Distro-hoppers anonymous

Colonel Panic · 2023-10-13 19:28:35

I've been getting a problem with OpenSUSE Leap recently, where any attempt to boot it up hangs at the message "A start job is running for (device) /no limit," and the distro fails to boot.

I've found a solution that works, for the time being anyway; boot the distro from the option labelled "Advanced options for OpenSUSE 15.5" and, at the next menu, boot from "OpenSUSE (recovery mode)". Then the distro boots and works normally.

In other news; I've installed Debian 12.1 from a cover disk of a Linux magazine and it's working well. I also downloaded Voyager 23.10 beta accidentally (don't ask how that happened), so I decided to go ahead and install it. It's working fine though I can't seem to warm to it; I don't really like any version or derivative of Ubuntu apart from Mint, which this computer came with (Edit: the versions of Bodhi I tried were good too though I haven't downloaded any recent ones).

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-10-16 22:24:36)

Martin · 2023-10-14 07:35:13

unklar wrote:

Martin wrote:
unklar wrote:
The result of the installation on bare metal.
I am also testing dk on bare metal, on my side-kick Lenovo X230. Right now it is running i3 as I have not had time to make audio volume and screen brightness adjustments work.
/Martin
i3 is cool

Are you still using dk?
I still havn't got audio volume and screen brightness adjustments buttons to work so some leads wouldn't be out of the way.

/Martin

unklar · 2023-10-14 11:58:23

Martin wrote:

unklar wrote:
Martin wrote:
I am also testing dk on bare metal, on my side-kick Lenovo X230. Right now it is running i3 as I have not had time to make audio volume and screen brightness adjustments work.
/Martin
i3 is cool
Are you still using dk?
I still havn't got audio volume and screen brightness adjustments buttons to work so some leads wouldn't be out of the way.
/Martin

Yes.
dk has replaced plasma in siduction for me.
However, this is a desktop installation.

I still have dk in @cog's 'pecos' on a ThinkPad 500.
Here the brightness and volume buttons work fine, without my intervention. It uses pipewire and wireplumber.

Colonel Panic · 2023-10-29 18:30:41

I've just installed the latest version (38) of Ultramarine, a distro which is based on Fedora and which describes itself as a successor to Korora (which was also based on Fedora, and which I used to like).

The flagship edition (which is the one I have) uses Budgie as its window manager, has a very cool looking ice blue theme and works well enough but it doesn't come with a particularly wide range of software for a 1.9 GB download (there's no E-mail program included, for example).

Fedora 39 is due to be released any day now, but updating Fedora to its latest version is straightforward provided it's from the immediately previous one (so it should be fine).

EDIT: I've just updated Nobara which is also based on Fedora; it was a 1.8 GB download, which is par for the course with any Fedora-based distro. You need either a fast connection or a lot of time and patience to manage any of them.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-10-30 13:06:27)

unklar · 2023-11-08 18:57:04

I found another pearl today... with Hyprland and Sway, on archlinux.

A few ISO-Live pictures (I already made some space on my HDD's)

You can find them here.

Colonel Panic · 2023-11-08 22:18:14

unklar wrote:

I found another pearl today... with Hyprland and Sway, on archlinux.
A few ISO-Live pictures (I already made some space on my HDD's)
https://i.imgur.com/xXaqiZOt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gkV91yqt.png https://i.imgur.com/WIVuiNmt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vqlPp33t.png
You can find them here.

Excellent! I like the listed key bindings as well.

Edit: In other news, Nobara crashed for no obvious reason after I'd upgraded it so I deleted it and installed Exton's latest spin of Fedora Rawhide instead.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-11-11 22:04:06)

unklar · 2023-11-14 09:14:56

Colonel Panic wrote:

unklar wrote:
I found another pearl today... with Hyprland and Sway, on archlinux.
A few ISO-Live pictures (I already made some space on my HDD's)
https://i.imgur.com/xXaqiZOt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gkV91yqt.png https://i.imgur.com/WIVuiNmt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vqlPp33t.png
You can find them here.
Excellent! I like the listed key bindings as well.
Edit: In other news, Nobara crashed for no obvious reason after I'd upgraded it so I deleted it and installed Exton's latest spin of Fedora Rawhide instead.

For those interested:

I needed two installation attempts on the desktop computer.

Initially, the localization didn't work properly. The main problem, however, was that I didn't understand this 'archinstall.script' at first.
I just couldn't understand why a /boot partition with fat32 and flag had to be created at the beginning of a bios-only system.

If you leave the automatic installation to the script, it will flatten everything on the disk in the usual M$ manner. In wise foresight I therefore 'only' had the test HDD in the computer. Goodbye, nox with BL-Boron

The script did not accept the partitioning with MB, MiB, GB or GiB specifications. It wanted the start and end sectors. One advantage is that you can always go back until it fits.

This was then accepted:

During the first run, I noticed that something was permanently writing to the .xsession-errors. Within 20 minutes it easily reached ~700KB. Only from another system was I able to find the cause, namely the missing backlight and battery.
After unchecking the corresponding panel settings, it behaves normally.

Hyprland and Sway hang up quickly, especially when working with applications across several workspaces. As a rule, "Exit Compositor" and restart helps here. Sway also has problems with the windows fitting into the screen area and not reaching into the panels at the top and bottom.

However, this may also be due to the computer being overtaxed by the computing power. (This is because the T500 laptop with integrated and discrete graphics already fails the live operation of the ISO.)

All in all, this is excellent work with the nwg-shell. It prevents the .json files 'behind' it from being edited by hand (which they don't like at all).

Colonel Panic · 2023-11-21 00:13:50

I've just upgraded Voyager 23.10, based on Ubuntu of the same version number (so not the LTS version); it went well, but was another very big download (1,132 MB), so it's perhaps not the best distro for those with slow connections. Here's a review of it;

https://www.zdnet.com/article/voyager-2 … p-to-date/

I'm also experimenting with tiling inside stacking window managers such as Budgie, which has an add-on program available called Window Shuffler that does basic window tiling based on the four quadrants of the desktop. It can apparently be set up to produce other grids than the 2x2 one, but that is more complicated.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-11-21 00:30:19)

Martin · 2023-11-25 18:09:36

Any sane Ubuntu derivatives out there? By sane I mean 'de-Canonicaled' and with good defaults for file systems, snapshots/backup and safety. On the Debian side of the Linux woods we have Spiral and MX-23 for instance.

The reason for asking is I have a brand new computer and one thing I plan to do with it is to dive into the world of open source finite element analysis. Most such programs are available for both Debian and Ubuntu but maybe with a more options for Ubuntu users (I am still investigating, currently following these tutorials http://tuxriders.com/videos/setup/ ).

If I find I am better off with Ubuntu I would like to avoid 'vanilla' Ubuntu. I have multi-year experience of that at work and I can live with it but if I have a choice I prefer something else.

There is Linux Mint and that is where I came from when I started using Crunch Bang Linux. I remember I felt good about that move but don't remember what issue I had with Mint. It is some 15 years ago so it is perhaps not valid today anyway.

Then we have PopOS and Tuxedo OS 2 but I have a problem with written and video reviews. They focus too much on what things look and feel like and mostly ignore what happens behind the scenes. Things like the file system set-up and back-up preparation done in Spiral Linux. One review of Tuxedo OS 2 looks a bit on that and it looks interesting.

Any else?

Live OS testing suffers from the same limitation as most published reviews. You only get a sense of the looks and feeling but not the other things I mentioned above.

/Martin

Colonel Panic · 2023-11-25 20:02:42

Hi Martin,

Not sure what you mean by "sane". I mostly avoid sandbox-based utilities such as snap and flatpack, and I can manage just fine in either Voyager or Mint (the two Ubuntu-based distros I've got at the moment) without using them. It's also easy to install either one to your hard drive with the partition formatted with ext4 if you want to avoid btrfs as I do.

I've got a live DVD of Pop! somewhere but haven;t installed it. There's a reasonably informative factsheet about it though;

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/differenc … vs-pop_os/

I agree with you about most distro reviews by the way. I like Liam Proven on The Register; he does at least try and install things. Here's a link to his page;

https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-11-25 20:39:21)

Martin · 2023-11-25 21:56:21

Colonel Panic wrote:

Hi Martin,
Not sure what you mean by "sane". I mostly avoid sandbox-based utilities such as snap and flatpack, and I can manage just fine in either Voyager or Mint (the two Ubuntu-based distros I've got at the moment) without using them. It's also easy to install either one to your hard drive with the partition formatted with ext4 if you want to avoid btrfs as I do.
I've got a live DVD of Pop! somewhere but haven;t installed it. There's a reasonably informative factsheet about it though;
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/differenc … vs-pop_os/
I agree with you about most distro reviews by the way. I like Liam Proven on The Register; he does at least try and install things. Here's a link to his page;
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven

Thanks for this input.

I downloaded a Voyager ISO a few days ago but it refuses to boot for some reason.

I have problems with Tuxedo OS 2 as well.

These are the only Linux ISOs that have caused me grief ever.

Btw, I have used btrfs since 2015 or so and is fully satisfied with how that has worked. On my old (current) machine virtual machine disk images live on a separate ext4 partition and for the life of me I can't remember why :-) More on that in a separate thread if I can't figure it out.

/Martin

hhh · 2023-11-26 09:17:32

@Martin, I use Ubuntu without any Snaps or Flatpaks. I can't remember which Lunar version I originally installed, but I think it was the standard GNOME one. I immediately started removing things... first all the gnome-software, Ubuntu-store, auto-update stuff and the Ubuntu Pro advertisement in apt. I used Firefox straight from Mozilla which (optionally) requires manually creating a firefox.desktop file, but now Mozilla has a deb for firefox-nightly that does that the same way almost all apt installed package does.

I eventually pulled GNOME out and install Openbox and a selection of the BunsenLabs packages, and that's worked great. I use one PPA source (kxstudio), the BunsenLabs source, a source for Plex Media service and one for my VPN, but other than that it's stock Ubuntu. It's been dist-upgraded to Mantic at this point.

The only thing that's different than running a similar Debian setup is that sometimes apt will auto-hold some package upgrades, so you have to run apt install *package* to get the new version. That doesn't happen very often, though.

That said, it was a bunch of scouring dpkg -l to get things where I have them now. If I were to go with an Ubuntu derivative, I'd be tempted to try the Lite edition of Zorin OS that uses Xfce. Otherwise, I'd just use debian sid and keep an eye on the siduction forums' Upgrade Warnings thread.

hhh · 2023-11-26 17:04:46

Here's the Ubuntu list of recognized Derivatives...

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives

r.chaffee53 · 2023-11-26 23:41:21

Xubuntu Minimal

On the download page under torrents. Sorry I can't post a link.

I use it after limiting Snap with this.

apt remove --autoremove snapd

Create the no snap preference.

sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref

Package: snapd
Pin: release a=*
Pin-Priority: -10'

Bob

Last edited by r.chaffee53 (2023-11-26 23:45:24)

Colonel Panic · 2023-11-26 23:52:30

hhh wrote:

Here's the Ubuntu list of recognized Derivatives...
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives

Thanks but I've just spotted a mistake in that list; WattOS is now based on Debian rather than Ubuntu (which I believe it used to be based on). I haven't tried Bodhi (which is also on the list) for a while but it used to be good and has a nice looking desktop as standard (Moksha).

R.Chaffee; thanks for the advice concerning how to remove Snap from Ubuntu Minimal too.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2024-08-04 13:49:56)

rbh · 2023-11-27 19:54:56

Colonel Panic wrote:

I havent tried Bodhi (which is also on the list) for a while but It used to be good

Yes, I liked it when it came 2011. Run it for a while until I read about #!. But, their 32-bit Non-PAE version is based on Ubuntu 18.04!

I am runing one Lubuntu VM, just to see if I'm missing something when running Debian. Can't see I am missing anything essential...

jeffreyC · 2023-11-27 22:06:30

If I had to use an Ubuntu derivative I would use Linux Mint Xfce and set the desktop up like MX Linux.

No snaps, sane decisions on telemetry ond so on...

Martin · 2023-11-27 22:54:28

Yesterday I took Tuxedo OS 2 for a Live ISO spin. This only worked after I had disabled secure boot.

Tuxedo OS 2 is well put together. It is slick and contains some help function a la MX Linux but not just copied. Some of them are tailored for use with the HW Tuxedo sells. I am impressed.

But, it is too much KDE Plasma which means most tools (file manager etc) are over designed and the desktop fills up much quicker than I am used to. Everything is a bit over ambitious and suffering from 'featuritis'.

Bottom line: Not my kind of UX.

Then I took Pop OS for a Live ISO Qemu spin.
Is it a saner take on Gnome than Ubuntu? Probably. Having used vanilla Ubuntu at work for years I feel much more at home here than in Tuxedo OS 2 even though Tuxedo comes across as a more polished product.

This evening I revisited both MX-23 and Spiral Linux. Both with XFCE and both staying out of my way but doing the job. Spiral being slightly lower key but offering no special programs and repos.

All these four distros have some kind of fancy program/app finding tool. The one in Tuxedo OS 2 is the worst one due mostly to poor layout. The one in MX Linux is best. Both MX and Tuxedo offer some extras such as very modern/tailored kernels. Maybe Pop also do -- I didn't check.

I should take a look at Mint Xfce.

But I hope I can stay in Debian -- been here ever since I came across #! many moons ago.

/Martin

Colonel Panic · 2023-11-28 20:24:29

One advantage of Pop! is that it supports tiling on the desktop, which is useful for a lot of people. You can get a more basic version of this though in any other distro by installing WindowMaker as your window manager; if you're happy with the somewhat retro interface it works well.

I agree that Tuxedo looks interesting. Like Pop! it was developed by a computer manufacturer for use on its own machines.

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tuxedo

Jeffrey: I agree with you about Mint too. I had some problems with earlier versions but as far as I can see there's really nothing wrong with the latest one (my current computer came with Mint Cinnamon already installed).

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2023-11-28 20:28:05)

unklar · 2023-12-10 12:22:38

@nwg, if you're reading this...

On 2023-12-06 the system was updated here. This also affected the files under /etc/lightdm, without your're 'nwg-greeter.conf'.
Since then, the Light Display Manager can no longer be started. In the meantime, I have installed the lghtdm-gtk-greeter.

What do I have to do to get your nice login screen back?

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