Other Interesting Distros, Part 8

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

WetGeek

[deleted] It may of course be that VirtualBox is able to do something more efficiently when the guest is in EFI mode.

I think you're right. Your response caused me to do my own research (UEFI vs BIOS) and it convinced me that UEFI supports bigger disks, disks with more than 4 primary partitions, doesn't run in 16-bit mode, and so on, but the big advantage is faster boot times and support for more secure booting . Apparently it doesn't affect run time performance. Not normally, that is.

That came as a surprise to me, because I'd just personally observed a significant difference in performance between VMs that I'd been using for years in BIOS mode and VMs just recently created in UEFI mode.

[deleted]

WetGeek There may have been a coincidental change in something, but I don't really know. I'll try EFI next time I'm using a VM.

WetGeek

[deleted]

This is another example of Flarum's worst feature. I'd accidentally posted my unfinished response, and when I went on to finish it, I couldn't save the changes. For more years than I want to admit, I'd used CTRL+I to italicize text. Now, in the forum, I still start to do that before I stop and use the forum method instead. On rare occasions I don't catch myself, and actually do press CTRL+I, and I believe that's what caused the message to be posted prematurely.

Anyway, I went on to say that a virtual OS's BIOS and/or UEFI is provided by the VirtualBox software, not the host machine's motherboard. Thus, it's possible that UEFI has far more influence on the performance of VMs than it does on physical hardware.

It's also possible that the difference I'm seeing is the difference between the Solus VM I launched yesterday versus other distro's VMs that I had previously evaluated. To find out for sure, I'll need to do a lot more research -- perhaps by creating matching VMs of some distro, one using BIOS and the other using UEFI.

I'll start by reviewing my earlier forum threads where I complained about how poorly the mouse reacted on certain distros I was testing. If a new VM made from the same .ISO file -- but using UEFI instead -- runs differently, I'll have confirmed that a run-time difference does indeed exist for VirtualBox VMs. That will be my next project.

Thanks very much for your response to my original post! It encouraged me to find out much more about UEFI than I'd previously understood. The faster boot time alone is reason enough for me to keep making UEFI VMs, especially for ones that I plan to keep using for a long time. But now I also want to find out if there really is a performance difference, too.

In other words, can I really believe my lying eyes?

WetGeek

WetGeek It's also possible that the difference I'm seeing is the difference between the Solus VM I launched yesterday versus other distro's VMs that I had previously evaluated.

As I re-read this post, it also occurred to me that I'd created all those earlier VMs with VirtualBox 6.2 (I think). I created the newer Solus VMs using VirtualBox 7. That could have been yet another difference that needs to be eliminated if I'm to get to the bottom of this mystery.

So, I can't simply create a new UEFI VM of a distro that I'd tested before with a BIOS VM, because the VirtualBox versions are also different. (Solus didn't provide VirtualBox 7 until after it was recently restored.) I need to make both a BIOS VM and a UEFI VM using VirtualBox 7. First task now is to go back and search through those early reviews to find a really bad example, and then hope that I can still find its .ISO file stored on my NAS.

By the way, here's where I learned more about UEFI: https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/uefi-vs-bios.html.

WetGeek

WetGeek First task now is to go back and search through those early reviews to find a really bad example, and then hope that I can still find its .ISO file stored on my NAS.

I found a review of Zorin OS, where I explicitly mentioned that I needed to rely on vertical scroll bars, because the mouse wheel was useless. Due to an accident once upon a time, the Zorin .ISO was one of several that are no longer in the archive folder on my ISOs share, so I just downloaded a new copy.

Therefore, a test where both the BIOS and UEFI VMs respond normally to mouse input won't prove much, because today's version may not be the one I tested before. But if they respond differently, it will support my suspicion that the performance difference is because of VirtualBox.

WetGeek

WetGeek a test where both the BIOS and UEFI VMs respond normally to mouse input won't prove much, because today's version may not be the one I tested before

That took a while because I accidentally clicked on the Spanish language link that was immediately under the English link when I ran the installer. In Spanish, I can order cerveza at a restaurant and ask where the banyos are, but that's about it. So I restarted the installer and made sure to click on English that time.

I then installed this version of Zorin, minimally configured it, and installed kshisen and gnome-mahjongg. Aisleriot (for spider software) was already present, but I needed to install gnome-cards-data. I'm not sure whether to be happy or disappointed about this, but I played all three games briefly, and Zorin responded very smoothly to the mouse at all times. I had none of the drama I'd experienced with the Zorin VM I tested originally.

So, I'm happy for anyone who's using this version of Zorin, but I'm disappointed in that there was no reason at all to create a UEFI VM based on the same .ISO file. I'm convinced that the VMs would have been comparable.

My enthusiasm for figuring out what's changed to make my VMs so responsive now has finally run out. My interest in examining any more of the original troublesome distros is now gone. I'm not going to load Virtualbox 6.2 in order to compare the original VM with the one I just created using VirtualBox 7. I'm perfectly happy with creating UEFI VMs in the future, because there are so few extra steps, and indeed, they do boot faster.

Besides, we DVR'd the last regular season XFL game and we're watching it now. If the Seadragons beat the Vipers, we'll go to the playoffs.

[deleted]

WetGeek In Spanish, I can order cerveza at a restaurant and ask where the banyos are

Other interesting bistros thread when

[deleted]

I'm under impression this thread isn't just for reviews and more of a general Linux chit-chat thread, I have a quick PSA for you:

If you're making a backup script, evaluate well whether you need the rsync's --delete flag.
And if you do, do not test run the script with your home folder as the target.

Thanks for your time.

brent

[deleted] "delete extraneous files from dest dirs; delete files in destination which are not present in the source"
rsync --dry-run 🙂

[I ran grsync backups last night. 'Extraneous' is so loaded I wouldn't bother with the setting---couldn't decipher it!.
Ignore existing is the kind of delete I can handle.]

[deleted] If you're making a backup script, evaluate well whether you need the rsync's --delete flag.

Noted.

[deleted]

brent

'Extraneous' is so loaded I wouldn't bother with the setting---couldn't decipher it!.

It means that whatever exists in the target and not source -- poof, gone.

WetGeek

Manjaro Budgie

Installation

Its been many years since Manjaro was my go-to distro, and it's been quite a while since I reviewed it, so I figured it's about time to revisit it. And this time, rather than using my own favorite DE, I've decided to give Budgie some love and find out how Manjaro is doing with that. Manjaro is a popular distro that offers many DEs, and it's pretty well known that it's based on Arch.

The installation was pretty straightforward. Because I wanted to use an EFI boot, I started by running the "live" session from the .ISO file, and then used gparted to create a 1.0 GB boot partition, a 4.0 GB swap partition, and used the rest of the disk for the EXT4 file system. After the installer establisked the language and time zone, it displayed the page that asked about partitioning the disk. I told it to use my partitions, and when I moved to the next page, an error message complained that I hadn't established an EFI partition, and I would need to go back and do that, or it could later be problematic.

In fact, I had established such a partition, assigned it FAT32 as a format, and BOOT and ESP as flags. So I went back and verified all that with gparted, but when I clicked [Next] the same error message was displayed. So I backed up again, and this time chose the "use entire disk" option and specified creating a swap partition and allowing hibernation. Here's what the installer created:

The installer created a smaller boot partition, but with the same format and flags that my version included. I have no idea why this installer couldn't find my boot partition, but perhaps it was actually looking for the unallocated 2.0 MiB at the front of the disk? And a 4.0 GiB swap has been correct for every other VM I've created, as I always assign them 4.0 GB of memory. As I wrote, I have no idea, but it had no problem with the partitions it created.

I'll continue this soon, after I've had a chance to get some initial configuration done.

brent

WetGeek I've learned from bare-metalling it that your 1GB boot won't always fly and many distros will create only the space they need to store boot entries etc in the efi. and many are 300mib like this one (unlike solus 512).
In other words I've seen them dodge pre-made boot partitions to make their own and keep everything else the way you had it. and on the other hand I've seen them accept my hand-made boot partitions.
has to be the way the installer is written. always a surprise🙂.
budgie and orange?
🙁

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