Other Interesting Distros, Part 8

elfprince

WetGeek Isn't #1 working on this forum too? I can see what I am typing and can correct it while typing.

WetGeek

elfprince Isn't #1 working on this forum too?

No. Other forums provide a separate view of your work, with all the formatting you've used (italic, bold, etc.) applied to it. Looking at it is exactly like looking at your post after it's been posted. If all looks good there, you can post it as a separate action.

Short messages on the Solus forum aren't much of a problem in this respect. But in ones that are several pages long and contain a number of inserted screen capture images, it's easy to miss repeated words, edits that weren't quite what you intended, and such.

Then, when you read your posted message for the first time and spot them, you can't fix them because someone else beat you to your message.

elfprince

WetGeek Aha, I understand. From where I am coming from it is very different. I only post short text messages in my post, possibly a terminal code.
If you scroll down all the way to the end of other people's posts, you can see that Solus forum provides an 'echo' of your post in live time, including formatting. I see bold and italic is reflected as well. That for me is quite sufficient, but perhaps it is not for images etc.

brent

WetGeek I completely agree that a longer post, with pictures, formatting, bold, italics, and paragraph broken up accordingly can not be edited correctly before hitting post. It does need a preview function. I usually have to hit reply to publish, then look at my published post and edit from there quickly...
yeah a PITA sometimes. I can roll with it. Short posts, as you say, are unaffected.

Also I mostly get the incorrect number of new messages but the old Flarum had that idiosynchrancy too. Small potatoes on that one. But I see your point about the large messages.

WetGeek

elfprince That for me is quite sufficient, but perhaps it is not for images etc.

No, it provides images as well, but only after the message has already been posted once, not while you're creating it initially. Of course, once you've posted it that first time, and someone else acesses it, you're out of luck for any future edits.

It's also rather inconvenient to review a long message with lots of expanded image URLs, in the small area above the editing window.

elfprince

WetGeek Did you scroll down all the way, so you can see the buffer that reflects exactly what you are typing? I am not talking about the reply window, but a buffer on the forum screen at the bottom, just above the reply window. All formatting is reflected as you type, so you can correct all typos etc, before you hit post.

WetGeek

elfprince Did you scroll down all the way, so you can see the buffer that reflects exactly what you are typing?

I'm pretty sure I do that, but I'll be sure to pay careful attention and check that the next time I create a new, long, message. If you mean what I think you mean, I do. I also use Vivaldi's feature to enlarge the page contents to 130% to make it easier to what I'm typing on this HD laptop.

WetGeek

WetGeek If any of these complaints could be fixed by admin changes in the Flarum properties, that would be great!

And while I'm bitching about Flarum, I should point out that the number on the Notifications icon displays the correct number of unread notifications about half the time. Or maybe not quite that often.

Most of the time when I see a number there, I open the list to see what personal messages I haven't read yet, and find out that I've already read and answered them all.

[deleted]

Moving to phpbb when

WetGeek

Updating my Solus VMs

I've always taken the easy way out when creating my Solus edition VMs -- just BIOS installations on empty SSDs. They worked -- for some value of "worked." But my plan now is to keep these around for a long time, so I nuked the old VMs and created some that are better made for a change. I made four of them today -- Budgie, GNOME, MATE, and Plasma. Here's what the virtual disks looked like before I started the installers:

I wanted to upgrade to efi this time, so I created 1.0 GB boot partitions. I figured I could save a lot of time working with these VMs if I gave them swap partitions big enough to allow hibernating, so I don't need to restart all the software every time I boot a VM. The remainder is a typical root partition. The image above shows my Budgie VM's disk, where the OS occupies about 10.5 GB, leaving about 15.5 GB for operating storage. That's not a lot, but each of these VMs is connected to my NAS, so external storage is available.

Each of these VMs is configured as a daily-driver laptop, with Thunderbird, Vivaldi, games, system tools, and a connection to external storage. In othe words, about same as the VMs that I create for evaluating other interesting distros. I could use any one of these as a daily-driver for a day or more, and probably will.

WetGeek

WetGeek I wanted to upgrade to efi this time, so I created 1.0 GB boot partitions.

Many times I've read that EFI is a huge improvement over traditional BIOS, but I never had a way to compare them until now. This project allowed to do that, and I can now attest that the difference is indeed incredible. Immediately after installing these four VMs, the next thing I did was to update them. Those updates seemed to fly past. Likewise when I sysc'd Vivaldi and created 50+ start page shortcuts on each of them.

If you use VirtualBox for creating VMs, be assured that it is well worth the extra time and trouble to create your VMs partitions prior to installing the OS. All of he "live" .ISO files I've used include a partition editor, so it's easy to make the necessary edits before you start the installer.

From now on, whether I'm installnig an .ISO onto hardware or a virtual drive, I'll always take the time to do that.

[deleted]

WetGeek What's the difference?

WetGeek

[deleted] What's the difference?

I'm not a Linux software architect, but I know that the Basic Input Output System is the way software talks to the hardware. Since EFI is the BIOS's more modern replacement, I can only assume that it's there to do the same.

I'm not sure what all is stored in that little partition, but whatever it is appears to improve performance a lot. I'm accustomed to having to excuse a bit of slowness in my VMs, just because they're VMs. It usually shows up in mouse activity, and many times I've needed to complain about needing vertical scroll bars on documents because the mouse's "scroll wheel" had virtually no effect.

Most who know me know that I habitually install three solitaire games on the VMs I build. And if I play any of those games during the "daily driver" tests, I have to be prepared to click the mouse slowly, and often repeatedly. But I just launched my new Solus Budgie VM and played a game of Mahjongg (I use the "difficult" setting) in which I didn't need to click on any tile a second time. Not even once. I could simply click just as I do on my laptop, without being careful at all. And the game would respong just as quickly it does on the laptop host machine.

And no more frustration while trying to scroll through a document using the mouse wheel. This noticeable performance improvement carries on through the whole VM experience. I can't recommend it enough! Don't forget to click on the Enable ESP setting on the System category in the VirtualBox settings.

brent

WetGeek I'm so very happy to have Solus Budgie back. this is the experience I'm used to and adore and can work in day in and day out. Once I ridded the system of nautilus, and swapped in Nemo, I was good to go. I gave up a lot of tried and true habits and am on a non-clutter mission. From my backups I have brought little to budgie. Trying to different browsers, program, building my own stuff, etc.

That said, and long story short, I really don't need Fedora Budgie anymore. Since it's on a different disk, I think I'm going to bare metal install the Fedora Spin Plasma edition for kicks.

Will report back on this for your Part 8 thread (or 9 by that time?) after I've spent a few days with it. Or maybe you already reviewed it, I don't know.

[deleted]

WetGeek I tried to search for more clues, but the consensus seems to be it doesn't offer performance benefit for a running OS, mostly boot time (and support for GPT disks). So the performance increase you're experiencing is interesting. It may of course be that VirtualBox is able to do something more efficiently when the guest is in EFI mode.

Axios I've also grown to appreciate something that just works and gets stuff done. I used to run stuff like Arch but I realized I'm not so interested in doing maintenance all the time. I think Fedora is a good mix of "gets out of the way" and being cutting edge enough to not fall behind.

WetGeek

brent I think I'm going to bare metal install the Fedora Spin Plasma edition for kicks.

It will be a very big change, although a very worthwhile one, if you stick with it. This must be the new, adventurous Brent that I'm chatting with today. 🤣 The only thing I would suggest would be for you to install the Solus Plasma edition instead of Fedora. That way, you'll already be familar with 1/2 of your new system. I don't think any distro has ever done Plasma better than Solus does, and that includes KDE's Neon. It's newer, perhaps, but not better.

brent

WetGeek yes adventure for the new era of Solus! will weigh your advice. Just want to see what all the hub-bub is about. reckon Solus Plas or Fedora Plas it will be a tinkering DE for me. Talk to you when I am underwater 5 minutes after install🙂

Brucehankins

WetGeek I think Neon does Plasma the best (just my opinion) for the "all the Plasma goodies and goodness baked in" but is hamstrung by an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base. My favorite Plasma so far has been Endeavour, because I had to cobble it together myself to get it where Solus starts, and I learned a lot in doing so, but it's also just a simple DE that you can drop in and be comfortable also.
Solus has the best overall Plasma and OS combined experience out of the box to me. Simple and clean, yet has enough of the "goodies" baked in, but skips out on some of the bloat/fluff like the Discover store and deep akonadi integration.

Axios

This is going sound weird but I use to be one the guys the more nuts and bolts under the hood I could get to the happier I was Windows was that way.

But now as I get older I look for the happy medium where the tank is half full and I have just enuf to get the job
Done this seems to be more of a pleasurable experience.(But its has to be able to let me do it)

Gnome to little,Plasma to much,Mate in the middle its not that I cant handle like plasma I just dont want to
Solus Budgie I would put in the middle to (I dont know about the other budgie DE)
Stability and speed is number#1 on my list,Functionality is number#2

WetGeek

Brucehankins Solus has the best overall Plasma and OS combined experience out of the box

I agree. And that's what I was thinking of.

brent

"But now as I get older I look for the happy medium where the tank is half full and I have just enuf to get the job
Done this seems to be more of a pleasurable experience.(But its has to be able to let me do it)

Gnome to little,Plasma to much,Mate in the middle its not that I cant handle like plasma I just dont want to"

I was reminded of all your words tonight as I played in Open Mandriva Plasma and the NixOS Plasma--it was a nice Ventoy hour--...Mandriva much prettier...Nix more intriguing as far as reinventing the wheel. In many ways Plasma is "too much." the customizations seemed to bury any info on packaging, software center, updating....this info was hard to find in these installer isos. And every menu anywhere seemed to lead to more customizations. I wondered if there was a customization to mute the endless customization offerings?
I learned little about Nix or Mandriva OS' but that's OK. It's a really complete and exciting DE but very distracting. It wasn't more than I could handle but more than I wanted to handle tonight.

Initial impressions: I wanted to get to know Open Mandriva but was funneled to get to know Plasma instead.
Don't misread me, none of this is a turnoff. It's a really cool DE that I want to get a handle on.

When I understand how to wrench Plasma into a more pliable, subdued state then I can explore day to day life in Mandriva or Nix. But as a tinkerer when there is spare time. That soon-to-be empty bare metal HDD is burning a hole in my pocket, to mangle metaphors

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