Distro-hoppers anonymous

Colonel Panic · 2023-07-10 11:31:36

DeepDayze wrote:

Also a sudo apt --purge autoremove should help cleaning up left-over packages no longer needed.

Thanks, I've tried it now but but bleachbit turned out to be better (I've just recovered 928.8 MB of hard drive space in total with it). It's far more comprehensive in what it flags up for possible deletion, and it saves the settings you chose for it for the next time you run it.

[Edit: I found sudo apt --purge autoremove very useful today when I was in Neptune and Firefox insisted on displaying itself in German, so thanks for the info there. There was nothing for it but to remove Firefox completely and reinstall it.]

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-07-13 11:46:02)

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-02 08:13:48

I got a new (for me) computer recently from a charity shop for the homeless in Cambridge (England), so I'm testing it out to see which distros work with it and which don't. It came with Mint so it's a given that that one's OK, but it seems I have to avoid anything Arch-related becase Arch can't pick up the network card and it needs to be able to do that in order to install itself on my hard drive.

I installed Fedora 38 from the cover disk of a Linux magazine and it's working well (I'm posting from it now).

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-02 08:25:38)

Nili · 2023-08-02 13:32:39

^Enjoy and have fun!

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-03 13:37:41

Thanks Nili. I feel that my days of trying any and every distro in sight are over now though. It's just so much work setting up, moving files around and (sometimes) editing config files as well, every time you install a new distro. I'll just stick to a few that work well with this machine (I've got 500 GB of hard drive space now, so plenty of room).

Fedora is good though, but it's very heavy on updates. I like Open SUSE Leap as well; it's very stable and reliable but doesn't give you quite as big a choice of packages as Debian and nor are they the most up to date ones (but I suppose that's the price you pay for the stability and reliability).

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-03 14:00:13)

Nili · 2023-08-03 19:54:56

Any time. Personally, i have become lazy and impatient doing WM edits. My days of editing WM(s) are over too, but i don't think i'll stop Distro-hopping. That's why i fell short with DE after i bought a new tower desktop and a 4K monitor.

These last two years the most i have used Fedora with GNOME and Tumbleweed with KDE both on wayland.
I had the safest and quietest experience there with Fedora GNOME until one day out of blue i decided to try KDE since i had never been used at all. The first impression was extraordinary as i liked it immensely. From KDE Plasma i found a little more room to make easy themes/settings edits.

After ten years in Debian, or Debian-based, I really needed to look to other distros.

I think whichever offers the best opportunity we'll, be it Debian, Arch, openSUSE, Fedora, Void i'll give it a try.

I have already stopped at openSUSE, I believe i'll try many others in the future.

What i miss from Debian? is it the tracker.

Debian
openbox-tracker@debian
openSUSE
openbox-tracker@opensuse

What extraordinary data from Debian, sincerely openSUSE tracker i don't like it at all, too plain odd and dull.
I navigate tracker for packages data and Debian have it the greatest. Indeed... Debian have a lot more packages versus openSUSE, the later not only has fews, but also has many shortcomings. But, KDE imho is to solid, stable and rolling... that's the main reason i'm stick into this distro among others from KDE Dolphin, Gwenview, Konsole, Kate, Elisa etc..

I still have some fuel in me for Distro-hopping so far

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-03 22:24:36

Thanks for replying. I've never been a fan of Gnome (at least not from 3 onwards, although I like some of the software that comes with it such as gedit), but I agree that OpenSUSE is good. So is Gecko, which takes an OpenSUSE base and adds a few things like multimedia codecs to give a more out of the box experience.

Void's one I've never tried though I have seen good things said about it.

Nili · 2023-08-04 12:56:32

I used to have fun with GTK themes mostly GTK2 now looks a bit dated, things became difficult with GTK3 but, there were still rooms to make changes, while with GTK4 they seem even more complex to me. This matter was resolved passing on KDE.

Editing Breeze seems simpler. I was a geany fan, early leafpad on #! for text editor.

Really Tumbleweed for me that i use for almost a year now is it been solid distro.
Gecko, i checked from his LIVECD, but since i manage to make TW working with codecs, themes, packages i think don't need Gecko. However, appreciate what it offers for newbies on openSUSE, especially for those that have issues with codecs, packman, opi and so on out of box.

Never been used Void, but it's my target to check it.

ratcheer · 2023-08-04 13:25:04

Editing the config for Awesome WM has been a breeze. The settings just make sense and they work the way they're supposed to, at least the ones I've worked on. I've been using Awesome for about three years now.

DeepDayze · 2023-08-04 16:41:07

Nili wrote:

I used to have fun with GTK themes mostly GTK2 now looks a bit dated, things became difficult with GTK3 but, there were still rooms to make changes, while with GTK4 they seem even more complex to me. This matter was resolved passing on KDE.
Editing Breeze seems simpler. I was a geany fan, early leafpad on #! for text editor.
Really Tumbleweed for me that i use for almost a year now is it been solid distro.
Gecko, i checked from his LIVECD, but since i manage to make TW working with codecs, themes, packages i think don't need Gecko. However, appreciate what it offers for newbies on openSUSE, especially for those that have issues with codecs, packman, opi and so on out of box.
Never been used Void, but it's my target to check it.

Plasma has gotten better with the most recent release and now uses less resources. Plasma 6 is looking promising and hopefully be easier to configure as I miss having a lot of config options like in KDE 3.5!

Nili · 2023-08-04 17:09:27

DeepDayze wrote:

Plasma has gotten better with the most recent release and now uses less resources. Plasma 6 is looking promising and hopefully be easier to configure as I miss having a lot of config options like in KDE 3.5!

Already is it better even on current Plasma 5.27.7. I haven't doubt it, I am a regular follower of Nate posts. I'm looking forward to the day when it finally comes to the public.

Don't know anything about KDE2/3/4. I was all time on GNOME sides, Plasma 5 fulfills for my daily tasks absolutely fine.
As i said, even now on 5.27.7 it offers many opportunities of using or edting, so no doubt Plasma 6 will be pretty BIG and great release.

DeepDayze · 2023-08-04 17:21:38

Nili wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
Plasma has gotten better with the most recent release and now uses less resources. Plasma 6 is looking promising and hopefully be easier to configure as I miss having a lot of config options like in KDE 3.5!
Already is it better even on current Plasma 5.27.7. I haven't doubt it, I am a regular follower of Nate posts. I'm looking forward to the day when it finally comes to the public.
Don't know anything about KDE2/3/4. I was all time on GNOME sides, Plasma 5 fulfills for my daily tasks absolutely fine.
As i said, even now on 5.27.7 it offers many opportunities of using or edting, so no doubt Plasma 6 will be pretty BIG and great release.

I disliked GNOME but Cinnamon is like what GNOME should have been, but Plasma is now becoming my daily driver DE these days. Someday maybe a Plasma spin of BL with a theme that matches BL now would be nice if that were to ever happen

Nili · 2023-08-04 19:07:59

DeepDayze wrote:

I disliked GNOME but Cinnamon is like what GNOME should have been, but Plasma is now becoming my daily driver DE these days. Someday maybe a Plasma spin of BL with a theme that matches BL now would be nice if that were to ever happen

Cinnamon, i used early. 2013 it was the last i used Cinnamon. At that time it was little buggy also my old tower was dated and dull. Cinnamon extensions were very good. I have had positive experiences with Mint/Cinnamon that have already remained in memory of good things. I stayed on the forum for a few years, posting from #! OS

Plasma all the way for me as well.

In my opinion BL may remain faithful to Openbox/Tint2, its users are specifically dedicated to this couple.
Users of big DE GNOME/Plasma/Cinnamon/XFCE have it easier with a system like Debian, so they'll do it themselves.

I might be wrong, but i don't think BL resources are enough to manage Plasma due to limited time, or staff not very large, so they're better with Openbox standalone.

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-04 23:11:36

I quite like Cinnamon (I'm using it now), but I can't find a way with it to simply list all the windows I've got open across all workspaces as I can in XFce. The best I've found is to go Ctrl-Alt-Down Arrow to show all the windows in the current workspace, and Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow to show all the workspaces.

I agree with Nili; I can't see Bunsen having a KDE / Plasma version because of the extra demand on devs.

OpenSUSE; I generally go with Leap because it prioritises stability and reliability at the expense of always having the latest packages, but I've seen Tumbleweed users saying that they haven't had any problems with either stability or reliability. Tumbleweed is still available in a 32-bit version, which Leap isn't.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-04 23:22:29)

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-13 19:50:06

I've also installed Xubuntu 23.04 (from the same cover disk as I installed Fedora 38 from), and the latest beta of AntiX 23.

Xubuntu 23.04 works OK most of the time but it's not 100% stable. I've had a couple of small crashes which I had to send a report back to the devs about (the system automates this so it's fairly easy), so I think the last LTS version of Xubuntu (22.04) is a better bet.

AntiX is working well too. I know it's been criticised here for being ugly and certainly it can look clunky, but it's got an attractive default wallpaper now with the AntiX logo in 3-D brass letters against what looks like a tablet screen background.

I also like the fact that by default in AntiX you can switch between the various window managers from the menu without having to log out first. It doesn't have systemd though, and this may be a drawback for people who prefer it.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-13 19:55:45)

hhh · 2023-08-13 23:21:42

^ I'm using a BunsenLabs/Openbox setup on Ubuntu 23.04 with the latest stable mainline kernel (6.4.10). The last two stable kernels (6.4.9 and *.10) have been crash-free on this hardware (Lenovo i3 "el cheapo" Walmart laptop). I can't think of any reason that Xfce is to blame for crashing, not that you implied that. The default GNOME desktop was pretty crash free too, once I upgraded the default kernel, and I had to do that anyway to get my backlight keys to work. Win-win.

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-14 22:39:09

Thanks for replying hhh. I think I had a filesystem problem in Xubuntu, because it showed up when I tried to mount the Xubuntu partition from elsewhere. I got this message;

mount: /mnt/sda8: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda8, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

I ran e2fsck on it to try and fix it, and so far it's been OK since.

[Edit: I spoke too soon, there was a problem with the screensaver, which was crashing and then making the display flicker on and off. I've since disabled and then deleted it.

It may just be my machine though, so I'm not making a definitive statement about Xubuntu 23.04.]

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-15 20:26:31)

Colonel Panic · 2023-08-16 16:34:33

Thanks again DeepDayze for

sudo apt --purge autoremove

which I've just had to use in LegacyOS after I made a frightful mess of LibreOffice.

Update; I've given up with Xubuntu 23.04 now, life's too short. Obviously as always your mileage may vary and I'm not saying anyone else is going or even likely to have the same problem with it as I did with this machine.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-08-16 17:25:13)

Sector11 · 2023-08-17 03:16:47

@ Colonel Panic
I have these:

alias aremv='sudo apt autoremove --purge'
alias saremv='apt autoremove --purge --simulate'
alias remv='sudo apt remove'
alias sremv='apt remove --simulate'
alias prg='sudo apt purge'
alias sprg='apt purge --simulate'

DeepDayze · 2023-08-17 13:39:27

Sector11 wrote:

@ Colonel Panic
I have these:

alias aremv='sudo apt autoremove --purge'
alias saremv='apt autoremove --purge --simulate'
alias remv='sudo apt remove'
alias sremv='apt remove --simulate'
alias prg='sudo apt purge'
alias sprg='apt purge --simulate'

Thanks for those and I'm stealing 'em

DeepDayze · 2023-08-17 13:41:22

Trying out the new MX-23 KDE and it's pretty darn solid on my newish HP Probook 640G2 (old HP Elitebook was failing as lost last 2 USB ports on it)

#2041 2023-07-10 11:31:36

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2042 2023-08-02 08:13:48

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2043 2023-08-02 13:32:39

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2044 2023-08-03 13:37:41

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2045 2023-08-03 19:54:56

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2046 2023-08-03 22:24:36

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2047 2023-08-04 12:56:32

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2048 2023-08-04 13:25:04

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2049 2023-08-04 16:41:07

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2050 2023-08-04 17:09:27

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2051 2023-08-04 17:21:38

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2052 2023-08-04 19:07:59

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2053 2023-08-04 23:11:36

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2054 2023-08-13 19:50:06

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2055 2023-08-13 23:21:42

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2056 2023-08-14 22:39:09

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2057 2023-08-16 16:34:33

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2058 2023-08-17 03:16:47

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2059 2023-08-17 13:39:27

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

#2060 2023-08-17 13:41:22

Re: Distro-hoppers anonymous

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