DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 850, 27 January 2020

Feature Story (by Jesse Smith)

FuryBSD 12.0 FuryBSD is the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database and provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. FuryBSD is not entirely different in its goals from NomadBSD, which we discussed recently. I wanted to take this FreeBSD-based project for a test drive and see how it compares to NomadBSD and other desktop-oriented projects in the FreeBSD family.



FuryBSD supplies hybrid ISO/USB images which can be used to run a live desktop. There are two desktop editions currently, both for 64-bit (x86_64) machines: Xfce and KDE Plasma. The Xfce edition is 1.4GB in size and is the flavour I downloaded. The KDE Plasma edition is about 3.0GB in size.



Booting from the live media brings up the Xfce 4.14 desktop environment. Along the bottom of the screen is a panel which holds the application menu, task switcher and system tray. Icons on the desktop open the Thunar file manager, launch the system installer, and provide quick access to a Getting Started document. There are two more icons for accessing X.Org configuration options and showing system information. The Getting Started document is a quick reference text file containing command line instructions for setting up networking and installing video drivers. The System Information icon opens the Firefox web browser and displays a locally generated page which contains general information about our computer and its resource usage.





FuryBSD 12.0 -- The live Xfce desktop

(full image size: 1.2MB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Installing



Launching the system installer opens a window that displays a series of text-based menus and prompts. The first screen asks us to make up a hostname for our computer. We are then shown a series of ZFS options. We can choose which disk to take over for the filesystem, along with RAID options, whether to enabling encryption, and we can set the size of swap space. This screen is not at all beginner friendly and is likely to confuse anyone not accustomed to working with ZFS, but the options all seem to work as I would hope. The installer asks if we are sure we want to wipe and take over the disks we selected and then copies its files to the hard drive.



Once the files have copied we are asked to make up a password for the root account. We can then add a new user account. We are advised to add at least one user to the wheel group. This recommendation is not explained, but it is so our user can perform administration actions. We are then asked to pick our time zone from a menu and then the system restarts.



While the installer worked well enough, something that gave me a little trouble was the screensaver came on while the operating system was being set up and locked the desktop. I did not know what the password was and it took a little trial-and-error before I came up with "furybsd" as the password. I later found the default passwords are on the project's GitHub page for the live media.



Early impressions



My fresh install of FuryBSD booted to a graphical login screen. From there I could sign into my account, which brings up the Xfce desktop. The installed version of Xfce is the same as the live version, with a few minor changes. Most of the desktop icons have been removed with just the file manager launchers remaining. The Getting Started and System Information icons have been removed. Otherwise the experience is virtually identical to the live media.



FuryBSD uses a theme that is mostly grey and white with creamy yellow folder icons. The application menu launchers tend to have neutral icons, neither particularly bright and detailed or minimal.





FuryBSD 12.0 -- The Xfce application menu

(full image size: 924kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Hardware



I tried running FuryBSD on my laptop and in a VirtualBox machine. In both test environments, the operating system ran quickly and the Xfce desktop performed smoothly. When running in VirtualBox, at first FuryBSD could not integrate the mouse pointer or use my system's full screen resolution. Once VirtualBox guest modules had been installed from the FreeBSD package repositories mouse integration worked, but I still could not get the desktop to use a higher screen resolution.



When running on my laptop, FuryBSD was able to make use of my wired network connection, but could not detect my wireless card. I used the Getting Started tips file, but the listed tools did not help. I also found applications were unable to play sound in either test environment. I will touch on this again later, but FuryBSD was entirely silent during my trial, regardless of how I adjusted the volume controls.



The operating system is fairly lean for a desktop system and requires just 2GB of disk space. Memory usage was about average, with the operating system consuming 330MB of Active memory and 290MB of Wired memory.



Applications



FuryBSD requires a smaller than normal amount of disk space because it ships with few desktop applications. We are given Firefox, the Thunar file manager, the Xfce terminal, the Xfce settings panel, and a bulk file renaming tool. The application menu contains a launcher for an e-mail client, but no e-mail application is installed. Behind the scenes we find the FreeBSD 12.0 userland tools, manual pages, and the Clang compiler.



For anything else we will need to turn to the package manager. FuryBSD does not ship with a graphical software manager, instead we can use the pkg command line package manager to install, upgrade, and remove software. We could also use FreeBSD's collection of ports if we wish to compile source packages and add customizations.





FuryBSD 12.0 -- Information on using the package manager

(full image size: 489kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



The Firefox browser worked well for the most part. I had no trouble visiting most websites. However, I could not get YouTube videos to play. Videos would load, but refuse to start. I also had trouble with local multimedia. I installed the VLC and mpv players. Both media players would show video, but were unable to produce sound, for either video or audio files.



Both the sudo and doas privilege escalation tools are installed. I found sudo is not configured and needs to be set up manually. The doas tool is set up to grant root access (with a password) to anyone in the wheel group. Some specific commands can also be run by wheel members without a password, such as the service command for managing background services and the ifconfig utility for managing network connections.





FuryBSD 12.0 -- The settings panel

(full image size: 477kB, resolution: 1366x768 pixels)



Conclusions



I don't feel as though I have a lot to say about FuryBSD as the operating system is quite minimal for a desktop system. The project mostly does what it sets out to do - providing a way to run a live desktop version of FreeBSD and make it possible to quickly install a FreeBSD-based operating system. On the positive side of things, it mostly works well, has some quick-reference documentation, uses FreeBSD's solid core as its base, and has a pretty vanilla, yet functional, version of Xfce.



I did have a few complaints. FuryBSD is very minimal, meaning beyond testing hardware and browsing the web, there is not a lot we can do with the live environment. The installer, while functional, is likely to scare away anyone besides people already comfortable with FreeBSD and ZFS. I also found sound was not working on my test systems.



While FuryBSD basically succeeds in fulfilling its mission, I was less enthusiastic about using it than I was when I tried NomadBSD last month. NomadBSD has a more polished desktop, more included applications, sound worked out of the box, the desktop resolution could be adjusted in VirtualBox, and it used less RAM. These two projects have a lot of overlap and, while they approach some things differently, I feel NomadBSD is currently the stronger choice for most users while FuryBSD will probably mostly appeal to people who want a more minimal default collection of software. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a de-branded HP laptop with the following specifications: Processor: Intel i3 2.5GHz CPU

Display: Intel integrated video

Storage: Western Digital 700GB hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Wired network device: Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast

Wireless network device: Realtek RTL8188EE Wireless network card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



FuryBSD has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7/10 from 9 review(s).

Have you used FuryBSD? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.





Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith)

Fedora presents Fedora CoreOS, Kubuntu unveils official laptop, Ubuntu dropping Amazon launcher The Fedora team have announced that the Fedora CoreOS platform is now available for general public use. Fedora CoreOS is a minimal platform intended to run containers and is considered the successor to Fedora Atomic Host and CoreOS's Container Linux. " The Fedora CoreOS team is pleased to announce that Fedora CoreOS is now available for general use. Here are some more details about this exciting delivery. Fedora CoreOS is a new Fedora Edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale. It's the successor to both Fedora Atomic Host and CoreOS Container Linux and is part of our effort to explore new ways of assembling and updating an OS. Fedora CoreOS combines the provisioning tools and automatic update model of Container Linux with the packaging technology, OCI support, and SELinux security of Atomic Host. "



The Fedora Magazine post goes on to note that this means CoreOS's Container Linux, which was purchased by Red Hat about two years ago, will soon reach the end of its supported life. " CoreOS Container Linux will be maintained for a few more months, and then will be declared end-of-life. We'll announce the exact end-of-life date later this month. " * * * * * The Kubuntu team has announced the availability of an official Kubuntu laptop. The laptop is a joint venture with Tuxedo Computers and the new device is being called the Kubuntu Focus Laptop. " The Kubuntu Council, MindShareManagement Inc, and Tuxedo Computers proudly announce the officially authorized Kubuntu Focus Laptop. The target audience are power users and developers who seek performance and compatibility with Linux deployment environments. It comes pre-loaded and pre-updated with the latest, professionally vetted software for web development, deep learning, Steam games, video editing, image editing, and dozens of additional supported software packages. This laptop is the result of months of focused industrial design. We took one hardware configuration meticulously tuned it to ensure everything works out of the box " A post on the Kubuntu website offers further details and specifications. * * * * * According to an article on FOSS Bytes, the Ubuntu distribution will no longer be shipping with a launcher for the Amazon store by default. Canonical's relationship with Amazon has often been the source of controversy over the past eight years and the distribution has gradually been pulling back from including Amazon search results and Amazon links bundled with the operating system. " Does the Amazon web app also give you a hard time on Ubuntu? If yes, then it's time to cheer for you as the much-awaited Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa has finally removed the pre-installed Amazon web launcher from the dock. The article points to a change on Launchpad which seems to indicate the removal of the Amazon launcher. * * * * * These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.





Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

Live distro versus installed distro performance Buyer-beware asks: Live distros always seem to work great off of a DVD. However, I struggle to figure out why they no longer work as fast or as smooth whenever I decide to actually install an updated distro.



A perfect example is the Ubuntu family. Lubuntu and Xubuntu have the same or better response times. Kubuntu takes forever no matter what I try to do.



How do I find out what settings are used that allow a live version of a Linux distro to work great when I test it on my hardware versus when I install it? Do you know of an optimization checklist that might help?



DistroWatch answers: I find this situation interesting as, typically, I get the same desktop performance from a live distro as an installed one. If anything, running a distribution from a hard drive is usually faster than running it from a DVD due to the better drive speed. I would generally consider it strange to find a distribution that runs slower after it has been installed than when it is running from a DVD.



When there is a performance difference when running from one medium or another there are some things we can check. The first one I usually look at is the video driver. In the Ubuntu family of distributions you can go into the Software & Updates tool from the application menu and look under the Additional Drivers tab. This will give you access to third-party drivers which may offer better desktop performance. Typically the third-party drivers will only help if you are using a 3-D desktop like GNOME or Cinnamon. It is less likely to help when running Lubuntu, Xubuntu or Kubuntu as these desktops do not require 3-D driver support to functional smoothly.



Another thing to look at is whether desktop visual effects are enabled. This tends to make a big difference on distributions that run the KDE Plasma desktop (such as Kubuntu). If you go into the System Settings panel and look at the desktop effects settings, you will likely find most of them enabled. Turning off visual effects can speed up the desktop. On many modern desktops you should also check the compositor settings. I often find turning off compositing (or tuning it to prefer performance over visual polish) can make a big difference. Each desktop handles this differently, so check your desktop environment's documentation or your distribution's documentation for steps on how to do this.



A third option is to look at background services, such as file indexing. Generally file indexing should be disabled on a live disc, but will be running in the background on a freshly installed distribution. Many distributions run a service like locate which indexes all the files on the hard drive. Some desktops, including KDE Plasma, can also create an index of files and this can slow down the interface. Check your desktop's settings to see if it is setting up a search index or file index. If so, disabling this service can help. Similarly, if your computer is running a background job to index files for locate, then disabling this service or making it run at a lower priority can help. You can check if one of these index services is running using your distribution's system monitor.



Finally, one more thing you can do is wait. If you are noticing the performance difference right away and not using the distribution for very long before deciding it is too slow, then it is possible some background services are running when you first sign in and will stop later. For instance, your system may be checking for software updates when you first install the operating system and will sort itself out in a few minutes. If so, the slower performance will be temporary and only happen when you first login to your account. If slow performance continues beyond a few minutes then it is probably due to one of the above scenarios. * * * * * Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.





Released Last Week

GParted Live 1.1.0-1



Curtis Gedak has announced the release of GParted Live 1.1.0-1, the latest stable version of the project's Debian-based CD/USB image with a collection of disk management and data rescue utilities: " The GParted team is pleased to announce a new stable release of GParted Live. This release includes GParted 1.1.0, updated packages and other improvements. Items of note include: fix error when moving locked LUKS-encrypted partition; switch to faster minfo and mdir to read FAT16/32 usage; calculate JFS size accurately; recognise ATARAID members and detect their busy status; based on the Debian 'Sid' repository as of 2020-01-21; Linux kernel updated to 5.4.13; fix an issue about makeboot.sh which failed to run. Note that the default boot options did not display an X Desktop on old Acer Aspire laptops. The workaround is to select Other modes of GParted Live and choose GParted Live (Safe graphics setting, vga-normal). Note also that a problem on a test computer with GParted stuck displaying 'Scanning all devices...' turned out to be an mdadm command waiting forever for a floppy_read_block. " Read the full release announcement for more details.



GhostBSD 20.01



GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop operating system based on TrueOS (which is, in turn, based on FreeBSD's development branch). The project's latest release, GhostBSD 20.01, introduces some fixes to the installer and ships with version 1.22.2 of the MATE desktop environment. A community edition featuring the Xfce desktop is also available. " I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.01 with some improvements made to the installer, mainly improvements to the way the installer UI deals with custom partitions involving GTP and UEFI. Also, some system and software has been updated. GhostBSD 20.01 ISO has some minor improvements over 19.10. It provides an up to date ISO with the latest packages and system updates for new installation with a simple installation process to get you going quickly. For current installation, no need to re-install. What has changed since 19.10: System got updated to 12.1-STABLE. MATE is now at 1.22.2. Added a warning when an incorrect password is used in Software Station. Fix the UI installer limitation with GPT and UEFI. " Further information can be found in the project's release announcement.



Lakka 2.3.2



The Lakka development team has announced the release of Lakka 2.3.2, a lightweight Linux distribution (based on LibreELEC) which promises to transform a small computer into a full-blown game console. The new release comes with an updated RetroArch user interface: " The Lakka team wishes everyone a happy new year as it welcomes 2020 with a new update and a new tier-based releases system. This new Lakka update, version 2.3.2, contains RetroArch 1.8.4 (was 1.7.2), some new cores and a handful of core updates. This new version of RetroArch adds some welcome features - the most interesting is the manual content scanner. You read it right - no database is required any more to build your playlists. Whether it's because the database is missing or your platform has little memory to handle big scans, you now have the choice to do a manual scan to build playlists on your Lakka box. This new scanning method simply takes all files ending with a known extension in a folder and adds them to the playlist for that system. " Read the rest of the release announcement for further details. At present, the new Lakka release is available for generic x86_64 computers and Raspberry Pi boards.



Solus 4.1



Solus is a Linux distribution built from scratch. It uses a forked version of the PiSi package manager, maintained as "eopkg" within Solus, and a custom desktop environment called "Budgie", developed in-house. The project's latest release is Solus 4.1 which offers many updates and should provide a faster install process thanks to using a different format for compression: " Solus 4.1 is the first ISO release to feature the use of Zstandard(zstd) compression for the SquashFS images. Compared to the XZ compressed ISOs from previous releases, the ztsd compressed size is a little bit larger. But as a result, the decompression times are significantly improved (3-4x), leading to a much faster installation process than ever previously achieved. In most cases, you can expect to spend more time filling out the questions in the installation wizard than it will actually take to copy everything to disk. We hope you are just as surprised as we were at just how fast this process has become. " The project's release announcement offers further details.





Solus 4.1 -- Running the Budgie desktop

(full image size: 1.2MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)

* * * * * Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases

Bicom Systems PBXware 5.3.5

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2-beta (Announcement)

Fatdog64 Linux 810

Q4OS 3.10.r2

Bluestar Linux 5.4.13

EasyNAS 1.0.0-beta1

EasyOS 2.2.5

Android-x86 9.0-rc2

Parabola GNU/Linux-libre 2020.01.18

Qubes OS 4.0.3

KDE neon 20200123

Live Raizo 11.20.01.22

Robolinux 10.8

Volumio 2.699

Bedrock Linux 0.7.14-beta1

Torrent Corner

Upcoming Releases and Announcements

Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith)

Purchasing an official distro computer There are a handful of Linux distributions (and some flavours of BSD) which are partnered with hardware sellers to provide customers with official desktop, laptop and NAS devices. The Linux Mint distribution promotes the MintBox series of computers, for example, and in our News section we talked about the new Kubuntu Focus Laptop. Buying a laptop that is endorsed by the distribution should, in theory at least, provide a smooth experience with hardware that has been tested with the distribution's configuration and drivers.



We would like to hear how many of our readers have purchased one of these official, distribution-endorsed computers. Was it a good experience or the same as you would expect from any off-the-shelf computer? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.



You can see the results of our previous poll on whether init software plays a role in choosing your distribution in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.



Purchasing official distribution computers



I have purchased an official distro PC and liked it: 89 (5%) I have purchased an official distro PC and disliked it: 8 (0%) I have not purchased an official distro PC and plan to later: 360 (21%) I have not and have no plans to purchase an official distro PC: 1220 (73%)