What distros have you been testing recently?

Discussion on Linux distributions
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

Yeah, we are absolutely opposite poles on that, I could actually stand for Neon to be a bit MORE minimal in my ideal world.
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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Compared to PCLinuxOS most distros are minimal as they include a lot of extra apps. Even Feren doesnt have a lot of apps but I have no serious issues with Neon as its just Kubuntu on a diet.
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wove
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I have become a real fan of the minimal install over time. I think some of that is due to being stuck with LibreOffice only to delete it immediately. A couple weeks back I discovered that Manjaro posted minimal image for the Pinebook Pro and I have been with lots of fits and starts cobbling together something I like for that platform.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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When I was using older hardware/ less powerful hardware I used mostly lightweight minimalist distros but thats changed. My hardware, even the older hardware has a lot more performance and ram and it really doesnt matter any more as to what distro I use. If having extra apps bothers the user by all means stick to minimalist distros but I prefer to have full desktop and remove those few things that I dont need.
Some of my favorites were wattOS, Bodhi and antiX.
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wove
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I should have added to my prior post that I have a 10Mbps internet connection. It seems that most distros now approach 2GB in size which makes for a long download time. And it also sucks bandwidth to the point that not much else can be done on the internet by myself of anyone else in the house. I use torrent to download if the option is available and set the download to happen overnight. That of course cuts into the instant gratification of seeing something interesting and getting to try it out.
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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

It use to be that way for me as well as I had DSL for a time. I use to look for the smallest download distros I could find.
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

crosscourt wrote: Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:14 pm It use to be that way for me as well as I had DSL for a time. I use to look for the smallest download distros I could find.
So you mentioning that made me think of something. Do any distro's make diff's available during a distro's availability to keep the iso updated? So (using Debian) when it goes from 10.8 to 10.9, instead of downloading the 10.9 iso entirely, since there will still (probably, I'd think) be a fair amount unchanged, does anyone offer a diff file to update the 10.8 iso to 10.9? Is this even realistically useful of an idea?
wove
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

Some Pinebook Pro images on github or ftp have a variety of files available besides just the actual distro and might include diff file, but I have not looked closely. Fedora which uses dnf, say they only download that which has changed on a full upgrade, and that might well be done via diff a file. I do know that with Fedora a full system upgrade generally downloads between a third and a half as much as a new install image..
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I know Fedora defaults to using diffs for upgrades (unless the diff doesn't save a lot of bandwidth), and Debian can be set to do this, but I was thinking more for keeping installation mediums up to date, since MOST distro's do offer updated installers throughout the lifespan of each version...
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

For rolling distros, especially those based on pacman, I generally keep and reuse an installer for 1-2 years, since it seems even an month old installer will bring in 500+MB of updates.

With Ubuntu and its derivatives I tend to just have the latest LTS and just do the upgrade, which is less than always downloading the latest. And of course with Debian an installer is good for a long long time.
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