What distros have you been testing recently?

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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Thats odd as I use Mageia at home with no issues but I dont use Mageia at all any more. The only three distros Ive used recently are Zorin, Neon and Mint, with Zorin my everyday. My experience with OM has been terrible so Im done with it. Glad it worked out for you.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

I switched my OpenSUSE VM over to Tumbleweed, LEAP was just too moldy oldy ultimately. VERY impressed with Tumbleweed though. Has a few programs LEAP doesn't, nothing I want is missing though. And it's actually very up to date. So I decided to give it the ultimate test, and installed it on bare iron. Installed currently on the L14.

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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Im trying to absorb this as youre using OpenSUSE and a rolling release, :o My last stint with OpenSUSE was with Tumbleweed and Gecko the knock off.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

Yeah, it's AMAZING what a simple thing like being able to remove patterns does to the likeability of the OS. It's night and day how usable it is and how much less I hate it and everything about it. I still have SOME patterns installed, but removed all the annoying ones.

I'm actually using it right now. So far the only things I've found I don't like are that SparkleShare isn't available so has to be installed via Flatpak, photoflare isn't available (but Pinta is and is the reasonably recent 1.7.1 version, although not the latest 2.0), and it doesn't have .desktop files for several applications when it installs them (virt-manager, cpu-x). Still, I'm just storing the .desktop files from Debian on my NAS and copying them over to /usr/share/applications to get menu entries for the apps, dealing with running SparkleShare via flatpak, and I've got Pinta installed if I need to do any very basic picture (screenshot) editing.

Vivaldi, Edge, FreeOffice, WPS-office all have working repos and install without any issues. OnlyOffice has a working repo, but it DOES NOT install without any issues, you do have to tell it to ignore errors to install it (fonts names it expects Fedora names and isn't designed to be able to deal with OpenSuse names). I also added the avicenzi repo to get ProtonVPN-gui installed, as the official protonvpn repo is completely incompatible with OpenSUSE.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

OnlyOffice isnt available by Flatpak? I run it on Zorin from Flatpak.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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It is, however other than Steam (multilib) and retroarch (I just can't make the native installs WORK) I prefer native apps to flatpak since they're so much smaller, and usually also take less time to start up. I don't have MAJOR issues with using most apps through Flatpak if I have to, but greatly prefer native.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Startup of OnlyOffice is quick in regards to my Zorin install. I dont use that many Flatpak apps.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I've got 0AD (so that multiplayer is easy), Steam (so I don't have to enable multilib) and RetroArch (so I can just get it to work) installed through Flatpak on all systems that have them. And then if I'm on a Debian system and want LibreOffice I'll install the Flatpak version since it's already gargantuan and I'd rather have the newer version through Flatpak than a slightly smaller version that's old and crusty.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Im running FreeOffice 2021 on Zorin and it runs great. I use it on Windows as well. I installed it directly from the FreeOffice website with Zorin.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

Fedora SilverBlue is built entirely on flatpaks. The runtimes for the flatpaks are part of the base install, I guess they actually form the desktop. So in that environment the actual flatpak applications are about the same size as they are on any other application.

The advantage is that generally they are created by the developer and are updated very quickly. I do like the fact that since they live entirely in userland, it is not necessary to use a password to install and they are also deleted just as easily.

Flatpaks remind me of the whole ports and jails in BSD. Everything happens in user land, and a nice benefit is that what one user installs does not impact any other users. I can use Chromium and another user can use Firefox and neither has to deal with an unwanted application in the applications menu.

I am quite content with Fedora Silverblue. It has been rock solid on my desktop machine and I will probably be sticking with for awhile.
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