Other Interesting Distros, Part 5

brent

WetGeek its connected. just saying I couldnt get far enough to see if I catch the nala bug...

WetGeek

brent just saying I couldnt get far enough to see if I catch the nala bug...

Maybe if I knew what fluxbox is, or what it has to do with examining a distro, I would have understood.

brent

WetGeek I explained of the 5 DE's of Siduction I chose Xorg to explore which has the fluxbox WM.

to, hopefully, make this connection clearer for you, I have been specifically replying to this:
"If any of you give Siduction a try, and do an update, and get stuck on this Nala bug, you might want to know what turned out to be the cause. It only happens when a config file is being replaced, and the user is asked for (Yn) confirmation. But the confirmation prompt doesn't appear. One user said that entering "Y" when it stopped got it to finish on his machine. I couldn't reproduce it, because I'd fully updated my laptop using apt, so the situation didn't occur again for me."

elfprince

brent I think that the Siduction team should have named it 'Fluxbox' and not 'Xorg'.

WetGeek

brent I explained of the 5 DE's of Siduction I chose Xorg to explore which has the fluxbox WM.

Ah, sorry. I didn't make the connection. I must have had something else on my mind at the time.

brent

elfprince yeah if a Window Manager is in charge than the name of the 'desktop' is whatever.however the devs made the LightDM look? I have a hard time with the symantics sometimes.

WetGeek . I must have had something else on my mind at the time.

I am not always crystal clear so no worries.

brent

WetGeek I am going to download and play with Siduction LXQT later tonight. I had a mixed first impression of it's WM DE. I find it an interesting distro.

WetGeek

brent I find it an interesting distro.

It is. It takes something pretty special to get me to remove PCLinuxOS from my spare laptop and replace it with something else.

You really oughta try the Plasma version of something sometime. It's compact and powerful. And just about every distro worth the name releases a Plasma version. I can vouch for the Plasma version of Siduction.

brent

WetGeek LXQT is supposed to be Plasma-light, or in the kde family. always liked it. not opposed to trying Siduction in Plasma in fact, on your voucher, I will download it after LXQT which is at 1.3 out out 1.8GB. What the heck, it's new years and steelers/ravens in the background.

WetGeek

brent LXQT is supposed to be Plasma-light

I realized they're both built on QT, but I didn't know they went farther than that. I've never used LXQT, but you just raised my opinion of it. I'll need to try this Plasma-light sometime. You've got me curious now.

Don't forget, if it has Nala, and you use it to do an update/upgrade, and it gets stuck towards the end, just type a "Y" to tell it to accept the new conf file and finish up.

Siduction is German, by the way, but they publish their manual in both German and English versions. Their forum, too.

Brucehankins

brent LXQT is supposed to be Plasma-light

They share the Qt framework and some small components, but not much else. LXQt is actually the culmination of LXDE-Qt and razor-Qt. It was basically started because at the time LXDE was based on GTK+2, and many thought the migration to GTK+3 would make the DE too bloated. The applications are either from scratch or Qt ports of existing GTK+2 applications, such as PcManFm. As far as performative lightweight desktop environments go, it will give XFCE or Mate a run for the money anyway. It can also be themed rather nicely and easier than XFCE, and you can even add some Plasma bits to give it more eye candy like swapping to Kwin window manager. Of course, the more pizazz you add, the less lightweight it becomes. If I had to switch to any other DE, LXQt would be my first choice.

brent

WetGeek Don't forget, if it has Nala, and you use it to do an update/upgrade, and it gets stuck towards the end, just type a "Y" to tell it to accept the new conf file and finish up.

Thanks for the tip. I could not open synaptic in the Fluxbox Siduction because I didn't know what the password was. I had no idea apt or dpkg was replaced with nala (if they are replaced by nala).
More in my reading--and you may have mentioned this but I didn't catch it----Sid in Siduction is the Sid repo. Bunsen uses bullseye repo. Bunsen is Deb 12? based, But Siduction is Unstable Debian based. not sure what that means because I see it Unstable used a lot. Not tested/developed/released yet maybe.
Anyways.
Got my two new isos. time to reboot and play🙂
Both of these teams seem to be moving the ball at will which is the hallmark of porous defenses but still 3-3 in the first...it's going to be that kind of game...cool

edit: I bookmarked this for now https://trendoceans.com/nala-package-manager/

WetGeek

brent I had no idea apt or dpkg was replaced with nala

Nala is a front-end for apt. It produces beautiful output in the terminal, but there's a prompt that is left hidden. It's a "Continue (Yn)" prompt, which is why "Y" is what you want. The second time I did an update/upgrade it completed without a problem.

I'm in the process of installing the LXQT version on a VM right now. I was really serious about being curious about it. I can't wait to see Plasma-lite.

WetGeek

brent Siduction is Unstable Debian based. not sure what that means

It means the newest versions of everything, including the kernels, rather than older and better-tested stuff as in an LTS version. It's like the Solus unstable version.

WetGeek

brent Got my two new isos. time to reboot and play

I thought that I'd mention this. When I updated/upgraded the LXQT version of Siduction using Nala, I just pressed <Enter> every time it stopped during the dpkg part. I think it took three times, but eventually it accepted all those defaults, and finished.

The same thing probably would have got the Plasma version updated without any drama, if I'd realized what the problem was.

brent

WetGeek OK....in lxqt now. I like it. I tried to load Plasma twice and it would not load from Ventoy. I will play with this some more.

I have come to realize (Bunsen is an example) that not everything installs/launches live environment successfully from Ventoy. sometimes you have to set it from Etcher/DD. maybe that's the case. Pretty sure my hardware can handle it.****at distrowatch someone commented he/she couldn't launch or install 2 out of the 5 DEs (anecdotal).
On the other hand, LXQT is fine. App menu as straightforward as Solus's. I can see why you compared it to Solus. File manager is someting called PacmanSomething-Qt which, again, is competent as nautilus (used to be).
Peeve so far is Super key does not launch app menu. 99.9% of distros including WIN it launches app menu...maybe an ISO kink?
synaptic still here. Nala has 39 packages to upgrade. nala also has autopurge in addition to autoremove. Under utilities are kernel-remover (!) and dconf editor. usually distros don't advertise those. the lxqt settings submenu pretty big.
Will leave this thing on the ventoy.

brent

edit: did not do full upgrade to get the Y part you mentioned.

WetGeek

brent did not do full upgrade to get the Y part you mentioned.

I figured that. There were a lot more packages upgraded when I did it. G'night, Brent.

brent

WetGeek actually I didn't want to exit without trying. so I did. I had to hit Y. Then this terminal (i forgot--lxqt -term?) it had groovy colors. Nala didn't do the stalling, per se. It was clear from the commands that Nala handed the dirty work off todpkg: "dpkg upgrading 106 packages" was the message. that took forever but got no prompts after that initial Y.

brent

Brucehankins great history lesson. QT is where they share DNA then not much else. I am surprised they are that GTK-heavy....why do they adapt to KDE applications so easily? I've not witnessed this before, i.e. Budgie with K-stuff and Plasma with Budgie stuff...(perhaps I'm overthinking here?)

Brucehankins If I had to switch to any other DE, LXQt would be my first choice.

I could never put my finger on why I always liked it. It's lightness and speed were not on my radar, more its simplicity and aesthetic.

stalebrim

brent I could never put my finger on why I always liked it. It's lightness and speed were not on my radar, more its simplicity and aesthetic.

To me it's simple to the point of being clunky, as much as I've tried to use it. To each their own, I guess. I may be spoiled with Plasma, though I don't feel the same with MATE or XFCE than I feel with LXQt.

Brucehankins

brent why do they adapt to KDE applications so easily?

Because of the same Qt underpinnings. It's like installing Budgie or Gnome apps in Mate, they're all GTK based, so it won't pull a ton of dependencies with it. As long as you stay within the same framework base, the dependency list is usually pretty small.

Side bit of history, Qt was released in 1995 and KDE (Kool Desktop Environment) was announced in 1996 to be based on Qt and C++.

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