What distros have you been testing recently?

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crosscourt
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What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Just gave Kubuntu 18.04.3 a try and very disappointed with it. 5.12.5 KDE only and the Discover updater is still in the older version whichwas terrible. Still using the 4.15 kernel as well so done with that.

Retrying Zorin OS 15.1 and loving it as its a very feature rich distro, thats good with both desktops and laptops and doesnt force you open the lid of your laptop to engage an external monitor. Touch features if you need them and works very well with other devices such as smartphones. Memory usage though is still high at 1.3-1.6gb.

Also retrying Mint Mate 19 which I upgraded to 19.3 and it was quite a difference. Im using the Redmond theme so the desktop has a Winodws look to it still with the advanced Mate menu. It includes a system troubleshooter now, and a Kernel manager that makes changing or removing kernels a snap without issues. Along with the driver manager and other improvements to Mate its a realy nice distro so far that compares favorably though not exactly with KDE, Memory usage was around 500-533mb so Im good with that. I mainly use Htop for checking memory usage except with KDE as Ksysguard does a better/more accurate read on memory usage.

Presently using my wifes old Dell desktop with an Athlon II X3 435 cpu, 8gb of ram, radeon 4200 gpu and a 7200rpm 256gb hard drive.
Performance so far on all these distros with this 2009-2010 desktop has been excellent.
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chris
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by chris »

Are you not worried that Mint 19 still uses 5.3 kernel which was EOLed some time ago? No sign of 5.4.? kernel! 5.4.14 latest stable.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

All the Ubuntu based distros use the HWE 5.3.0-26 kernel which is supported till August 2020. I confirmed this not only with the Linux Mint devs but with other devs who work consistently with Ubuntu in regards to kernel support. The Mint community in particular isnt going to use a kernel if its a security risk and Mint is very good about also making sure security updates are installed by alerting the user through their system alert troubleshooter.

Any of user of Mint can open update manager, go to the top left of the screen, click on view, kernel manager and see which kernels are available and which are still supported by date.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Really liking Feren OS KDE its better than Mint KDE was and is as up to date as Neon but gives you a few more apps in the standard install.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

Still testing Void on my VM's, other than that not really testing anything out of my "base" OS's recently. I guess Gallium, but that's only because I can't get audio to work with any other OS on the Chromebooks. But since it's fully neon-ized, it's really barely Gallium other than the kernel.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Hasnt been much to test recently.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by dai_trying »

I'm wondering how long it will be before Win10 is on your top 5?
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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It will never be in my top 5 and honestly if my wife hadnt gone down that road I would not have gone down it at all.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Continuing to enjoy Feren OS KDE, its very nice and has caught the attention of some of the KDE Mint fans it appears.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Getting ready to test MX Linux 19.1 and continuing to use Q4OS 3.9 Centaurus KDE at home and KDE Neon at work.
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