What distros have you been testing recently?

Discussion on Linux distributions
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

Teamgroup is one of the smaller Taiwanese producers/sellers of anything memory related. They originally did RAM, but it was rare to find them in the US. They expanded to SSD's when htey started becoming common, and also started pushing for increased sales in the Americas. They dont' make their own DRAM or NAND, nor their own controllers, so generally their products don't stand out overly much for performance (since they tend toward reference type designs), but they can often be one of the best value drives for a specific performance level. I have a 1TB MS30 drives in one of my external enclosures.

Do you see any performance gains from going to a drive that THEORETICALLY could have more parallelization? Or just needed more space and don't see any difference?
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

Thanks for the info on Teamgroup. The only place I recall seeing them is on Newegg, which promotes them heavily. I have Team thumb drives and SD cards which have worked well for me, so I gave the SSD a shot. It was on special for $30, which was right in my range.

I do not have any benchmark tools, so I can not cite specifics. It feels about the same. My workflow typically involves just editing/creating files that will be around 10-20MB and generally involve a block of time working on one file, so my productivity does not heavily depend on a fast drive. I will have several applications open spread over a few workspace. I save and restore my session, which means my systems are all slow too boot. But with all the applications open and their data loaded everything I need is ready to go. So for my use more RAM is much more useful than a faster hard drive.

I was really only looking for more storage. I have mostly used smaller drives, because they are cheaper. Once I finish a project, I will move it to a backup or external storage and just delete it on the machine I created it on. But I thought it might be nice to perhaps have some movies pictures and music stored on machine and a bigger drive might be nice.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Ive been using Teamgroup drives for awhile and the performance on mine is quite good compared to my other drives.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Neptune 7.5 just released based on Debian stable. They have gone back to using the most recent version of KDE so will give it a try today.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Neptune has too many issues. It saw my Printers but didnt see my Broadcom wifi and the drivers were installed. Problems with icons, themes and it makes you install Firefox 64 then you update it by clicking on help/about Firefox, three times to get to 103. Its not using the latest KDE version so thats it for Neptune.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Ended up installing Q4OS KDE as its my favorite KDE distro presently. Its pretty much vanilla Debian with some perks and is much faster to install overall.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Tried reinstalling Neptune on my Dell 6440 and things went much better. All devices were detected and I didnt have any of the install issues I saw previously. There are still some silly issues with themes and icoms depending on what you choose. You still have to install Firefox 64 then go to help/about Firefox and click to update three times and youll get 103. Many times Dark themes dont install properly and you dont get the full effect. Its a lot of little things but none are so bad to make the distro not worth using. It offers a nice group of apps and didnt have any codec issues. Will leave it installed and see how they do down the road. Overalll its a nice KDE distro thats nice looking and straightforward without a lot of unnecessary features.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

With Endeavour's live/install USB booting well, I tried installing the KDE version with the online installer. It went smoothly and fairly quickly considering my relatively slow Internet. When I reached the end and restarted, it appeared to start. The verbose text scrolled up the screen right to the point where it listed "starting account services" then it just hung. Tried the installer again this time just going with the XFCE DE that is built in. The exact same thing happened. upon restart it gets to "starting account services" then just hangs.

I moved on to trying Neon that also boots the live/install media. It does the same thing, appears to install fine, but upon restart, it just fails to get to the login screen. It does boot boot in verbose mode by default and I did not turn it on, so I am not sure where the hang occurs, but it just does not boot.

Next I tried Ubuntu Budgie, which is one of the few distros that work on the Pinebook Pro. Well it was a complete success, install was simple and quick enough and when restarted it moved right to the login screen. Everything is working fine, sound camera sleep wake all good. Probably not the bistro I want, but it is not bad, but it was getting late and I had a USB stick with it burned to it. Next I will probably see how Kubuntu does.

As a side note Apple makes setting up a dual boot very easy. With Apple disk utility you just select add a new partition and drag it to the size you want. Select the blank partition in the installer. The installer will/should install /boot into the efi partition along side the Apple boot loader. When you boot with the alt key held down you are asked with OS you want to boot.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Getting ready to try Peppermint OS which now based on Debian, not Ubuntu. It also uses XFCE now instead of LXDE even though it still has a few LXDE elements in it.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I played around with Endless OS again. Still not a fan of the default apps, and the fact that some apps just can't be removed.
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