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 »

Peppermint is a really nice OS. As I said its Debian based and installs as a minimal install. During the install process you have the option of adding apps from their repos in an easy to use feature. It allows to mix and match things like browsers,office apps, video/audio apps as well as others. Once done it installs and I had no issues with devices, all were detected. It has a Peppermint welcome screen with additional help and apps plus tutorials. They have a peppermint hub on the panel that allows access to commonly used XFCE settings but you can also access the main settings as well. It also has an attached tab with synaptic,text editor,network,power manager and run a program. They also give the choice of Nemo or Thunar for file manager. They have their own update manager which works very well but Synaptic is also there. Resouce usage is around 550mb at this point. They have quite a few custom wallpapers,themes and icons and overall its a nice looking distro. They still have the webcentric apps but the way they allow you to tailor the install, as in my case I set it up as a more standard desktop.
Like this distro much better than Mint XFCE so far, and theyve done a great job customizing and adding features. They have isos based both on Debian and Devuan which is interesting and its only 1.3gb. Only oddity was when I installed Chromium and Duck Duck Go popped up, very odd, so that had to go. I installed Chrome instead from their website using the gdebi package installer. Ill do some other tests and see how it goes but overall a nice experience.
Ive not typically enjoyed XFCE much as of late but this experience was much better overall.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I originally installed Peppermint on my Dell e6440 but I tried it on my Dell e4310 instead and it runs like a top. Very lightweight distro thats really quick. I had installed the Broadcom wifi drivers during the install and it picked it up with no issues. Great choice for older hardware given the 4310 is a first gen i5 cpu. This would run well even on a c2d cpu and 4gb wouldnt be an issue even though all my hardware runs at least 8gb. No multimedia issuesand all devices were seen.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

Being lightweight I gave Peppermint a quick look on the 2008 MBP. Like everything Debian I have tried, it did not work. In this particular case it started from the live USB, got to grub, then when I enter to start it seems to hang right away. After about 2-3 minutes the beast simply reboots itself. There must be something in the Debian startup sequence that runs afoul with the hardware of this old system.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Sorry it didnt work for you as it would have been a good option. I was happy to find a lightweight Debian based distro with such a nice feature set. Ive also used Ubuntu based distros with older hardware for compatibility reasons but recently the Debian based distros have been excellent. Zorin is the only Ubuntu based distro I use on a regular basis, then I use Q4OS KDE and now it appears I have Peppermint Debian.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Installed Peppermint on another of my laptops and so far no issues. Its become a favorite already and overall along with Q4OS KDE will probably be my go to except for my newer hardware. Neptune is gone, too many issues and MX Linux is good but not great and theyve added way too many tools and many have issues. Zorin is still my favorite with newer hardware and is the closest distro to Windows in how it looks and functions. My wife even liked it which surprised me. Feren OS, Neon and PCLinuxOS are a wait and see for now.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I had mentioned nix with regards to their creating and excellent boot loader for the PineBook Pro, but I do not recall every paying any attention to NixOS itself. Last evening when reading about HomeBrew I saw that Nix was mentioned as a excellent replacement for Homebrew. And this morning I went to check further and downloaded NixOS.

It turns out that Nix also makes a great boot loader for old Macs as well. The Nix OS live/installer boots fine and installs easily too. The installer is Calamares and like Endeavour it allows the user to pick from several DEs. The install is very very minimal. Most important though for me is that it boots after install.

It is very light on resource usage and feels very responsive. I chose KDE. You get kate konsole, settings, and Firefox. Anything else you might want you need to install and installing is via command line using the nix package manager. During install it runs hardware detection and if you allow it to use "non-free" software it does an excellent job of installing drivers needed.

Very similar to BSD the system is controlled by a config file. The easiest way to get the software you want installed is to simply add them to the system configuration then do rebuild switch it will install the new software when you reboot the software will be available. You have an option (-p name) to create a new profile. If you messed up you can roll back to the previous setup.

I am really enjoying this setup. It is fast and nimble and very easy to get set the way you want it. It has similar draw backs as Endeavour/Arch in that to install software you need to know the package name of what you wish to install. I installed kmail, which does not start because it is missing "Account Services" and my guess is that "Account Services" is not the package name.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Ive never worked with older Macs but older Intel systems I havent had many issues with in regards to modern distros. One of the things I like with Peppermint is, they do have a 32bit version for anyone that needs it. Glad you found NixOS and Im still poking around at other distros.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Just installed Peppermint on my Dell 3330 with no issues and runs very well.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Peppermint is a semi-rolling distro now, as it doesnt have to adhere to Ubuntus schedule anymore. I like that and Debians release schedule is moderate and very reasonable overall. It certainly allows the devs to do more tweaking without killing themselves. Why they bother with the Devuan version, Im a bit unclear on that.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I added Peppermint to my HP Elitedesk G3 with a 6th gen cpu,16gb of ram and 128gb ssd. Good experience so far and had no issues with hardware being detected. I wanted to use it more often so decided to add it to one of my desktop systems.
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