A 'Buntu Worth A Try

[raymac46]

Here's a new topic. Feel free to deviate as needed.

I'm an old timey Ubuntu user but got away from it a few years ago. Now I've found one flavor that's worth trying again.

Lubuntu is working well on my crappy old Lenovo AMD powered laptop from 2014. I've recently upgraded in place to version 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) without incident. Lubuntu of course features my favorite LXQt desktop and it has a lovely implementation right out of the box. I find that you can upgrade with the CLI or use the graphical method and both work great. There are some Ubuntu quirks like snaps but I haven't had any problem with them.

Note I'd never run vanilla Ubuntu as I vastly prefer Debian if I want GNOME as my desktop. But Lubuntu is a hidden gem in my view. YMMV of course.

[crp]

3 hours ago, raymac46 said:

recently upgraded in place

Now you got my attention. I switched from RH's to Debian a few years ago solely due to being able to install OS updates in place with Debian.

Still have a CentOS i'm stuck with but hope to replace it this Winter.

[raymac46]

I have updated Ubuntu in place many times over the years. Early on it was a bear to configure wifi with WPA encryption so it was easier to upgrade in place than reinstall when a new release of Ubuntu came out. Nowadays Network Manager can handle wifi with ease. Back around 2008 it was called Network Mangler for a reason.

[Hedon James]

Agreed on your assessment of Lubuntu.  That was the 'Buntu of my choice when I was a 'Buntu user.  I ended up leaving that camp because I always had an issue with "upgrade in place".  It would upgrade fine, on the surface; but over time, little quirks and hiccups would present themselves.  As I progressed through the rabbit hole of troubleshooting, more often than not the end result was to "re-install", which almost always fixed the problem.  I ultimately concluded that re-installing my OS was the way to go, which is a huge PITA.  I only used the LTS releases, so I had to re-install a small home network every 2-4 years (6 years was beyond the support window).  I dreaded that.

 

That's when I started looking at rolling releases.  I really wanted to go rolling, until I started monitoring rolling distros in a VM:  Sparky Linux, Siduction, Arch, Manjaro.......they updated VERY often.  Very manageable for a single computer, but I quickly realized that managing a rolling release on a 6-8 machine home network was going to overwhelm me and have the opposite of the intended effect.  That's when I went 180 degrees in the other direction and started looking at fixed distros with 5+ year support windows, including some "server" distros (CentOS) that I could mold to a desktop OS.  Long story short, I ended up settling on Debian for several reasons.....it wasn't the "best" for any of my criteria (subjective), but it fit ALL my criteria.  And numerous users swear and declare that vanilla Debian (no Frankens, with external PPAs) updates in place, seamlessly, with one fella on the Debian forums claiming that he has installed his DebianOS ONCE in the early naughts and has upgraded in place ever since with no issues whatsoever.  If he is to be believed, this sounds perfect to me.  I'll find out soon enough, as I'm on Debian 10, but I've still got some runway with that one.

 

But I digress....I still monitor a few distros in Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and Lubuntu is one of them.  If it wasn't for that measly 2-year LTS support window, I'd be tempted.  Lubuntu devs have certainly put together a nice distro, even if it means straying from Ubuntu standards (for instance, Ubuntu distros typically install with Ubiquity, but Lubuntu has adopted Calamares).  I think it's an excellent distro for Linux beginners, as well as Windows migrators.  And LXQt is VERY customizable.  I have configured my lxqt-panels to mimic a Unity layout (it looks like mother Ubuntu), as well as a legacy Mate layout (Gnome2), a MacOS layout, and/or the standard Windows/Mint layout.  There's something there for just about every user.

[raymac46]

I've done some "roll your own" LXQt setups with Arch and Debian, but I have to say that Lubuntu is the nicest looking one by far out of the box. I'm only dealing with one non work critical old laptop, so a botched upgrade wouldn't be the end of the world. I did switch to XFWM4 as my window manager but I do that all the time.

Yes you have to upgrade every six months or so, but given the craziness of running Debian Testing on the Thinkpad with GNOME breaking all the Extensions on a regular basis, it seems a fair bargain.

[raymac46]

One other thing - I think that the ship has sailed where you could call Lubuntu "lightweight for old hardware." It is strictly 64 bit now and you really need 4 GB of RAM to get the most out of it. It runs nice if you have the horses for it.

[crp]

2 hours ago, Hedon James said:

And numerous users swear and declare that vanilla Debian (no Frankens, with external PPAs) updates in place

I wouldn't swear to it, but I have updated in place Debian at least 5 times.

[Hedon James]

20 hours ago, crp said:

I wouldn't swear to it, but I have updated in place Debian at least 5 times.

Another +1 in the "multiple upgrade without issue" category!  Tells me I'm on the right track.  But I'd feel even better about my choice if you'd swear to it!  LOL!

[securitybreach]

8 hours ago, Hedon James said:

Another +1 in the "multiple upgrade without issue" category!  Tells me I'm on the right track.  But I'd feel even better about my choice if you'd swear to it!  LOL!

just think..no need to do that on Arch as it is always updating...

[abarbarian]

13 hours ago, securitybreach said:

just think..no need to do that on Arch as it is always updating...

 

Hmmmmmmmmm update once every six months or update several times a day. Tricky choice.

[Hedon James]

15 hours ago, securitybreach said:

just think..no need to do that on Arch as it is always updating...

true....but I mentioned this above...in administrating Arch in a VM, I realized there was NO WAY  I could stay on top of updates for a small home network of 6-8 non-homogeneous hardware.  No matter how much I like Arch, it just doesn't make sense for my small fleet.  I can't be updating 6-8 machines on a weekly, or even monthly basis.  Too many chances to forget ONE machine and bork it.

[securitybreach]

7 minutes ago, Hedon James said:

true....but I mentioned this above...in administrating Arch in a VM, I realized there was NO WAY  I could stay on top of updates for a small home network of 6-8 non-homogeneous hardware.  No matter how much I like Arch, it just doesn't make sense for my small fleet.  I can't be updating 6-8 machines on a weekly, or even monthly basis.  Too many chances to forget ONE machine and bork it.

 

I hear ya. I really don't have a problem doing so on 7 machines. Some I do daily and some I only do weekly. I have an ssh server on every machine so its just a matter of ssh-ing in and running pacman -Syu. On my servers, I hold back the kernel and only update on major releases.. x.x instead of x.x.x

[raymac46]

Well sad to say I have come to the end of my Lubuntu trial. I have just found the LXQt implementation too buggy for my use. The latest problem that I had was that nm-tray icon disappeared from the panel completely and I have no way of getting it back. Wifi still works but it's annoying.

So I've now instlled Linux Mint Xfce which I know will be stable and intuitive to use.

 

ray@ray-Lenovo-Flex-2-15D:~$ inxi -Fxz
System:
  Kernel: 5.15.0-57-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0
    Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 Distro: Linux Mint 21.1 Vera base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20377 v: Lenovo Flex 2-15D
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: LENOVO model: Lenovo Flex 2-15D v: 31900058 WIN
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI: LENOVO v: 9FCN27WW date: 06/11/2015
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 18.3 Wh (100.0%) condition: 18.3/30.1 Wh (60.7%)
    volts: 8.1 min: 7.2 model: SANYO L13S4A61 status: Full
CPU:
  Info: quad core model: AMD A8-6410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics bits: 64
    type: MCP arch: Puma rev: 1 cache: L1: 256 KiB L2: 2 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 998 min/max: 1000/2000 boost: enabled cores: 1: 998
    2: 998 3: 998 4: 998 bogomips: 15969
  Flags: avx ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Mullins [Radeon R4/R5 Graphics] vendor: Lenovo driver: radeon
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:01.0
  Device-2: IMC Networks Lenovo EasyCamera type: USB driver: uvcvideo
    bus-ID: 2-1.4:4
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.3 driver: X: loaded: ati,radeon
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa gpu: radeon resolution: 1366x768~60Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD KABINI (LLVM 13.0.1 DRM 2.50 5.15.0-57-generic)
    v: 4.5 Mesa 22.0.5 direct render: Yes
Audio:
  Device-1: AMD Kabini HDMI/DP Audio vendor: Lenovo driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel bus-ID: 00:01.1
  Device-2: AMD FCH Azalia vendor: Lenovo driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
    bus-ID: 00:14.2
  Device-3: Realtek USB Audio type: USB
    driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid bus-ID: 3-1:2
  Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.15.0-57-generic running: yes
  Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
  Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    vendor: Lenovo driver: r8169 v: kernel port: 1000 bus-ID: 01:00.0
  IF: enp1s0 state: down mac: <filter>
  Device-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter
    vendor: Lenovo driver: ath9k v: kernel bus-ID: 03:00.0
  IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Qualcomm Atheros AR3012 Bluetooth 4.0 type: USB driver: btusb
    v: 0.8 bus-ID: 1-1.2:5
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 3 state: up address: <filter>
    bt-v: 2.1 lmp-v: 4.1
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 465.76 GiB used: 80.76 GiB (17.3%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WDS500G2B0A
    size: 465.76 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 456.89 GiB used: 80.75 GiB (17.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 511 MiB used: 5.2 MiB (1.0%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/sda1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 61.5 MiB (3.0%) file: /swapfile
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 48.2 C mobo: 32.0 C gpu: radeon temp: 41.0 C
  Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Info:
  Processes: 236 Uptime: 5h 53m Memory: 6.71 GiB used: 1.57 GiB (23.4%)
  Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.3.0 Packages: 2120 Shell: Bash
  v: 5.1.16 inxi: 3.3.13
ray@ray-Lenovo-Flex-2-15D:~$ 

 

Edited January 12, 2023 by raymac46

[securitybreach]

Well running nm-tray would of brought it back but glad that you like LinuxMint.

[raymac46]

I tried running nm-tray but it did not reappear. The actual nm-tray was working, but the icon disappeared.

[securitybreach]

24 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

I tried running nm-tray but it did not reappear. The actual nm-tray was working, but the icon disappeared.

 

Ah ok, carry on

[raymac46]

This looks like the issue:

 

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=752650

[securitybreach]

1 hour ago, raymac46 said:

This looks like the issue:

 

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=752650

 

The link is down for maintenance but good deal

[sunrat]

8 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

The link is down for maintenance but good deal

 

Debian forum is back up now. It was offline for scheduled maintenance and upgrade of phpBB for a short time today.

[Hedon James]

wow....1 strike and Lubuntu is OUT?!  LOL

 

Sorry to hear Lubuntu ain't cutting it for you anymore.  I am curious though....what version of Lubuntu were you running?  the latest & greatest?  or an LTS, which I think would be 22.04?

 

Looks like you were focused on nm-tray, but it sounds like nm-tray was working just fine, just not DISPLAYING fine.  I would've been looking into the lxqt-panels.  Some things I would've considered, in no particular order:

• remove nm-tray from lxqt-panel
• place nm-tray back in panel
• if neither worked, repeat both those actions, then restart lxqt-panel
• created my own icon shortcut for network manager, then placed it on my tray as a launcher, rather than part of system tray utilities
• considered connman as alternative to nm-tray (connman is actually recommended with lxqt; not a fan, though, I prefer network manager, but connman gets it done, so i leave it alone)

referencing your Debian link, it sounds like i'm on the right track with icon display....looks like the developer fixed it, and it would've filtered down to you eventually.  in the meantime, I might've hunted down that missing icon and placed it where the OS expects to find it.

 

Of course, replace the OS with a tried & tested true friend OS is also a way to go, and MAY have been the "quicker" option.  LOL!  Poor Windows folks prolly would've had to wait for Windows 12 to address that issue?  Linux for the win!

Edited January 13, 2023 by Hedon James

[raymac46]

@HJ it was not just the disappearing icon. I had a growing sense that LXQt just isn't as ready for prime time as LXDE was back in the day - at least in its Ubuntu incarnation. There was no way to remove nm-tray from the actual tray and replace it because the icon was gonzo. There is a network widget I could install to see if the connection was working but it certainly wasn't as useful as nm-tray.

I was using the latest version (Kinetic) of Lubuntu.

The icon went away when I tried an LXQt GUI to update the system. I used the GUI because the terminal updates with apt were taking forever.

I probably could have researched the file system, found out where the missing icon went and maybe fixed it - but I never have gotten over the feeling that GTK works better for me than Qt when it comes to Linux. Nor do I think Ubuntu based distros are as good as they were at one time.

Since I was already using XFWM4 as my window manager and I have always been a fan of Xfce I just took the path of least resistance, given that the machine I was running was not mission critical. I think I am just getting too dam' old for this troubleshooting cr^p.

[Hedon James]

23 hours ago, raymac46 said:

@HJ it was not just the disappearing icon. I had a growing sense that LXQt just isn't as ready for prime time as LXDE was back in the day - at least in its Ubuntu incarnation. There was no way to remove nm-tray from the actual tray and replace it because the icon was gonzo. There is a network widget I could install to see if the connection was working but it certainly wasn't as useful as nm-tray.

I was using the latest version (Kinetic) of Lubuntu.

The icon went away when I tried an LXQt GUI to update the system. I used the GUI because the terminal updates with apt were taking forever.

I probably could have researched the file system, found out where the missing icon went and maybe fixed it - but I never have gotten over the feeling that GTK works better for me than Qt when it comes to Linux. Nor do I think Ubuntu based distros are as good as they were at one time.

Since I was already using XFWM4 as my window manager and I have always been a fan of Xfce I just took the path of least resistance, given that the machine I was running was not mission critical. I think I am just getting too dam' old for this troubleshooting cr^p.

Hard to disagree with most of your assessment, especially the path of least resistance comment.  I think I might disagree with the assessment of GTK vs QT, but that's a personal preference.

 

Should you ever feel the itch to check it out again, a couple quick thoughts to share based on MY experiences:

• LXDE was the best....modular....rock solid....my favorite DE by a long shot.
• LXQt isn't on that level....yet....but it is getting there.  In the meantime, it's certainly serviceable.  It does SOME things better than LXDE (like theming, window manager modularity, and control center/panel) but it IS a moving target, and moving targets create "misses"
• the 'Buntus have slipped a little, IMO.  their focus is on just about everything BUT the desktop.  part of the reason I moved to Debian.  Debian with LXQT has been quite stable for me with very few to no issues
• Lubuntu has a nice implementation of LXQt....it tempted me.  But you need to stick to LTS versions in the 'Buntu family.  The "in between" releases are just Betas and RCs for the LTS versions.  Stick with XX.04 versions, where XX represents the last 2 digits of "even numbered years" and you should be fine
• your "upgrade in place" of Lubuntu is a perfect demonstration of my experiences with the 'Buntus.  everything appeared to be fine, but over time, quirky issues appeared (like your disappearance of a nm-tray icon that you have to jump through hoops to fix?!); I learned that a re-install of the "upgrade" version was the best way to avoid any potential upgrade issues; jump from LTS to LTS
• referencing that last statement regarding re-installation to upgrade the OS, THAT is what lead me to Debian.  NUMEROUS folks in the Debian forums have represented that they just keep upgrading their Debian OS in place, with no issues whatsoever.  I haven't done it yet (still on Buster), but that was the tipping point for me.  One fellow on Debian forum represented he has been upgrading his Debian "in place" since 2004(?) with NO issues whatsoever.....I'm kinda skeptical about that, but why would he lie about such a thing?  I WANT that!  Try Debian LXQt....FWIW!

 

All that said, glad you got it sorted out, and QUICKLY!  LOL!

[raymac46]

I do have the LXQt desktop on my "Swiss Knife" Thinkpad T430 running Debian Testing but mostly I stick with GNOME there. I haven't had any problems with stability and I always run my updates from the Terminal. I've upgraded in place a number of times without issue. But Debian is a whole 'nother matter than Ubuntu or even Linux Mint. There are other issues with Debian like wifi and codecs but stability isn't one of them, especially if you stick to the "stable" branch.

I think my issues with LXQt are probably due in part to laziness; I haven't put the time in getting to know the ins and outs of the desktop so I know how to fix icons, etc. Mea culpa.

[wa4chq]

I tried Ubuntu when it first came out.  It was nice but I couldn't get onboard.  That was a while back and maybe it's changed....gotten older, grumpier and grayer....wait, that's me!

[raymac46]

For the record I just booted up Debian Testing on the Thinkpad with LXQt and did a 120 package upgrade at record speed in the Terminal. After a reboot, the wifi applet is still there. Mind you it looks as if Debian is using the GTK nm-applet rather thatn nm-tray.

[raymac46]

Just checked another stable version of LXQt (Arch Linux) on my old Toshiba Netbook. Again Arch is using nm-applet. So the issue is definitely with the use of nm-tray and Lubuntu updates GUI.