What distros have you been testing recently?

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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

I mean, it's only been in development for 9 years or so, what's another dozen?
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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Zorin 16 went to the 5.11 kernel and updated to the most recent versions of Firefox and Chrome.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Really disappointed with Feren OS as I downloaded the latest image and found many more changes that I frankly didnt care for much. I was installing it on my Dell Latitude 3340 instead of Win10 but I had issues with Feren OS based on Ubuntu. If I go to another Ubuntu based distro Ill probably go to Neon.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Are they completely abandoning their Mintish roots and going to more of a Kubuntu type aesthetic?
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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No, they are pushing what I would call a more MacOS look which youve probably seen but there are some other issues, such as a few crashes of apps at boot and some issues with making changes and changing settings. I went to customize and change the look to a more standard KDE look and many issues cropped up. It also didnt save changes which surprised me and at one point it said I didnt have an internet connection. That was when I went to Q4OS and had no issues whatsoever.
My original Feren installs were older versions that were updated to the newer version but they also had some minor issues.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Interesting as Q4OS Gemini with no changes has settled down and is using 490-497mbs at GUI, so resource usage is fine.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I have been using Endless OS on the IdeaCentre for the last week and am finding it very enjoyable. It is not really designed for the hard core Linux user. It is easily the most "turn key" Linux distro I have ever used. It runs on everything I have ever tried it on (and generally speaking it runs well). Endless says that if you can run a "feature phone" you can use this OS.

It is built on Debain using OStree and is an immutable OS. Applications are all flatpaks, which I suppose limits some things, but more and more software is being made for flatpak. There are a few terminal things that can be done to the base OS, you can firmware for unsupported wifi cards, and you can make it so lower level Python libs and apps work. A benefit to the OS is that a backup to the home folder covers just about everything you have installed.

It is a nice looking system. A great deal of it consists of off line content. It has a local Encyclopedia that has over 50,000 wikipedia entries. Updates are very nice, they download in the background, do not hog bandwidth and do not need a continuous network connection. As an added bonus the app center allows you to save applications to Thumbdrive to install on another machine.

The main focus of Endless is education and home for the low end side of the digital divide. It is a very nice OS to use, it keeps its focus on the work flow and applications driving the work.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Things have gotten a lot simpler these days. Im using Q4OS Gemini as my main distro,as its just Debian with a few perks. Im using Zorin OS 16 and MX LInux KDE, thats about it. Its the smallest group of distros Ive used in quite some time and havent been testing a large number of distros, Nothing has really caught my attention at least for now.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I was attemtping Arch-GUI yesterday. Basically just a calamares frontend to Arch. No 3rd party repos whatsoever, no non-arch packages. However, wouldn't boot from the image so...not really much to say there.

I actually downloaded and tried Endless in a VM recently after reading what Wove wrote. The boot animation is pretty, I like it. The desktop annoys me, I HATE shortcuts on my desktop. Really, Endless IMO is best described as "attempting to recreate a Chromebook using Gnome". And as such, I admit, it does a REALLY good job. Even on a very limited VM, it was snappy and responsive at 1440x900 resolution (largest resolution I can find that you can run in a window without scrollbars on a 1080P display). The app center has a nice layout, and seems to work reasonably well. The default apps installed are logical apps to have installed, although for modern machines I think Brasero at this point could be removed, VERY few machines made in the last few years still have optical drives. Although I also see why they included it, since it's not taking a ton of room, and those that DO still have them have the ability to use them out of the box. In the end, while it's definitely not something *I* would enjoy using for very long at a time, I see the draw of it. It's SUPER simple like a Chromebook, but has drivers for generic x86 hardware (something that ChromeOS/CloudReady lacks a lot of), and isn't TIED to google. You can even get rid of Chrome entirely (and weirdly it defaults to having both Chrome and Chromium installed default, but no Firefox). I do find many of the "apps" that you can't get rid of their icons to be highly annoying though (Chrome, YouTube, etc). One thing that some might find humorous, I find that this is, BY FAR, the best looking "out of the box" implementation of Gnome3 I have EVER seen.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

I always carry an external DVD drive with me as I use it all the time. I make isos for clients to try distros as its cheaper and works with older hardware a bit better. I still use USB drives but for ease of use and quickness DVDs are still a great choice.
No doubt Gnome 3 on Endless is nice looking but I give some love to Zorin 16 as well.
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