Advice for OS needed

I haven’t read thru all the comments but what I saw and searched hasn’t mentioned LMDE, Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s a rolling release too. For my wife’s old Toshiba laptop and her new HP 2in1 I have updates and upgrades set to hit automatically, her preference. On my HP laptop I have them set for manual control. I can look them over, reject anything I’m not sure about and then weeks later I can OK them if there have been no issues noted by anyone or us. I just installed LMDE in March of 2020 shortly after its Beta release and there have been several kernel updates. Default is to keep one old kernel for safety and uninstall the older ones. That’s exactly what I did before - we’ve used Linux solely, no Microsoft at all, since 2007, first Ubuntu until 2012 when they decided to go Unity on us. We didn’t like the Unity DE so we jumped ship to Linux Mint Mate and stayed there until March 2020 when we went all LMDE. We don’t distro-hop until we’ve decided to actually change.
LMDE comes with the Cinnamon DE and zips right along on all three of our machines, even the Toshiba, as Debian is a bit lighter than the Ubuntu derivatives of Linux Mint.
LMDE is Lefebvre’s (lead Mint developer) backup in case Ubuntu decides to go stupid again, as they did with Unity and now, playing footsie with Microsoft, who knows what’s going to happen with Ubuntu.
When Ubuntu went with the Unity DE they dropped the Gnome DE entirely. That move wiped out a couple derivatives such as Vinux, a distro expressly for visually impaired users. Gnome had all the needed tweaks that Vinux needed, Unity had none of them and Vinux, as an accessible distro, went bust. Vinux was the distro that forced Ubuntu to adopt barebones accessible installation features so that blind and low vision users can install most builds of Linux today. Ubuntu’s shenanigans have destroyed or hurt other derivatives. I just don’t like their policies and I’ll never use Ubuntu because they can’t be trusted. Just like Microsoft, change with us and like it or else.

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Happy New Year to @berninghausen

As you have not read my post #82 your sorrow is entirely misplaced and misconceived – I choose to use HP-Trisquel over more modern and quantum leap Dell-ubuntu for obvious reasons - “my ancient HP with Trisquel gets the job done fast and snappy, with the same amount of resources as the more modern Dell-ubuntu standing at idle without a single application being loaded let alone running.” Yes – not even being WiFied to printer or modemd to the internet either!
Having already compared “ages and hardware” to dispel the myths muted by others I cannot understand you on this. I too am sorry that my suggestions did not bare fruit. Not sure if what you say of disc vs computer is also true – I defer to the better knowledge of Akito, Mina and Rosika. I wish you best of luck with your quest as I consider whether to install Trisquel-9 over v8 on HP and what to replace ubuntu-16 with on the Dell.
Should be an interesting New Year :face_with_monocle:
ps. - @FBClark 20+ year user of Linux – it shows – well said Sir. What species is your excellent macro Avatar?

Andy, it looks like my problem lies in the lap of the people who created the Trisquel ISO–they didn’t check with each individual user on the specifics of each individual computer. Shame on them.

My first program was written in FORTRAN, on punch cards in 63 or 64. I believe that makes my entry into ‘old and outdated’ hard to beat. 20+ years of Linux has shown me that problems grow like children and are just about as easy to control. If a distro won’t load for me, I’ll just format the USB stick and try something else.

Happy New Year to all.

I’d rather say, the problem derives from the unwillingness of some manufacturers to provide open source drivers for their devices.

Don’t think it has anything to do with drivers, unless that’s why the ISOs refuse to function.

Another one from NOT NORMAL Andy
Totally Independent and “So cool ice cubes are jealous”

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One old timer to another.

in Cobol, also punched cards in 1969. :grin: Happy New Year!
But early Linux use at just about 2.5 years.

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It’s one of our common cutworm caterpillars. They like to hide out buried in dirt or sod during the day and come out at night to nip tender plants off right at dirt level. Some varieties will also climb 8’+ to eat the tender tips of other plants. Nasty garden pests! But these ones obviously like Tux and wear his shirts!!

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If I recomember correctly, Trisquel is an ‘all free’ distro. They don’t include proprietary drivers which makes some hardware a bear to get working.

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Hi all and thanks for this great input of yours. :hearts:

@Andy2:

Thank you very much for suggesting EndeavourOS and for the link you provided.
I read the article from distrowatch through and it seems like a pretty good OS.
Yet as far as desktops are concerned:

Desktop: Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, GNOME, i3, KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, Xfce

It seems they stick to LXQt rather than LXDE (which I prefer and actually am looking for).
Plus:

  • package management is pacman (instead of DEB)
  • release model: rolling (instead if fixed)

That in effect sums up to rather not choose that distro for my purposes.

But thanks anyway for the suggestion, Andy. :blush:

@FBClark:

Hi and thanks for suggesting LMDE.

Theroetically that would be nice, too, but rolling release isn´t what I´m looking for.
Besides I once had difficulties with Linux Mint when experiencing a strange phenomenon obviously called “fallback mode” (in a VM).
I simply couldn´t get rid of it and since then I´m not so sure whether I might be comfortable using LinuxMInt as my main system. :worried:

Does that refer to your LMDE systems? I didn´t know that updates could be set to manual control even in a rolling release. I would´ve thought they can´t be avoided or tweaked to one´s liking here as well.
So that´s great news then. :smiley:

True, it´s an “all free distro”.
Yet running it as a live sytem using my ventoy-stick it didn´t seem to throw any obstacles at me, which seems cool for me.

But, as mentioned earlier, playonlinux isn´t in their repository. Therefore I´m still wondering if trisquel would be right for me.

Many greetings.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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Just what is your problem…. seems like nobody can understand your unreasonable stance … Well, might I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The hanging gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically… (Fawlty Towers - Basil) Get real for crise sake. Perhaps @Mina can give us a rough estimate to the nearest thousand of the permeations of each individual vs each individual computer you think these Spanish student devs at Trisquel should devote to your whims and hostility – shame on you, I would propose, is a better fit n’est pas!

Think you are having eye :eye: ( I ) trouble here – we are all talking about old, even ancient, as Akito refers to my HP - laptops, towers etc running linux distros.
Suggest you drop this silly Trisqel-gnu-FSF bashing and move on to something else outside of truly free :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:. :innocent: OSs?
Good Luck

It seems sarcasm is wasted on some people.

Whatever :upside_down_face:

Hi all,

After learning quite a lot about lightweight distros and Linux distros in general (thanks to your help :+1: )
I was thinking about what makes a distro lightweight. :thinking:

I may be wrong here (please correct me in this case ) but I came up with (at least) these points:

  • a certain (lightweigt) desktop environment
  • some default applications that come with it (e.g. pcmanfm as file manager with LXDE)
    (for LXDE see also: LXDE · GitHub )
  • lightweight applications instead of heavyweight ones (e.g. midori browser instead of chromium)

As a consequence I was pondering the following theoretical scenario:

Wouldn´t it be possible to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and afterwards install the LXDE desktop:

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop # with some additional programmes typical for Lubuntu

or

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-core # without those additional programmes

or even

sudo apt-get install lxde # pure desktop environment

and select at the login screen what to start?
(installation examples from LXDE Installation › Wiki › ubuntuusers.de )

One could un-install some heavyweights that come with ubuntu and replace them with lightweight programmes.

If I´d start ubuntu that way (choosing LXDE/Lubuntu environment) wouldn´t it be lightweight with the additional benefit of the 5 years´s support :question:

I was thinking about that scenario after logging in to an IRC chat with pidgin (#lxde). I noticed in the heading:

And no. LXDE isn´t deprecated right now…

which gave me a bit of hope regarding LXDE´s future… :kissing:

Many greetings.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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Dear Rosika, very busy at the moment updating Trisquel v9 over v8 - I have no confidence whatsoever in such matters - but wish I could ring out an alarm siren :speaker::speaking_head: Achtung…. and give you a better answer! :frowning_face:
(very briefly) As I know you like to be in control of updates….
I may have said this before – Stay away from ubuntu as far as possible due to - Multiple times a day, snapd checks for available updates of all Snaps and installs them in the background using “atomic operation” without asking admin or user. This is the largest backdoor I know of and a Mega Security Risk. Ask yourself if this has anything to do with Linux-Msoft…??? Gah!..… :woozy_face:. :nauseated_face:. :face_vomiting:
This why I don’t use ubuntu-Win10 Dell other than for Tails+Tor and I am desperately searching for a new none ubuntu OS for my Dell laptop.

I know that you will do your own research but for others perhaps…?

Take EXTRA care to Stay Safe – Best Wishes

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I hate Snap and how it behaves, but I wouldn’t necessarily call this a backdoor. If there were no background updating, then the user would update manually and the result would be pretty much the same. I think, they just wanted to make it more user-friendly, as Tech-agnostic people don’t ever think of updating or cleaning anything from their computer.

Some people who use apt or similar package managers run a self-managed apt update and maybe even apt upgrade in the background regularly, through a custom script.

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The Snap sandbox heavily relies on the AppArmor Linux Security Module from the upstream Linux kernel. Because only one “major” Linux Security Module (LSM) can be active at the same time - the Snap sandbox is much less secure when another major LSM is enabled. As a result, on distributions such as Fedora which enable SELinux by default, the Snap sandbox is heavily degraded.
I defer to experts on this but still believe I called it out as a backdoor correctly. There is much expert opinion out there to read.
SECURITY RISK. :hole:. :bomb:. :scream: - it certainly is

EDIT:- Phew, You are still safe AFAIK with Trisquel - I just ran…
HP-G60-Notebook-PC:~$ snap list
The program ‘snap’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install snapd
So do not panic all Trisquel users our devs are on top of the situation even in v8 - thanks guys :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:. :star_struck:

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@Andy2 and @Akito:

Hi and thanks so much to both of you for giving me your view on the matter of snaps. :ok_hand:
Thanks also for the links which I´ll look up as well. :open_book:

Very interesting insights.

I have to admit I haven´t put much thought into the matter of snaps.
But looking up the package list of LXLE (hot candidate) on DistroWatch.com: LXLE
it seems this distro takes care of the snap mechanism per default as well:

• snapd 2.40+18.04

I know that the degree of sandboxing done by snaps is much debated but regardless of that there´s one particular programme which gives me quite a lot of headaches: chromium-browser.

As I´m still using Lubuntu 18.04.5 at the moment I have the DEB-installed version if chromium running within the firejail sandbox which I like a lot. :smiley:

With ubuntu or any derivative which I may install in April there´s no chromuim DEB-package available any longer, just as snap. :angry:
And firejail cannot handle snaps or rather: apps running as snaps.

That is very unfortunate, even to such a degree that I likely will be forced to refrain from using chromium.

Many greetings.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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So busy so this is quick from the hip and may be of no use to you but…
My FOSS custom ROM on my Pixel phone is very secure grapheneOS as recommended by Edward Snowden. This uses a variant of chromium called Vanadium.

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@Andy2:

Hi Andy,

Thanks for taking the time to respond once more. :heart:
It´s really appreciated.

Never heard of Vanadium before. I´ll do bit of research then.
Thanks also for your link.

I wish you every success for your Trisquel update. :+1:

Stay safe and many greetings.
Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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