What distros have you been testing recently?

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bin
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Sparkylinux KDE Plasma edition. Moving on the Bullseye means saying farewell to XFCE which has been my mainstay (apart from Q4OS TDE) since the end of Gnome 2. Having roundly vilified Plasma for some time now I am puzzled as to how I now I like it - and It has taken a bit of fiddling and cursing but I now have a better relationship with Plasma and certainly for the next couple of years all should be well.

I've been using Sparky XFCE and the only real reason for using their KDE is that for some reason it does not have the annoying habit of hanging for 25 seconds on an SDDM stop job when shutting down - or even just logging off. Oh and their repos do stock a lot of apps that are not in normal repos and so get updates along with the rest - which is nice.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

New DE, new browser, new email, sounds like you are all ready for a fresh start to the new year. Congrats, I wish you well.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Just installed KDE 5.24 on Neon and its very nice. The system monitor, quick view and activity overview are nice features. I havent worked with it enough yet but will be back once Ive used it more.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

Been playing with the latest OpenMandriva recently. It's nice that they're now trying to stay up to date, with Plasma 5.24 (shipped with 5.23.5), 5.16 kernels, etc. However, they still suffer from the fact that they're so different from Fedora with filenames, that many 3rd party apps they don't package will generate errors when attempting to install, because things like fonts are simply named something different for the package on here. So while they have a decent list of software available, there's a LOT that if you want it to work, you'd have to compile yourself because even though you can find a rpm package, it barfs due to dependencies.
Overall, this is by far the best release of OpenMandriva ever though, as it is quite modern, and in my testing quite stable. And I'd say it's a better experience using it than Fedora, overall there's no compelling reason to use it over distro's that have far more software able to be installed.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Ive tried their last three versions and all of them were disappointing and in some cases couldnt be used without a lot of effort. 4.1 had issues updating and you had to follow specific instructions to be able to update it, not sopmething thats attractive to the average user. I still use Mageia and so far I think its the best RPM distro Ive used so far.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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crosscourt wrote: Sat Feb 19, 2022 2:27 am Ive tried their last three versions and all of them were disappointing and in some cases couldnt be used without a lot of effort. 4.1 had issues updating and you had to follow specific instructions to be able to update it, not sopmething thats attractive to the average user. I still use Mageia and so far I think its the best RPM distro Ive used so far.
Yeah, apparently that was the big focus of 4.3, was fixing those types of issues. Thus far (it's only been a week or so), it's been fairly flawless for 4.3. It...just works. It's not overly impressive, but it's fast, everything worked right, it's had no issues with the upgrades, etc. By comparison to earlier versions, this is a fantastic release. I'm just underwhelmed when comparing it to distro's that are a bit more mainstream. It's not a BAD OS, just...it also doesn't really have anything to keep you coming back, with the POSSIBLE exception that they DO have a RYZEN OPTIMIZED version of the OS, which is...nifty. I'd definitely take this over Mageia as of the last time I used Mageia, but I haven't installed it recently either, so I may need to do that to have a good comparison.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Mageia has improved a lot and you should give it another look. Id never forsake Mageia for OpenMandriva. Given I was a die hard Mandriva user, its done nothing but disappoint me. Ive also moved on as Im more mainstream now using Zorin OS 16 and loving it.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Got Mageia installed. It'll be a good comparison, as they're both running on the same hypervisor, both configured with 4 cores, 8GB ram, 40GB drive. At first blush, OpenMandriva DEFINITELY performs better, it's quite noticeably faster than Magiea, and massively more up to date, as well. Mageia still uses a version of Plasma that's older than Debian is on. It also still uses the antiquated and useless net applet that can't connect to anything other than hardwired connections.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

They do use net applet and yes Mageia isnt as up to date as other distros, but with my hardware it performs much better than OM 4.3. Ive had no issues with net applet though with a variety of ethernet and wifi devices assuming drivers are available such as my Panda 006. Im not as focused on super up to date KDE as many of my distros arent using 5.24 or later. I really dont play with RPM distros much any more as they just dont offer what Im looking for in everyday use. If Fedora had a longer support cycle Id give it a look.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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None of the networks I have available wirelessly will net applet connect to (any of my home SSID's, nor my phone). Don't know why. It simply won't connect. Networkmanager has no issues. Therefore I hate net applet.

I think my testing of Mageia is already enough for me. IMO, the network issues are enough to make me prefer OpenMandriva. It can connect to my network. Mageia can't. OpenMandriva is up to date. Mageia isn't. OpenMandriva is noticeably faster when configured identically. No reason to continue even comparing, Mageia has lost on basic functionality and speed.
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