NAS shares with a change to /etc/fstab.

Thankfully, EndeavourOS installed the VirtualBox guest additions without complaint, so this VM has access to all of it's host machine's USB 3.0 ports. I inserted a USB flash drive that contains all my distro configuration files, and this refusal by Dolphin was but a minor inconvenience.

Now, after mounting those shares, Dolphin displays their names, but insists that it can't enter any of them. That's apparently a distro issue, because many distros that I've tried have no such problems. And Dolphin still insists that there are no smb shares available. That's gotta be news to my smb server. I've never been able to figure out how to solve this problem.

I installed Vivaldi using Pacman, then configured and sync'd it. Then I installed and tried to setup Thunderbird, but although I'd added two email accounts, the Thunderbird UI did not appear. So I started it again from the menu, and it displayed the account setup page again. After the third attempt, I rebooted the system and tried launching Thunderbird again. The same thing happened when I tried to launch it.

CONCLUSION
Given that I can't access my NAS shares using Dolphin, and I can't get Thunderbird to appear, there's no point in further preparing this distro for an extended daily user test. And since the problems I've encountered could reflect a poor implementation of the Plasma DE, I'm going to start over and evaluate the community edition that features OpenBox instead of any DE.

The Plasma version does show definite promise. It's fast, it readily installed the VBox guest additions, and the mouse almost works as it should, but that's not enough to make it a good candidate for a daily-driver. We'll soon see what the OpenBox edition offers

I finally give up on EndeavourOS. I thought I'd give it one more try by selecting a Budgie version, but that's going nowhere. I launched a terminal, and it showed up as a bright white background with black text, and hurt my eyes. So I tried to configure it, and created a new profile, but I could not change the colors, and they only offered that one gnome theme for the terminal.

Then I wanted to see if I could get to my NAS with the file manager, and this is as far as I got when I clicked on Network and then Windows Network, the only shortcut that's available from there.

I can't seem to get anything accompished with EndeavourOS, so I'm calling it a day now. It looks like we've got about 8" of new snow in the back yard, so maybe I'll go build a snowman.

brent No Openbox was already there.

We don't seem to be talking about the same thing. I was asking whether you'd had a chance to use both default desktops, not desktop environments. If you use the combination I mentioned -- Super+Tab -- you'll see something like this:

Well, I should say exactly like that.

That shows the two default desktops that Beryllium provides. You can run two applications at the same time, and they won't interfere with each other, as each one will have its own desktop to use. Sometimes I run a file manager in one, and a terminal in the other. Then Super+Tab looks like this:

You can now see the icon for the file manager on Desktop 1 (in the home page for jerry) and the icon for the terminal on Desktop 2 (showing my user). By clicking on those, I can be taken to the respective desktop, to use the application that is there.

The Add new desktop link does exactly that. Let's say that the work I need to do requires settings as well as a file manager and a terminal. If I click the Add new desktop link, the Super+Tab display looks like this:

I've added Desktop 3, but I haven't started anything there yet. So I click on Go there... to be taken to that empty desktop, and start a Power Settings dialog there.

Again, simply by clicking on one of these, I'm taken to that respective desktop to use the application there. But there's more! Find an empty spot on any of the desktops and you can scroll through all three of those using your mouse wheel. You don't need to use the Super+Tab incantation to open the desktops dialog. And if you now look at the bottom panel, you'll see the three desktops represented there. You don't even need to scroll the mouse wheel -- just click on the application icons there, and you'll be taken to that application immediately.

Normally, on my daily laptop I have 10 desktops defined, but on VMs where I don't need the VirtualBox manager or a workspace (desktop) to run a VM on, I only need 8. Thus, when I was experimenting with Beryllium as a daily driver, I used the Super+Tab command to create 6 more desktops, for a total of 8. Then I could load Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Spider, Shisen-sho, Mahjongg, Dolphin, and Terminal into 7 of those, and leave one empty for running things I don't use all the time, like maybe a settings dialog.

That's why I was upset that after a reboot, my desktops were reduced to just the two default empty ones. Maybe there's a setting somewhere that would cause the set of desktops in use to be preserved through a reboot, but I haven't looked for that yet. Maybe today. I totally gave up on EndeavourOS.

I thought you might find it useful to load your email into one of those default desktops and your browser into the other. Then, each one could be full-screen, and you could easily change from one to the other. And you wouldn't need to dig one out from behind the other on a single desktop.