DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 826, 5 August 2019

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

Exploring the waiting list Most of the time we hold off on reviewing young distributions until they have matured enough, and been active long enough, to migrate from the DistroWatch waiting list to the database of tracked projects. However, putting off talking about projects until they reach a certain age, level of infrastructure, or version number means our readers miss out on hearing about some really interesting concepts.



This week I decided to explore three projects on the waiting list which, while not necessarily ready for mainstream use, present neat ideas which certainly sound promising, or at least unusual. * * * * * Resilient Linux 1.0 The first project on my experimental list is Resilient Linux. Resilient is based on Debian 9 "Stretch" and is designed to run with the operating system on a read-only partition. A second partition, referred to as the persistence partition, includes system updates and user data. This arrangement offers a few benefits. One is that we can backup the entire system by taking a snapshot or archive of the persistence partition. Another is that attackers cannot directly corrupt or compromise the main operating system partition since they cannot write to it. Finally, it should be very easy to restore or transfer an existing system by installing Resilient and then copying the persistence partition to the new operating system.



The Resilient website reports that the persistence partition can be encrypted for additional security and the distribution is available in Desktop and Server editions. At the moment, Resilient is available for 64-bit computers (x86_64) only. The distribution's Desktop edition is available as a 3.2GB Zip file, which unpacks to a 4.3GB image file.



I tried booting off the image file and, each time, the system began to boot and then dropped me to an initramfs prompt. After trying a few different boot options, I had to admit defeat. While Resilient is not working for me yet, I think the idea of a read-only operating system partition makes sense. It sounds similar to openSUSE's Transactional Server or Fedora's Silverblue operating system, but with a Debian base. I am hoping the next release runs for me so I can give this concept a try. * * * * * PrimeOS 0.4.5 The next distribution on my list is PrimeOS, which provides an implementation of Android that runs on x86 personal computers. This allows users to run Android and its many applications on a desktop or laptop computer.



PrimeOS is presented in three editions: Mainline (for new computers), Standard (for most 64-bit computers), and Classic (for 32-bit computers). I tried downloading the Standard edition which is a 1GB download, and the Classic edition which is 879MB.



The first time I tried to download PrimeOS the download was slow and eventually failed due to a dropped connection. When I went back to the project's website to try another mirror I was told no mirrors (including the one I had just used) were available. I then tried the Classic option which did present me with mirrors. The Classic download started quickly, but stopped downloading at 16%. Returning again, later, to the project's download page failed to provide me with working mirrors.



In short, PrimeOS may be a useful operating system (it sounds a lot like Android-x86), however after several tries I was unable to get my hands on a copy to actually give it a spin. * * * * * BlueLight 0.2.2 Alpha The final experimental distribution on my to-try list this week was BlueLight. The project's website does not tell us much about this unusual Linux distribution, other than it is related to another project called OS.js: BlueLight, formerly called OS.js Linux, is a lightweight web-based Linux distro powered by OS.js. It uses the power of Electron to run a cloud based operating system, OS.js, to provide the user with a more web-based experience. The BlueLight ISO file is 825MB in size. Booting from the media brings up a graphical interface with a blue theme. A window soon pops-up and asks us to select our language from a list. We are then asked to pick our time zone from a list that uses white text on a white background, meaning we need to move the mouse over each entry to highlight it in order to see what it says.



We then pick a disk to house BlueLight's installation and the system copies files from its media. The installer finishes and drops us at a live, minimal desktop environment. Here I ran into an odd problem as I could find no way to reboot or shutdown the system. The application menu is mostly empty and the logout option simply re-launches the desktop and starts the installer again.



I eventually forced a hard poweroff and restarted the computer. At this point BlueLight failed to boot, reporting no system disk could be found. I wondered if I might have skipped an installation step and checked the project's website. At the time of writing there is no documentation on installing the distribution and the link to the project's wiki is broken. The project's blog is also off-line at the time of writing, making me wonder if the project may be abandoned.



For the moment at least, as curious as I was to see what a web-focused operating system might offer, it looks like I will have to wait to find out. * * * * * Each other these projects has been on our waiting list a short while and still have plenty of time to work out bugs and become more polished. For now, I think they each offer intriguing ideas, the implementations just need time to mature before they are ready to be explored further.





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Librem 5 hardware finalized, Manjaro introduces new package manager, Trident warns of video driver issue, NetBSD reveals 9.0 features The Librem 5 is a smart phone being designed to run GNU/Linux distributions, such as PureOS, and run with 100% free and open source software. The phone's hardware design has been finalized and Purism, the organization behind the phone, hopes to start shipping units to backers later this year. Details on the phone's hardware and hardware switches for protecting privacy can be found in this blog post. * * * * * The Manjaro Linux team has announced a few new tools coming to future versions of their rolling release distribution. The first is fpakman, a graphical application for handling Flatpak and Snap packages. " Some might notice that since the Snapcraft Summit a lot of package changes went into Manjaro and our available RCs. Also we didn't yet announce 18.1.0-rc6 officially yet. Xfce, GNOME and KDE editions will come with fpakman, so managing Snaps and Flatpaks is easy. This way everybody can easily access the Snap store by a click and don't have to hassle to get Snaps enabled. This enables us to ship even more proprietary software, which we couldn't before. " Also on the topic of proprietary software, Manjaro has partnered with Softmaker to ship the FreeOffice productivity suite by default. FreeOffice claims to have a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft Office and is free to use, though some Manjaro users have expressed concern as FreeOffice is proprietary software. The Manjaro team has responded that they will make installing FreeOffice (or another suite) an option in the distribution's installer. * * * * * The developers of Project Trident are reporting that, due to some issues with the upstream FreeBSD vesa video driver, Project Trident may not start properly on computers booting in legacy BIOS mode. " FreeBSD has broken their vesa driver which is required for legacy boot systems in the Trident installer. If you have the option, you will need to enable booting via EFI or UEFI in order to go through the graphical installer. If you already have an installed Trident system with legacy boot and which currently uses an NVIDIA or AMD graphics driver, it is still safe to upgrade your system to this release (only the vesa driver is currently broken, which is used for no-GPU and some Intel-GPU systems). You can run about from a terminal to see which GPU driver your system is currently using. " Details on the FreeBSD driver issue can be found in this problem report. * * * * * The NetBSD project has published some highlights of the operating system's upcoming 9.0 release. The NetBSD developers are working to get 32-bit ARM applications running on 64-bit ARM hardware, updating ZFS support, and introducing a number of security and memory leak detection tools. The system installer will now work with GPT UEFI hardware configurations. A complete overview of the features people can expect to see in NetBSD 9.0 are listed in the project's blog post. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Flagship distributions for desktop environments Looking-for-the-best-examples asks: I've tried out KDE neon recently and was wondering if other desktops, besides KDE, have flagship distros that really show off how the desktop is meant to look?



DistroWatch answers: I would say that there are several distributions which focus on, or showcase, upstream desktop environments. Though many of them do not have the same direct (or official) relationship KDE neon has with the KDE Plasma desktop. Three other official distribution/desktop matches are: deepin which runs the Deepin desktop, older versions of Ubuntu running Unity, and Linux Mint which is home to the Cinnamon desktop. Also, I think Project Trident (which is a flavour of BSD, not a Linux distribution) could probably be considered the official platform for the Lumina desktop environment.



While most other desktops do not necessarily have an official distro showcasing them, I think an argument could be made for Fedora being a good platform to show off GNOME. Fedora and GNOME are both sponsored by Red Hat and Fedora tends to ship the latest stable upstream GNOME packages with very little modification. One might also argue that Ubuntu MATE probably offers the latest MATE desktop set up in a way that is ideal for showing off the desktop's features in a friendly way.



Off the top of my head, I don't think Xfce, LXDE, and LXQt have official connections to any Linux distributions, but if you are curious to try them you may want to look at Xubuntu and Lubuntu as both distributions are fairly easy to set up and strive to offer a solid desktop experience. Likewise, I don't think Enlightenment has official ties to any distribution, but Bodhi Linux is well regarded as offering a polished Enlightenment experience. I believe Q4OS is one of the few distributions still shipping with the Trinity desktop and so it becomes a showcase for Trinity by default. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

Linux Mint 19.2



The Linux Mint team has published an update to the distribution's 19.x series. The new version, Linux Mint 19.2, is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, offering five years of support. The new update offers several user interface improvements. For instance, it is now possible to configure the width overlay scrollbars, and programs with the same name show up with added descriptions in the application menu so that users can tell X-Apps from GNOME programs and Flatpaks from Deb packages. " The application menu is faster and it now identifies and distinguishes duplicates. If two applications have the same name, the menu will show more information about them. In your application menu, Xed is the 'Text Editor'. If you install Gedit, you no longer end up with two 'Text Editor' entries. Instead, you'll see 'Text Editor (Xed)' and 'Text Editor (Gedit)'. The same goes for Flatpaks, if you install the Flatpak of an application you already have, the menu will distinguish between the two to let you know which one is the one from the repositories and which one is the Flatpak. Scrollbar settings: If you don't like overlay scrollbars or if you find them too thin, you can now configure the way they look in the System Settings. " Further details can be found in the project's release announcements for each edition (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce).



SparkyLinux 2019.08



The SparkyLinux team have published the first new release of the project's semi-rolling branch, which is based on Debian Testing, also known as "Bullseye". The new snapshot, SparkyLinux 2019.08, ships with updated kernels, new compiler options and is available in LXQt, Xfce and two minimal editions. " There are new live/install media of SparkyLinux 2019.08 'Po Tolo' available to download. This is the 1st snapshot of the new (semi-)rolling line, which is based on the testing branch of Debian 'Bullseye'. Changes: system updated from Debian Testing 'Bullseye' repos as of August 1, 2019; added GCC 9 (GCC 8 is still the default one); new Sparky6 theme; new Tela icon set; refreshed desktop look; SDDM instead of LightDM (LXQt edition); Linux kernel 4.19.37 (5.1.21 EOL, 5.2.5 and 5.3-rc2 available at Sparky unstable repos). As I mentioned before, Sparky of the rolling line is available to amd64/x86_64 machines only. Sparky rolling 32-bit is fully supported so if you have it, simply keep it up to date. " Additional information can be found in the project's release announcement.





SparkyLinux 2019.08 -- Running the LXQt desktop

(full image size: 178kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)



Pardus 19.0



Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution jointly developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) and National Academic Network and Information Centre (ULAKBİM). The distribution is built on Debian, with the latest version, Pardus 19.0, being based on Debian 10. The project's release announcement is available in Turkish and an English translation reads: " The Pardus operating system comes with Linux kernel 4.19 to keep your hardware is running smoothly and with high performance. See the positive impact of power management on laptops on battery life thanks to integration with Pardus, as well as software such as TLP. Pardus-specific improvements and innovations in the Debian-based package management system are more convenient and secure thanks to weekly updates via package repositories. Pardus has made improvements and has been compiled from source code and rebuilt packages. " Pardus 19.0 comes in Xfce, GNOME and Server editions. * * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

Linux Lite 4.6-rc1 (Announcement)

HardenedBSD 12-1200059.2

KDE neon 20190801

SmartOS 20190731

ArchBang Linux 0108-beta

Container Linux 2135.6.0

Manjaro Linux 18.1.0-rc6

Arch Linux 2019.08.01

PrimTux 5-beta2

Volumio 2.599

4MLinux 29.2

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith)

Custom desktop versus vanilla desktop Some Linux distributions customize their desktop environments, adding tweaks, short-cuts and special layouts to present the user with a special look and feel. Other distributions present a vanilla desktop experience, packaging the desktop with the defaults its developers chose. Do you prefer it when distributions leave desktops in their default, upstream state, or do you like to have a custom desktop experience? Let us know your favourite desktop and distro combination in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on GNU/Linux smart phones in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Custom desktop versus vanilla desktop



I prefer a custom desktop: 503 (27%) I prefer a vanilla desktop: 656 (35%) It depends on the distro/desktop combination: 590 (31%) No preference: 127 (7%)

Website News (by Jesse Smith)