Other Interesting Distros, Part 6

WetGeek

Brucehankins I don't think you've covered it

No, I haven't here, and that's a good suggestion. MX is a distro that I used for a good while during my BS* days. I appreciated it, and recommended it to friends. I don't remember what DE I used then, but it might very well have been XFCE. I guess I didn't expect to learn much from a distro so familiar to me, but it's been so long that it's probably not much like what I remember anymore. I'll give it a shot, and thanks for the suggestion.

* Before Solus

brent

Brucehankins Used MXLinux XFCE about a month as 'hobby' distro, 2-3 years ag0. Slick. I remember yandex and tools were a huge part of it. This is 3 years ago---I didn't think rendering and resolutions on that thing agreed with my eyeballs at the time (compared to here that is).

WetGeek

Staudey I really dig the icons in that first screenshot.

Yeah ... they had the same effect on me. It might be interesting to try that icons theme elsewhere.

brent

@tomscharbach Turns out I was wrong and Linux does have a thin client (chromebook-like):

WetGeek

brent Linux does have a thin client (chromebook-like)

Gonna review it? Sounds appropriate, given current events here.

brent

WetGeek does seem very appropriate but I never used Chromebook/macbook so I'd have nothing to compare it too. Someone will review it I hope, and I look forward to it.

WetGeek

brent Someone will review it I hope, and I look forward to it.

@tomscharbach to the courtest phone, please. @tomscharbach to the courtesy phone.

WetGeek

MX Linux 21.2.1 - Coming Attraction

minrvovrfc

WetGeek This "yirmibir" is quite good but it's based on "Bullseye", not a bad thing for me by this time. But I wish it came with the newer XFCE, now that D.E.'s devs fixed that really annoying bug with resizing Thunar's window. 🙂

(Still waiting for it on Debian "Testing, have that with XFCE also.)

One weird thing is that for Wine, have to enable 32-bit repositories like has to be done with regular Debian. By default there's only one server in Turkey but I think it could be changed to those of "debian-dot-org".

minrvovrfc

minrvovrfc Update on Debian "Testing" at my end: Thunar still does what it likes after closing it and opening it again. It does stay with the window size I force on it when I maximize and then set to smaller, but without closing it. I downloaded the latest package directly from XFCE repository and almost went about building it but declined.

It's not a big deal but bothersome considering that, at least the Arch-based distros carrying this D.E. have it squared away.

brent

I did grab the .iso for giggles. The literature was exciting (I did the bolding):
"ThinStation is a basic and small, yet very powerful, Open Source thin client operating system supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, Redhat Spice, NoMachine NX, 2X ThinClient, Microsoft Windows terminal services (RDP, via RDesktop/FreeRDP), VMWare Horizon View, Cendio ThinLinc, Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS terminal and SSH (No special configuration of the application servers is needed to use ThinStation).

ThinStation is mainly intended for schoolroom, office, company or department use, but can be used at home (eg. for a silent PC in the bedroom that 'runs' XP on your workstation in the back room).

While ThinStation is based on Linux, users may actually never see Linux at all. If you decide to connect directly to a Microsoft Windows, Citrix or Unix server, the user will feel that they are running directly on the server. But, you can also have a local Desktop interface (with a local Browser & other tools).

ThinStation supports a Microsoft Windows-only environment and REQUIRES NO UNIX/Linux KNOWLEDGE.

ThinStation runs on ordinary PC hardware (64 bit i686 class). You may either reuse older computers or save a lot of time on workstation administration. Or both! An old Pentium-II with 128 MB RAM or better can be a perfectly useful workstation. And you don't need a hard disk - you can boot off the network and even have a silent workstation. Workstation devices (floppy/HD/CD/USB) and printers (LPT/USB) are supported."
edit/forgot end quotation mks

stalebrim

brent An old Pentium-II with 128 MB RAM or better can be a perfectly useful workstation.

@Staudey can confirm

minrvovrfc

LOL this stupid forum didn't let me edit my previous post a second time, was only trying to add the closed double-quote. Cheesh. I'm out of here.

WetGeek

minrvovrfc LOL this stupid forum didn't let me edit my previous post a second time, was only trying to add the closed double-quote.

That's happened to me as well. It's why I asked a while ago whether adding "edited" was really necessary. I assume it's so that one can't change what was said after someone else has already responded to it.

WhiteWolf

Btw anyone here ever used Enlightenment Desktop? If yes what distro were you using?

brent

WhiteWolf Moksha, a fork of Enlightenment, is an awesome desktop, and exclusive to Bodhi. It's not what I'd call compact or streamlined. It's warm and friendly and not overburdened as weird as that sounds. Liked it just fine.

minrvovrfc

brent I'd agree with you if only I could disable tap-to-click for touchpad. Otherwise I have to plug in an external mouse which I have like no room for, which makes that OS unusable to me.

I also wanted to like Pearl Linux but it is very slow. They have their own D.E. which is a cross between LXDE and XFCE and looks nice, and I was willing to tolerate an Ubuntu-based for the first time ever, but better if they offered Debian installer instead of Ubiquity. Also the Pearl Linux ISO comes only with the PearlDE and not updated in over six months so far. :/

https://discuss.getsol.us/d/9144-other-interesting-distros-part-6/44
(Picture of school hallway)

In the 1980's this would be a striking scene. "What movie is it?" or "Are they rich?" would be the first questions I would have asked. 😮

WetGeek

MX Linux 21.2.1 - Coming Attraction

No longer scheduled. This implementation of XFCE could charitably be described as unusable. I have no idea why that is -- whether it simply doesn't work in a VM, or whatever -- but if you don't want to use the defaullt configuration, there's not much configuration possible.

My first attempt was to move the panel from the left side to the bottom of the display. But the only options were vertical and horizontal. Apparently vertical also implies left edge, and horizontal implies top. When I changed the setting from vertical to horizontal, the panel moved to the top of the display. I spent a very long time trying to find a way to move it to the bottom, but there's no position setting, as there is with other distros.

Further attempts to configure the panel failed as well. I created eight virtual desktops, and there was already a workspace switcher on the end of the panel, but it displayed only four of the desktops, from Desktop 5 up to Desktop 8. And the switcher could not be moved to any other location on the panel.

CONCLUSION
I know how to configure an XFCE desktop environment. I just finished posting my review of the Pardus distro using XFCE, and ran into none of these issues. I simply could not get anything done with XFCE on this version of MX Linux. I've spent more than three hours trying, and my interest ended about an hour ago.

brent

WetGeek My first attempt was to move the panel from the left side to the bottom of the display. But the only options were vertical and horizontal. Apparently vertical also implies left edge, and horizontal implies top. When I changed the setting from vertical to horizontal, the panel moved to the top of the display. I spent a very long time trying to find a way to move it to the bottom, but there's no position setting, as there is with other distros.

Further attempts to configure the panel failed as well. I created eight virtual desktops, and there was already a workspace switcher on the end of the panel, but it displayed only four of the desktops, from Desktop 5 up to Desktop 8. And the switcher could not be moved to any other location on the panel.

About three years ago I did not have these problems when using it. It sounds like a sad regression. I can hear your hair falling out. Mine is reading that. You suffer through your art🙂. Horizontal means top only and vertical left? Ugh that's like handcuffs.
I do remember one thing from my time with MX---there were 18 (way too damn many) ways to do something and of those 18 many were not effective but it was a new distro...but nice looking

WetGeek

brent About three years ago I did not have these problems when using it.

I didn't, either. I might have mentioned that I recommended it to some of my friends. I wouldn't have done that unless it worked impressively well.

brent

THINSTATION UPDATE:
A very light no-frills system---very slim---a sleek racehorse. For the live session adwaita is the only icon installed, system bare bones. The only real app (to my surprise) is the Libre Suite, and you can save to the PC...that tells me Libre Office does not have a cloud or cloud presence(?).

A linux distro (based on Crux whatever Crux is) where Chrome is the default and ONLY installed browser tells you what its mission is. See my literature above. This is built for work/school. The variety of desktop login icon shortcut programs is an arsenal: from ssh to ms (3 apps) to google to a bunch of protocol logins I never heard of...this is wired to plug right into the matrix.

FAIL: took 4 screenshots in Thinstation: but Thinstation did not recognize/see both my usb (to transport the photos to show you) or the Ventoy USB. The was no gnome-disks. I completely spacedsudo mount blah blah blah because I forgot sudo whatever find mounted drives command is. I suppose I will email them to meself next time I'm in.
I'm here to inform you it appears Linux does have it's own chromebook...edit/hope someone qualified will review it🙂