All Linux Things

I haven't really done much testing recently, even in VM's. There just hasn't been that much that really interested me that's come out recently.

When I go thru periods where there isnt much in the way of new distros, I fall back to my long term tests and updated new versions like Zorin 15.3.

I installed Pop OS on my X220 over the weekend. It is not a light weight distro at all, but it did run better than I would have thought. I was interested in checking out the Pop Shell, which brings a sort of i3 tiling windows to the Gnome desktop. It works rather well, it is not as smooth as Spaces on the Mac. But if used for a while to learn the keyboard shortcuts for window navigation it would be nice on smaller screen laptops.

I gather there is a new Endeavor OS and it supports the Pinebook Pro sort of indirectly. You use the Arch image for the Pinebook Pro, which does not install a GUI, then you run an Endeavor OS script to install a DE of you choice. Do I recall someone on this forum saying nice things about Endeavor OS? I guess I should search.

bill

I definitely have said nice things about EndeavourOS. It's close enough to pure Arch that I don't mind running it, but has a sane installation that only takes 10 minutes (on amd64) instead of 45 minutes. I've also said that when doing an online install, it has sufficient options enabled that I actually don't hate the Calamares installer, which is unusual for me.

Pop OS is Gnome 3 and uses around 1.3gb minimum of memory. To compare, Ubuntu 20.04.1 using their custom Gnome desktop only uses around 700-730mb of memory.

Ive been running MX Linux 19.2 with the recently available 5.8 kernel and its been a great experience. Resource usage has dropped with recent updates, speed is excellent and the variety of tools with this distro makes it a great choice for newer users who need some help and simple ways to accomplish tasks thru a GUI.
MX package installer gives you direct access to additional apps, kernels and other software thru the MX repos, particularly good if your system has special needs.
No issues with my printer or Wifi. Im running it on a Dell E6420 laptop so this isnt new hardware yet everything works fine.

Still using Sparkylinux.

Had to unravel a couple of interesting knots to get unattended-upgrades running properly but other than that it's all good. They also maintain additional repos of useful stuff including an updated deb repack of Seamonkey which I like.

They also support a huge range of DEs easily installed through a UI.

My favourite is still LXDE installed via Stretch and then upgraded to Buster - that way you don't lose some of the LXDE bits dropped in the change-over. Why I have no idea but it's something to do with not having to mess with GTK3 and .css files to get my DE looking right....

I also like LXDE and have used it recently with antiX but I need to try SparkyLinux, as its been quite awhile.
Ive also gotten back into XFCE recently with MX Linux, Zorin OS Lite and Mint XFCE.

Made a large move to MX Linux KDE as its really been a joy to use and easy to install. Ive got 3 of my laptops running the KDE version and one running the XFCE version.

Dropped Neon as I was having many issues with it.