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So Many Distros - So Little Time


raymac46

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What with trying to help with a few technical issues and just hearing about new distros I have done quite a bit of distro hopping lately - not much on the rails but in VirtualBox. I have tried out a fair number of the latest releases. So what's my conclusion? Here is my current list of distros worth installing in VBox or at the very least running on Live DVD:

 

1. Linux Mint 18.1 - this is still my #1 choice for a power desktop. Now that I have figured out the wifi issue and my AMD video card is working flawlessly, LM is a solid and polished O/S. I like the Cinnamon desktop as much as anything out there right now. Any Windows users will feel right at home.

 

2. MX-16 - great for a memory challenged 64 bit netbook. Xfce desktop is tweaked and quite lovely. Very stable.

 

3. Mageia 6 - this is going to be a great distro when released. The Plasma 5 desktop is wonderful but you can get GNOME if you want. Best RPM distro I've used.

 

4. Siduction - you get the bleeding edge experience with the comfort of Debian. I like the Xfce desktop best.

 

5. Manjaro - they've fixed my video card woes and their Xfce version is a real winner. Plus you get to use pacman.

 

6. AntiX - perfect if you've got an old 32 bit junker netbook. I use IceWM here.

 

7. Debian Stretch - I think this will be a real solid release and should fix the video card issues I had with Jessie. The Plasma desktop is very nice here as well.

 

8. PCLOS - after the screwups I had with this distro back in the day I never would have thought it would ever be on this list. But although it is still a mish-mosh of RPM and Debian it is a pretty nice distro. I installed the MATE desktop and if you like the old school :Linux it might be worth a try.

Edited by raymac46
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My List

 

1st choice is Mint 18.1

 

2nd LXLE 16.04.2 RC

 

3rd Siduction Cinnamon or LXQT

 

4th MX-16 Toss up between it and LXLE for my laptop

 

5th place Debian Stretch

 

I have tried over 40 distro's in the past month still searching for the one for my Laptop. It is a 4 year old HP 17 inch with intel i-3 cpu and 8 GB ram and it is slow slow. Only has linux on it.

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That sort of laptop should be able to run anything. If I were really concerned about speed I'd look into replacing the hard drive with an SSD.

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I have a similar spec laptop - a five year old lenovo with an intel i3 and 4 gigs of ram. It's a little slower to boot than most machines I see around, but Manjaro KDE runs very nicely on it. That's currently my first choice for distro, and probably debian stable with xfce or i3wm for 32bit hardware.

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That sort of laptop should be able to run anything. If I were really concerned about speed I'd look into replacing the hard drive with an SSD.

I have to assume you are not familiar with this laptop. It is one that HP bowed down to MS with their secure boot and uefi bios. It was all but impossible to dual boot and have grub as the boot loader. I wrote a article in my Blog about it. This particular model is slow even with 8 GB ram I removed windows completely and only use Linux on it. I may just put one of my ssd's in it and take out the HD 750 GB if It will take a SSD not sure because everything about it is proprietary. It always would revert back to Windows no matter what you chose to boot as the 1st OS next boot it would boot windows again. There was a work around which I did, but as soon as there was a update. it would break the work around and back to windows. That is why I removed windows. It is still way to slow for Mint Cinnamon.

Mel

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Hedon James

Interesting list, and hard to argue with any of those. But my criteria for a VirtualBox installation tends to revolve around something "new" or "different" that I'd like to keep tabs on, or know more about. Under that criteria, here is my list of recommended VMs, mostly in alphabetic order:

 

1. AntiX - lightweight rolling release of Debian with at least 3 different window managers and 2 different file managers. Rox is an interesting FM/DE.

2. AryaLinux - LFS in an ISO. NOT READY for primetime, but interesting to tinker with. Makes Arch look very user-friendly...

3. Deepin - interesting DE that doesn't resemble anything else; quite original. Software Center is well done

4. Extix/LFA - putting Extix and Linux For All (LFA) together here, as they're both Arnie Exton creations. His customizations/mashup desktop environments are interesting to me. Ubuntu with Fluxbox, custom kernels, LxQT, etc...

5. LXLE - probably the best, most polished "lightweight" distro out of the box; the distro that helped make sense of the "different paradigms for different users, but one OS" concept; I think I thought of it first, but LXLE definitely DID it first

6. PCLOS - rolling release RPM based, but Debian packaging tools; a very nice LXDE distro, FWIW

7. Porteus - haven't spent much time with this one, but like the idea of a customized system (or even a minimal kiosk interface?!), persisting on a usb stick to take anywhere. could be cool with an android tablet...working on the idea...

8. TrueOS - technically a BSD, but the birthplace of the Lumina Desktop; Lumina looks interesting as perhaps the lightest of lightweight desktop environments, with distro-agnostic dependencies; borne from fluxbox, has been almost completely re-written with QT toolkit, with almost no fluxbox lineage remaining (or so it is said). Still functions like fluxbox, and might be a drop-in replacement for fluxbox, depending on what happens with LXDE-GTK2 and LXQT desktops...

 

JMO...

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@HJ your list has some interesting stuff too. Mine is primarily something that impresses me enough that I MIGHT consider putting it on the rails someday. Our experience with Arya Linux would not encourage me to install it for real. AntiX I have installed on a couple of old netbooks.

Tried Deepin but couldn't make it stick on my list. I agree LXLE could be there.

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@Mel I had a look at the specs and it should not take a lot of work to replace your hard drive. Looks like the door on the bottom makes the drive quite accessible. Check to be sure but most of these machines just have a standard laptop drive you can replace with an SSD. Sometimes they are in a caddy but the screws usually come out easily.

I don't know why that machine would run Cinnamon slowly. I have Cinnamon on a much older and lower memory desktop and it's just fine.

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@Mel I had a look at the specs and it should not take a lot of work to replace your hard drive. Looks like the door on the bottom makes the drive quite accessible. Check to be sure but most of these machines just have a standard laptop drive you can replace with an SSD. Sometimes they are in a caddy but the screws usually come out easily.

I don't know why that machine would run Cinnamon slowly. I have Cinnamon on a much older and lower memory desktop and it's just fine.

I think the reason for it being so slow is because it is proprietary and was made for MS Windows. Everything about it is a pita. it started out with win 7 and upgraded to win 8 when I bought it. It has been slow since day one. I have not found any Linux Distro that it likes and all of them for whatever reason run slow. I only use it when traveling in the motor home. The wifi on it does not work very well unless you are right on top of a access point. I have had several laptops and this is the worst one I've ever had. all of my others were IBM or Toshiba's. Even the compaqs that I had were much better. As far as the hard drive goes I've changed several in Laptops. Unless this one uses sata none of my ssd drives will work unless ther is a adapter for them. I will take a look at the spec's and see. I think though that the drive is probably IDE.

 

Update

I downloaded the service manual and took a good look at removing the hard drive. I removed it and I can use a SSD Disk so I will use one of the ones in my main desktop and use the 750 GB hard drive from the laptop in a external enclosure for a storage drive. No wonder it is so slow the drive is only a 5400 rpm. I hope this will solve the problem. HP tech says you need all kinds of drivers and stuff to do it. but since I don't use windows on it, It should not matter.

Edited by mhbell
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Hedon James

@HJ your list has some interesting stuff too. Mine is primarily something that impresses me enough that I MIGHT consider putting it on the rails someday. Our experience with Arya Linux would not encourage me to install it for real. AntiX I have installed on a couple of old netbooks.

Tried Deepin but couldn't make it stick on my list. I agree LXLE could be there.

 

There is NO WAY I'd install AryaLinux on anything but a VM. I feel like it's the ground level of something, and I'm interested to see where they're going with it. Will they model Gentoo? Or Arch? Something else? Or is it an exercise of just automating LFS...a proof of concept? I'll keep it around for awhile...

 

I also meant to put Solus on that list...Budgie desktop created from scratch. Budgie's kind of interesting, and it's about to become another official flavor of Ubuntu. My criteria isn't so much whether I might consider installing it someday, but whether it does something in a new or different way, and whether I can take anything from it if I look at it that way too. Like a pirate looking to steal things of value...

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My list:

  • Slackware

 

Excellent! Reminds me of a friend of mine, who would have listed only Debian.

 

I have a handful of distros that I run, installed on a few different computers. I've mainly been sticking with these four: Debian, Arch, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.

 

The Arch-based Antergos is the newest addition here -- first installed back around November 2016. It's really just Arch with some stuff (perhaps too much stuff) added, but quicker to install. Seems like a solid project, but I suspect I'll end up replacing Antergos with another "straight" Arch installation.

 

I have MX and BunsenLabs living on my slowest, most poorly-performing old notebook, but I hardly ever boot up that notebook.

 

Also, I like to have GParted Live and MX around on flash drives; these two are my favorites to use for when I need live sessions (not that often).

 

That's pretty much it. I don't do a lot of distro-hopping around. I like to see how a distro works out for me over the long term, and I'll keep a distro in my "lineup" for years if I'm happy with it.

 

3. Mageia 6 - this is going to be a great distro when released. The Plasma 5 desktop is wonderful but you can get GNOME if you want. Best RPM distro I've used.

 

Mageia, I might take a look at that at some point. I've kinda settled in with openSUSE, the one .rpm distro I run these days, and I'd be surprised if Mageia has something better than YaST. I like what I've read about Mageia, though.

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Mageia uses urpmi for command line package management but is transitioning to DNF. However where it really shines is with the user friendly and powerful Mageia Control Center - a legacy of Mandriva. It is really a polished set of GUI tools that makes it very easy for the new user to install/update/configure and does it well.

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Mandriva/Mageia was a Bruno favorite and he often recommended it to new users. I got into it seriously back when every Ubuntu update was breaking my carefully built manual wifi configuration - and Ubuntu started messing with Unity. The Mandriva Control Center was the first GUI tool that really got my wifi working right.

It was a KDE based distro but offered a rather buggy GNOME 2 that I coped with.

By the time Mandriva died and Mageia replaced it I had discovered Cinnamon and Linux Mint - and I still use that as my main driver. Now with the new Plasma 5 desktop and general polished look and fell Mageia is something I want to keep in VBox on Windows as an alternative.

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