MONTHLY
FOIBLES
...wherein
we discuss what did and didn’t work for us this month…
Moss, I
tried Manjaro on both of my laptops; in each case, it caused one of
my other installations to be hidden to Grub. No idea why. I had the
same problem with GeckoLinux, including having Gecko and Manjaro do
it to each other, but with Manjaro I still had boots to Linux Mint
and Bodhi (on the T430) whereas I did not have those with Gecko or on
a brief attempt at OpenSUSE.
And
after a lot of trying, I have come to the conclusion that Manjaro is
a no-go for me. When I do updates or install programs, the download
gets done and freezes. When I reboot and go to do the update or
installation, it finds the downloaded programs and installs them. I
contacted the users in the Manjaro Forum.
I'm
used to being told to go into Terminal and type this or that. The
Manjaro users told me to close the GUI entirely and go to a pure CLI.
That is a killer for a new user, and, for now, I'm not going to do
it.
Right
now, this leaves me with Pop!_OS, Q4OS and Pearl Desktop 8 for
September... PopOS uses a modified Gnome that a lot of power users
have been raving about. I am trying it, not deleting it, but it takes
4 clicks to do what I can do in 2 in MATE or Cinnamon or Plasma or
Budgie. Pearl Desktop is a hybrid of LXDE and XFCE which very
effectively achieves a MacOS-like desktop with lots of really cool
effects, on top of Ubuntu 18.04...but is written by one or more truly
right-wing radicals with the weather info set for a small town in
Alabama. This shows especially in the fact that the code name is
Qanon, Firefox opens with a link to Prophetic-News.com, and the
installation of Kodi comes pre-loaded with QAnon and Infowars
plugins. I have cleaned it liberally (pun intended), and am still
using it. There are also only two mirrors for the Pearl bits of the
distro, which reduces its accessibility considerably. I believe the
forum is also very lightly attended, and given the theme of this
distro, I’m not sure I’d want to talk to them (after they found
out my own political leanings, at least).
The
good news is that I asked the users of the Telegram and Discord
groups which of the three distros I should report on this month. The
voting was light, but was tilted toward Q4OS.
I
also got the last few pieces of my “new” Raspberry Pi 2B+,
donated by listener chbmb, so I have to get down to work using it to
free up my other computers a bit. He sent everything -- a new
mini-keyboard, new power supply, new case, and new SD card in
addition to the barely used Pi. I’m not sure whether I’m going to
set up a personal cloud, a video server, or something else… lots of
options. And I put Enlightenment E22 as an optional desktop on
my Linux Mint installation, T430, just last night.
Tony,
So for me, I have been setting up a new (refurbished) PC for my
wife, a Dell Optiplex 7010 i5 with 8Gb RAM and 2 x 250Gb drives, a
primary SSD with the Mint 19.2 Mate, and the HDD with Win10 set up in
dual boot mode. I have also been having fun joining the Big Daddy
Linux live stream again. Despite the fact it is 1-4am my time I have
a blast, they are a great group of folks and
Barbara
Harris
one
of the regular participants was the subject of the Linux Spotlight
episode on the 11th September. I’ve also been on
Holiday/Vacation again so not quite as much time to test this month
but my review Distribution has been well used for, the over 4 weeks
including it has been installed. I also joined the Euro BDLL episode
on the Saturday we arrived in Brussels, geeking doesn’t stop just
because I’m on holiday.
In
my spare time I’ve been making Jam, there is a local glut of wild
berries and I picked some Damsons from the burial ground at my Quaker
Meeting House a couple of weeks ago. I plan to make some marmalade
for home-made gifts shortly, ready for later in the year. So what
with the distro review and other geeky stuff I’ve managed to keep
myself occupied despite my life of retired leisure.
DISTRO
NAME:
Tony’s
Review this month was OpenSUSE
Tumbleweed
INSTALLATION
So
for information this months installation was done as a sole install
on my Toshiba Portege Z30 the specification is as follows, this is
the same machine I used for last month's EndeavourOS review:
Intel®
Core™ i5-4210U CPU 2cores and 4 threads @ 1.70GHz to 2.7GHz 128Gb
M2 SSD and 8Gb DDR3 Ram.
So
I booted up the USB drive and went directly to the install option as
I had downloaded the 4.3Gb off-line install iso, the first thing is
it checks for a network and gives you the WiFi logon option if not
connected by cable once connected it checks the installer for
updates, obviously if not connected to the network I assume it would
would skip straight to the Welcome and licence agreement. You don’t
actually have to click anything to agree to the LA but I assume by
clicking next you are basically saying your OK with it. It then
analyzes the system I’m again assuming it’s checking for hardware
it needs to configure after this you get asked what repoes you wish
yo use I left the defaults checked. Once the repoes are configured
you get asked what type of system and DE you want if opting for a
desktop and not server installation. Of the 4 options which are
generic, KDE Plasma, Gnome and XFCE I chose XFCE as I was getting to
like this while running EndeacourOS last month, at the time of the
review there is no option for installing MATE or Cinnamon from the
offline iso but there are Live iso’s available for those DE’s.
You
then move on to disk partitioning you do have some options other than
the suggested one but as I was installing to the whole drive on this
PC I went with the suggested option. I later did a dual boot on
another laptop and used the guided and expert options to see how
these worked and managed a successful dual boot install although you
do need quite a bit of knowledge of partitioning to choose this as it
is not the best of installers for a newcomer to Linux. I would
definitely do a little practice in a virtual machine before trying a
dual boot on an actual PC if your in anyway unsure.
Once
you are happy with the partitions you can go ahead and install, you
then get prompted to set up your location, username and password once
these are set you get presented with the system configuration you
have you have set and the option to abort, install or ask for help,
at this point I clicked install. About 20-25 minutes later I was
fully installed.
POST
INSTALLATION HARDWARE FACTS & ISSUES
After
install, all of the Laptop’s hardware seemed to be working,
including WiFi, so I was good to go and find all my software that I
use. After installing all my usual software I had a major issue in
that by default not all the codecs needed to play video and audio are
included out of the box, but thanks to the help of CubicleNate's
Techpad
and
before that a little bit of web research I was able to install
everything needed for multimedia to work.
EASE
OF USE
So
another new Linux and another new package management system. While
OpenSUSE uses .rpm packages these are managed by the YaST package
management system and the command line access to this is Zypper. most
commands in a terminal however have a familiar ring to them and I
also found out that if you accidentally use an apt command it will
work as they have set apt up as an alias for Zypper, although I’m
not sure if this would apply across the board.
Updates
and software installation can also be managed in the YaST GUI package
management interface, this is more like the synaptic package manager
than a GUI software installer so some knowledge of what you are
installing is needed although I didn’t have any issues in the time
I was using the system. There is an indicator on the bottom right of
the taskbar in XFCE that indicates if updates are available and in my
case I used this to prompt me to run the install updates in a
terminal and never had any issues.
APPLICATION
ISSUES:
As
Tumbleweed is a rolling release and although not quite as cutting
edge as ARCH, they do a little more quality assurance before pushing
out updates, you are unlikely to be very far from the latest software
that is installed on your system at the time of this recording
Audacity was on 2.3.2 and LibreOffice was 6.3.1.1 and XFCE was the
latest 4.14 which had been released about a week or so before I
started the review.
MEMORY
USE:
On
first boot the system reports about 560Mb of RAM usage in both STACER
and neofetch so with the resources available to this PC that is a
good 150Mb lower than I would expect of MATE and GNOME runs at about
1-1.1Gb of RAM at boot. As the minimum recommended RAM is 2Gb this
may be a little lighter on a PC with less RAM as I’ve found Linux
to be quite good at managing memory usage on lower specified
machines.
EASE
OF FINDING HELP
OpenSUSE
has a great Forum
here
although
for the month I’ve been running it, apart from the issues with
Media Codecs which I was helped with mainly by Cubicle Nate, I’ve
not had any issues to go and seek help for, as this is a laptop
without any special graphics it just works. So I can not comment on
how friendly those using the Forum are.
PLAYS
NICE WITH OTHERS
I
did do a dual boot on another Laptop and didn’t have much of an
issue getting it installed, I used the expert option as it already
had a dual boot on the PC and I was able to wipe out the other Linux
install and substitute OpenSUSE without any major drama. Again if
your not familiar with custom partitioning then you might like to
take a look at a YouTube video of this in OpenSUSE or do a couple of
dry runs in a VM before committing to bare metal.
STABILITY
No
issues the install has stayed as solid as the day it was installed
despite many updates being processed and a number of major software
packages installed. One thing on the software side however was that
my Discord Desktop App became corrupted in the last week of the test,
but Discord updates each time you open it so this might be a Discord
issue no OpenSUSE.
RATINGS:
Ease
of Installation
new
user friendly install scores 6/10
experienced
Linux users 8/10
Hardware
Issues 10/10
Ease
of Finding Help (Community, Web) I didn’t really test this ?/10
Ease
of Use 8/10
Plays
Nice With Others 8/10
Stability 9/10
SIMILAR
DISTROS TO CHECK OUT
OpenSUSE
15.1
EndeavourOS
- ARCH based rolling release
PCLinuxOS
- Rolling release with apt package management
Manjaro
- Again an ARCH based distro
Fedora
Rawhide - WARNING this is the development branch and as such NOT
stable
GeckoLinux
- from Moss
FINAL
COMMENTS
Considering
that for the majority of my Linux using life I would not have
considered the option of using a rolling distro, along with PCLinuxOS
and EndeavourOS that I have tested for the show, and now OpenSUSE
Tumbleweed. Yes you need to have a fair understanding of Linux before
you consider Tumbleweed as a daily driver but it is a great distro
for anyone who is willing to use the terminal and YaST package
manager and can manage without a GUI Software installer. It was no
more difficult to get my head around than PCLinuxOS and as it was
more configured out of the box less needed to be installed after the
initial installation than with EndeavourOS as that only gives you a
base install. The acid test is could I run Tumbleweed as my daily
driver and I would have to say yes to that, in fact for 80% of the
time over this last month I have used Tumbleweed as just that. When I
was on Big Daddy Linux Live a few weeks ago Rocco asked me if in all
my Distro Hopping I had come across a bad distro and I said so far
that I had not, well I can add Tumbleweed into the good category.
DISTRO
NAME: Moss,
review for
this month is
Q4OS.
MY
HARDWARE:
I
ran Q4OS on my Lenovo IdeaPad 110-15acl-80TJ with 4 Gb RAM and a 500
Gb hard drive, currently with 3 partitions. I later installed it on
my Lenovo ThinkPad T430, with 8 Gb RAM, a 500 Gb hard drive, and a
32” external monitor.
INSTALLATION
For
me, an installation includes the full installation and all updates.
If I can manage it, I then replace LibreOffice (if provided) with
SoftMaker Office, install my preferred VPN (PIA), and set up Grub
Customizer (if available) or other Grub management, and then install
my printer (Brother MFC-J491DW), a simple matter on .deb and .rpm
distros, not so much on others. I usually try to install Stacer so
that I can get good stats and a few extra controls.
I
will state that, during this month, I stopped using Mullvad as my VPN
and have switched to PIA. PIA should be easier to install in those
less-mainstream distros I’ve been reviewing, but is not quite as
simple as Mullvad to install in .deb or .rpm distros. It was an easy
install here. My wife has been having some trouble with PIA, as have
I, but it as been easily fixable for me by switching VPN nodes.
Back
to Q4OS The installer is Calamares. It installed on the IdeaPad
without running into the imaginary partition bug, and was an
extremely easy and pleasant experience. You have the option of
installing full, basic, or light editions, and either *just* Trinity
Desktop or *both* Trinity and Plasma 5. I chose the former, but at a
later time I added Plasma. It was seamless and simple. I was about to
rave about Calamares and say they fixed the bug, but a couple weeks
later I installed Q4OS on my T430, and ran into the imaginary
partition bug yet again, so that bug is apparently hardware-specific.
This is the first bug I’ve run into on Intel that was not a bug on
AMD, most of my prior issues have been with the drivers on the AMD
machine.
POST
INSTALLATION HARDWARE ISSUES
Just
as with Tony’s experience with Debian 10 Buster, there have been no
issues with the installation on my IdeaPad. This distro is little
else than Buster with a special Desktop. On the ThinkPad T430,
however, I had trouble getting Trinity to use my external monitor,
apparently I hit a setting wrong but I don’t seem to be able to fix
it. The T430 worked perfectly in Plasma, however. I did notice that
if you set the boot for autologin, it will automatically boot to
Trinity, or I did not find the switch to set “use last desktop”.
EASE
OF USE
It’s
as easy to use as you would expect Debian 10. The desktop itself is
vanilla XP if you leave it as installed, and changing the wallpaper
to something more pleasant than plain sky blue is simple; indeed they
have a nice grassy plain which resembles Windows Bliss but without
the hill, included in the distro, and of course you can find
wallpapers everywhere.
The
reason the developers give for making this distro is to serve
businesses, most of whom have never felt the need to leave XP except
that it is no longer secure. Add in Debian 10 Buster and your
security issues vanish. And Trinity Desktop is a fork of KDE 3.5,
created when KDE 4 turned out to be such a slow, laggy memory hog. If
you don’t like Trinity, Plasma 5 is just a re-login away.
Continuing
with my installation, PIA works great. The printer installed
flawlessly. And as Tony reported last month, Grub Customizer
has been added to the Debian repo so I didn’t even have to gripe
about not being able to install PPAs. SoftMaker, Stacer,
Discord, everything went in as easy as using Gdebi or apt.
I’m
finding that connecting to wifi away from home is not automatic in
most cases, and PIA does not load automatically but loads right up
when selected, so I keep the icon on my desktop. This is only true in
Trinity, and everything is automatic in Plasma.
I
have also found that my KDE games have Trinity versions which are a
lot more primitive and don’t always work; again, boot to Plasma and
everything works great.
What
was it about KDE 3.5 that needed to be moved away from? Animations?
This is a very satisfying desktop, and would be very well suited to
business or home. You say it’s not modern? Are you comparing it to
cave drawings, or Plasma 5? It’s a nice desktop, in appearance and
functionality.
MEMORY
USE:
With
Firefox open, the IdeaPad is using 1.8 or 1.9 Gb as I type, and only
8.9 Gb of hard drive is in use, a little heavy for a machine with
only 4 Gb of memory, but that’s what swap files are for. With
Firefox closed, Stacer reports about 765 Mb RAM in use. On the
ThinkPad it appears to use less memory than that, which is
interesting as it has twice the RAM to work with.
EASE
OF FINDING HELP
This
is interesting. There is a lot of documentation on KDE 3.5… but
apparently the Q4OS people did not get permission to use it, as many
of the doc pages are blank, with appeals for people to volunteer to
fill them in.
The
Q4OS forum uses FluxBB software, and has 618 registered users. That’s
not really enough to expect a quick response for any question you may
have, in my opinion. I haven’t really needed support, except
for screenshots (which I got from our own users) -- PrtSc merely
captures the current screen to your clipboard instead of opening a
screenshot program, which confused me. You have to go to the Desktop
and right-click to save it, and that help I got from our listeners.
I’m trying to figure out how to map that key to a screenshot
program.
PLAYS
NICE WITH OTHERS
I
have had no problems running or arranging other distros on my
multiboot system.
STABILITY
Well,
first, it’s Debian, latest edition, so that’s as stable as it
could be. And second, it’s 1.5 versions old of KDE, or the current
Plasma 5 desktop, which are as mainstream as you can get. So this is
as solid as you get, perfect for business -- but it’s also perfect
for just about anyone else who doesn’t care about wobbly windows or
cool animations, or if you do, just use Plasma.
SIMILAR
DISTROS TO CHECK OUT
Debian
10 Buster - a lot harder to install, but about the same otherwise
MX
Linux - I don’t know whether they have updated to Buster yet, but
they will.
Nothing
at all uses Triniity Desktop.
RATINGS:
Ease
of Installation
new
or experienced user 9/10
except
for if you encounter the bug 7/10
Hardware
Issues 7-9/10
Ease
of Finding Help (Community, Web) 7/10
Ease
of Use 8/10
Plays
Nice With Others 9/10
Stability 10/10
FINAL
COMMENTS
Nobody
I know is using this distro. Does that have to do with their
marketing or the sparse documentation? I know a lot of people who
loved XP and left for Linux when Microsoft tried to push them to Win7
would love this; indeed, I had forgotten how much I liked XP and how
simply usable it was, and you’re not stuck with the XP-like desktop
but can easily switch to the latest Plasma. But businesses have
either been swayed to newer Windows or already have a Linux farm, and
probably have overlooked this option. I may keep it on my IdeaPad for
a while.
NEW
RELEASES THIS MONTH: - from
our last show to present
Univention
Corporate Server 4.4-2
CentOS
8.0.1905
Bluestar
5.3.1
Hyperbola
0.3
Volumio
2.618
ClonOS
19.09
Lakka
2.3.1
ReactOS
0.4.12
Parrot
4.7
KDE
Neon 20190919
Endeavour
OS 2019.09.15
PCLinuxOS
2019.09
CentOS
7.7.1908 - last of 7.x
Clonezilla
Live 2.6.3-7
Emmabuntus
DE3-1.00
Porteus
Kiosk 4.9.0
GhostBSD
19.09
Endless
OS 3.6.3
EasyOS
2.1.3
EasyOS
1.2.3
Omarine
6.2
Endless
3.6.3
Slax
9.11.0
Voyager
10.1
ArcoLinux
19.09.1
Manjaro
18.1.0
Funtoo
Linux 1.4
OSGeoLive
13.0
Live
Raizo 10.19.09.11
KDE
neon 20190912
SmartOS
20190912
KaOS
2019.09
Debian
9.11.0
LXLE
18.04.3
Debian
10.1.0
Archman
GNU/Linux 2019-09
Tails
3.16
IPFire
2.23 Core 135
Kali
Linux 2019.3
Condres
OS 19.09
Linux
From Scratch 9.0
4MLinux
30.0
Linux
Lite 4.6
BlackArch
Linux 2019.09.01
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
We
have had a number of users who have wanted to submit their own
reviews for Distrohoppers’ Digest, so we are now planning to
produce a User-Only show, Distrohopper’s Digest User Edition. We
have posted the criteria to be used in your review on the blog at
https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com.
We did not get any submissions in September.
Please
submit your review in .flac format if you can, but we can accept .mp3
if that’s the best you can do. Submitting a script of what was said
will also help our listeners, but is not required. Please send your
submission to distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com.
Moss
I live in a rather impoverished area for a reason, it’s the only
pleasant place my wife and I can afford to live. While I don’t want
to make money as a podcaster per se (or am hesitant to do so), I do
need to feed the digital habit to keep doing this show and my other
show. My eyesight is not the best, so I am hoping for a 17”
laptop. I would like to get a Lenovo ThinkPad G70-80, which I can get
on eBay between $150-225, or a similar Dell. Some listeners have
offered to send me money, and I have received a very nice, complete
Raspberry Pi 2B+ with a new case, keyboard, power supply and SD card.
I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be thought of in this way. I’m
supporting myself and my wife on Social Security and a part time job.
I
have decided to set up an account at Sponsus, which is open source
and is kinda like Patreon; Michael Tunnell uses this. My
Sponsus is at https://sponsus.org/zaivala
.
Minimum donations are $3 per month due to how the site processes
payments. I have no idea what premiums to offer; you tell me what you
want and I’ll see what I can do. You can also make direct donations
to my PayPal if that is convenient, use the address
zaivalananda@gmail.com. Contact me for other ways to donate. All
donations will go to equipment for the shows, and any overflow will
be used to help establish a Linux Users Group in my area.
Transparency will be provided to donors. Anything you can do to help
will be very much appreciated. Please tell me if you want your name
used on the show, whether you make a Sponsus, PayPal or direct
donation.
Our
next show will be recorded on October 30th, 2019. There will be a
User Edition in about two weeks if we get any submissions. Visit our
website at https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com
and
follow us on MeWe, Discord and Telegram at our mintCast groups, and
please contact us at distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
if
you have any comments or distro suggestions.
I appreciate the honest review of openSUSE. I just wanted to add some notes. The aptitude compatibility package is called, "zypper-aptitude". It has translated all the commands I threw at it but I wouldn't consider myself an Aptitude power user. When it comes to desktop selection, they are almost all available in openSUSE and accessible from the installer itself. Although it does not present the options as easily as some of the others, you can customize the package selection before committing and select a desktop pattern for alternative desktops or if you want a more "minimal" installation.
ReplyDeleteThere is not a graphical "AppCenter" as you might see on some distros for openSUSE. You can use Discover in Plasma but an even better option would be to use https://software.opensuse.org/explore
Here you can search for applications and use the "Direct Install" option for whatever applications it is you would like that are available. It should also be noted that you are able to use Snaps and Flatpak as well as AppImages. Consequently, you have access to a pretty wide breadth of software. For better or worse, you didn't get a chance to get to know the community through the forums. It is almost unfortunate (I think...) you didn't have a problem you couldn't take there because the Forum is chock-full of incredibly technically proficient, kind and helpful people.
If you are up for it, I wouldn't mind digging into the issue you are having with Discord on openSUSE. I can't replicate the problem but problem solving is a fun activity. So... hit me up on Discord? ;)
Thanks for the podcast.
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