Distro-hoppers anonymous

Colonel Panic · 2023-05-28 19:17:31

Sounds like it, yes.

dolly · 2023-05-31 15:53:54

Thanks for the mentioning of Spiral Linux guys, unintended probably, but thank you anyway. It might be just what I need? Will take a close look at the GNOME Bookworm edition when it arrives. Are playing around with the current stable live session of GNOME,and it looks promising. It is a little bit too late to install it since we are so close to Debian 12.

Martin · 2023-05-31 20:45:16

Yes, Spiral is an interesting alternative.

I am currently testing Salix installed on a virtual machine (Qemu) to see if the issues I had with Slint had to do with Slint or were of a more general nature.

Salix delivers a very coherent user experience. Everything works really well including the things that did not work in Slint. The base program selection is very sane (= in my taste). Gslapt deals with dependencies both when installing and removing software.

Only fail so far: no sound to my speakers. I don't know if that is a Qemu machine configuration issue (probably) or a Salix issue.

Salix would be a top candidate for my Lenovo X230 if the set-up for full disk encryption was less intimidating.

/Martin

DeepDayze · 2023-05-31 22:15:38

Martin wrote:

Yes, Spiral is an interesting alternative.
I am currently testing Salix installed on a virtual machine (Qemu) to see if the issues I had with Slint had to do with Slint or were of a more general nature.
Salix delivers a very coherent user experience. Everything works really well including the things that did not work in Slint. The base program selection is very sane (= in my taste). Gslapt deals with dependencies both when installing and removing software.
Only fail so far: no sound to my speakers. I don't know if that is a Qemu machine configuration issue (probably) or a Salix issue.
Salix would be a top candidate for my Lenovo X230 if the set-up for full disk encryption was less intimidating.
/Martin

You could try using another disk for temporarily installing Salix to bare metal for testing and to determine if the problem with sound is fixed. Sound issues are more common in the virtual environments than on live bare metal.

Colonel Panic · 2023-06-01 06:38:53

Martin wrote:

Yes, Spiral is an interesting alternative.
I am currently testing Salix installed on a virtual machine (Qemu) to see if the issues I had with Slint had to do with Slint or were of a more general nature.
Salix delivers a very coherent user experience. Everything works really well including the things that did not work in Slint. The base program selection is very sane (= in my taste). Gslapt deals with dependencies both when installing and removing software.
Only fail so far: no sound to my speakers. I don't know if that is a Qemu machine configuration issue (probably) or a Salix issue.
Salix would be a top candidate for my Lenovo X230 if the set-up for full disk encryption was less intimidating.
/Martin

Hi Martin,

I had a similar problem with sound in Slackware a while back, and this is how I solved it;

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=8058

Martin · 2023-06-02 05:47:35

Colonel Panic wrote:

Hi Martin,
I had a similar problem with sound in Slackware a while back, and this is how I solved it;
https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=8058

Scary. When I check I find a ton of things depend on pulsaudio. Removing it using gslapt would rip up the complete thing.

/Martin

hhh · 2023-06-02 08:15:30

^ Why not try using pipewire+pipewire-pulse+wireplumber?

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0 … replumber/
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0 … replumber/

https://www.linuxquestions.org/question … 175693980/

Here's what it looks like on Debian/Ubuntu...

Colonel Panic · 2023-06-02 13:42:46

Martin, I'd take hhh's advice over mine - it sounds a lot less risky. I can't really comment on pipewire because I've never used it.

taberacci · 2023-06-03 11:54:08

dolly wrote:

Thanks for the mentioning of Spiral Linux guys, unintended probably, but thank you anyway. It might be just what I need? Will take a close look at the GNOME Bookworm edition when it arrives. Are playing around with the current stable live session of GNOME,and it looks promising. It is a little bit too late to install it since we are so close to Debian 12.

About two weeks ago I installed Spiral GNOME, which comes with v38 of the desktop environment. Which means the workspaces are presented differently from later GNOME, the extensions aren't judged by an online site, by something else to install which allows telemetry and whatever... and the mouse click response is poor. At least on my 11-year-old computer.

I have installed Spiral GNOME. First I updated to the best I could for "Bullseye" v11. Then changed the "sources.list" to target "Bookworm" instead of "Bullseye". Then I did system update again. It's the best that could be done with the same look but with some GNOME things upgraded to v43 or v44. Sadly the mouse click response still isn't as good as with EndeavourOS GNOME v43 which I very sourly miss right now.

I have tried Debian GNOME from one of the "release candidate" ISO's. Didn't like it, too many dependencies intertwined so Libreoffice cannot be easily unistalled if one doesn't want it on his/her system. It could be purged but then GNOME desktop doesn't work properly. It might be another reason but it takes a lot of CPU cycles opening the file manager, visiting "Tweaks" and doing other things.

Another thing with Debian GNOME is that it installs an insane amount of language packs for Libreoffice and for Firefox ESR which take at least 500MB of valuable disk space. If the user has 100GB or more to waste then it's not much concern, but some of us would actually like to have things that we could use, thank you.

TL;DR summary: I liked "Bookwormified" Spiral GNOME, but with Debian GNOME's look right now.

taberacci · 2023-06-03 11:57:30

LOL this forum is more temperamental than I thought. Cannot quote @Colonel_Panic above.

Thank you for looking up about Gecko Linux. But there is no mention of a new ISO for "Rolling", because the one that exists is over nine months old. That is a concern and there are people scared by OpenSUSE that would really like an opportunity to try it out if they could handle a rolling-release distro.

DeepDayze · 2023-06-03 14:24:55

dolly wrote:

Thanks for the mentioning of Spiral Linux guys, unintended probably, but thank you anyway. It might be just what I need? Will take a close look at the GNOME Bookworm edition when it arrives. Are playing around with the current stable live session of GNOME,and it looks promising. It is a little bit too late to install it since we are so close to Debian 12.

You can simply upgrade to Bookworm from the current Spiral ISOs which are based on Bullseye and there's instructions provided how to update to the latest Debian release. So yeah right now with Bookworm's imminent release it won't be too big a step to upgrade.

dolly · 2023-06-04 07:41:37

DeepDayze wrote:

So yeah right now with Bookworm's imminent release it won't be too big a step to upgrade.

You are right about that, this is probably an ideal time for upgrading to Bookworm. However there are two things, first, I have mostly negative experiences with such big upgrades. And if things go bad with GNOME..., well I suspect that it would be too difficult for me. I could try of course, if things go bad they go bad and wait for the release.

Second, and important, would an upgrade now, not exclude eventual improvements from the developer in the next official release?

taberacci · 2023-06-04 11:20:23

I have installed Spiral GNOME. First I updated to the best I could for "Bullseye" v11. Then changed the "sources.list" to target "Bookworm" instead of "Bullseye". Then I did system update again. It's the best that could be done with the same look but with some GNOME things upgraded to v43 or v44. Sadly the mouse click response still isn't as good as with EndeavourOS GNOME v43 which I very sourly miss right now.

Probably I should have given "distro-upgrade" command to "apt" instead of just "upgrade". (shrugs)

Not really a fan of GNOME and I rather prefer the older one that exists for Spiral GNOME right now. The response to the mouse buttons is the only outstanding issue. I like that I could turn extensions on and off locally without ever going online, and without installing spyware or any weak stuff like that, like has to be done now.

EDIT UPDATE: Yes I had to do the "sudo apt full-upgrade" instead of "upgrade" while going from "Bullseye" to "Bookworm". So now I have GNOME v43 instead of the older one!

Last edited by taberacci (2023-06-04 17:28:18)

Colonel Panic · 2023-06-04 18:41:08

taberacci wrote:

LOL this forum is more temperamental than I thought. Cannot quote @Colonel_Panic above.
Thank you for looking up about Gecko Linux. But there is no mention of a new ISO for "Rolling", because the one that exists is over nine months old. That is a concern and there are people scared by OpenSUSE that would really like an opportunity to try it out if they could handle a rolling-release distro.

Hi again taberacci,

My preference is for Leap because I believe it's more stable, but the Gecko dev(s) say that there's no problem with Tumbleweed either and it's safe to use the existing isos despite the fact they're now several months old. Here's the whole thread again;

https://github.com/geckolinux/geckolinu … nt-5893263

If you don't mind using the unmodified Leap iso, the new one (15.5) is due out sometime next week.

Martin · 2023-06-07 19:24:35

Sound issue of Salix solved. I only had to open the Pulse audio GUI and toggle the mute 'button'.

So far Salix has been a joy to use.

/Martin

DeepDayze · 2023-06-07 19:32:11

Martin wrote:

Sound issue of Salix solved. I only had to open the Pulse audio GUI and toggle the mute 'button'.
So far Salix has been a joy to use.
/Martin

Just one of those "D'oh" moments...good you got sound working!

taberacci · 2023-06-09 07:12:21

I hope other people are having better luck than I am getting a late release of Cinnamon D.E. (not the latest shown now on Distrowatch).

That on a 11-year-old HP laptop.

Because I tried to lift Spiral Cinnamon to "Bookworm" status but it was temperamental. Nemo kept sticking up while I navigated directories. But it's probably because I booted from external disk and I had to restore it via Clonezilla. What a shame (CTRL) key worked in Windows apps through Wine, while in the older distro release it didn't. Unlike with GNOME, the upgrade with Cinnamon changed nothing about the desktop, still had ugly bottom panel and desktop menu. I didn't care to explore further to see if the whole thing was as slow as I suffered with Manjaro and Ubuntu, which had much-better-looking desktops. I would have kept Ubuntu Cinnamon, with Snaps and all (just ignore it or block it), if it didn't make me feel like I needed to buy another computer only to be able to use it. Checked out Liya Linux for the same desktop but I just think they're trying to replicate Linux Mint success which is Arch-based and which is bloated. Don't tell me to try Linux Mint, just don't, it was horrible for me last year.

Because of it I'm never going to upgrade Debian XFCE which started before there was such thing as "Bookworm DI-Alpha". I don't like the talk elsewhere about download situations at "gold date" and originally was going to wait the rest of this month until upgrading. Also I'm happy with what I have with Spiral GNOME, I just don't care about desktop v44 and later. LOL appreciate Debian for not jumping as quickly into GNOME v44 as they did with v43 in September last year...

That Debian XFCE is a work of art, truly unique, although I'm not using it a lot.

Colonel Panic wrote:

If you don't mind using the unmodified Leap iso, the new one (15.5) is due out sometime next week.

"Leap" is already out but cannot use an ISO directly from OpenSUSE because I cannot install to internal HDD. Only if I had "bare metal" to try I would have taken up the offer.

Last edited by taberacci (2023-06-09 07:15:06)

Martin · 2023-06-13 20:30:53

Returning briefly to my adventure of comparing window managers and desktop environments. After having done that it struck me that maybe I should revisit dwm. I did play around some with dwm many moons ago. I remember liking it but also that there were too many issues, too many programs that did not work well in dwm.

I installed dwm from Debian's repo on my Lenovo x230 and found none or at least very, very few of my old issues were to be found. I also found I still rather like dwm. Life went on and all of a sudden I found I had used dwm for a month. The only 'tweak' I did was to manually start xfce's power manager.

As of today I am back to i3. Over all i3 suits me better but only by the slightest of margins. Time permitting I think I could tailor dwm to take the top position from i3 on this computer.

/Martin

ratcheer · 2023-06-14 14:15:44

I used Openbox for a very long time, then experimented with other wms for a while. I liked spectrwm pretty well and used it for a few months. Then I went back to Openbox.

But for the past two or three years, I have been using Awesome. I really like it. It is easy to make it do things the way I want. Almost everything is in one big configuration file that they say is written in lua. But I didn't have to learn lua in order to make my changes, as all the entries are easy to understand.

DeepDayze · 2023-06-14 15:17:54

Martin wrote:

Returning briefly to my adventure of comparing window managers and desktop environments. After having done that it struck me that maybe I should revisit dwm. I did play around some with dwm many moons ago. I remember liking it but also that there were too many issues, too many programs that did not work well in dwm.
I installed dwm from Debian's repo on my Lenovo x230 and found none or at least very, very few of my old issues were to be found. I also found I still rather like dwm. Life went on and all of a sudden I found I had used dwm for a month. The only 'tweak' I did was to manually start xfce's power manager.
As of today I am back to i3. Over all i3 suits me better but only by the slightest of margins. Time permitting I think I could tailor dwm to take the top position from i3 on this computer.
/Martin

There's patches/mods for dwm floating around I am sure, so that you can customize dwm even more and perhaps even some of your annoyances might already been fixed.

#1981 2023-05-28 19:17:31

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1982 2023-05-31 15:53:54

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1983 2023-05-31 20:45:16

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1984 2023-05-31 22:15:38

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1985 2023-06-01 06:38:53

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1986 2023-06-02 05:47:35

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1987 2023-06-02 08:15:30

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1988 2023-06-02 13:42:46

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#1989 2023-06-03 11:54:08

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#1990 2023-06-03 11:57:30

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#1991 2023-06-03 14:24:55

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#1992 2023-06-04 07:41:37

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#1993 2023-06-04 11:20:23

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#1994 2023-06-04 18:41:08

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#1995 2023-06-07 19:24:35

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#1996 2023-06-07 19:32:11

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#1997 2023-06-09 07:12:21

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#1998 2023-06-13 20:30:53

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#1999 2023-06-14 14:15:44

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#2000 2023-06-14 15:17:54

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