Ended up going to Arcollinux-i3 instead of the spin. Weird folder issues gone. Squashed another nit that has bothered me for ages. The dropbox status icon in the systray always got commingled with the neighboring status icon. I have switched from the native dropbox client to maestral which is fully open source and headless. Wrote a custom block for i3status-rust that calls a script that displays my dropbox status via maestral.
This week I gave Kubuntu 20.04 a try on an external SSD. I was needing more graceful handling of a second monitor (sometimes being attached at boot time, sometimes not), which XFCE (my current DE on my daily driver) was doing a poor job of, for me.
In the past, I was really turned off by KDE’s distasteful over-use of GUI elements and gratuitous features, but Kubuntu 20.04 so far seems pretty tight, and not too overwhelming. So far, it’s done a few really noticeable things more gracefully than XFCE does, which I really appreciated. But I haven’t spent enough time yet to get to know KDE more, to the extent that I discover its own subtle warts. That always takes a good month or two, IMHO.
Having said this, both of these desktops, XFCE and KDE, have way, way less hassles, than, say, Windows or MacOS. And I’ve given up the unrealistic expectation that any Desktop Environment will ever be pristinely perfect. Such is life.
This week I donated a Raspberry Pi 4 (complete with an official plastic case, MicroSD cards, and a power supply) to a Buddhist monastery. I know a couple of linux-using Buddhist monks there. 
I also tinkered with the Beta of the 64bit “Raspberry Pi OS”, trying out the nifty USB booting ability. As long as the drives were low-power enough (for the official 3A power supply to handle), they all worked; three of them, which I tested: a USB stick, and 2 spinning-rust drives (with no external power supply) all worked - these were labelled as 800 mA and down. But two different 2.5" SSD’s, which were labelled 1A and up? To much power draw!! This is with no other peripherals attached, other than ethernet.
Note that this Beta has no kernel headers package, making installing wireguard somewhat of a nightmare. So I went back to Ubuntu 20.04 64bit for the Raspberry Pi 4, for now (where wireguard is simple to install, but you can’t boot from a USB hard drive yet, without major pain).
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Sunday: meetings + meeting PC: pinebook pro with arm manjaro with KDE and my GNOME apps.
Monday-Thursday: coding in Fedora in the morning, gaming on Linux (OS:manjaro desktop:GNOME).
Friday: testing NixOS, installing new version of Fedora Silverblue Rawhive, gaming on manjaro.
Friday afternoon: gaming on manjaro, watching movies and gaming multiplayer TGIF style.
Saturday: managing my Home Linux World: IoTs, NextCloud, OpenWRT, Manjaro, Fedora Labs, coding.
At the moment my pinephone and pinebook pro has KDE plasma and my PC GNOME, I am used to gnome for 10 years and I use it at work (Fedora), but KDE is optimized well for pinebook pro and it is more user friendly. well long term dilemma do I switch to KDE Plasma full time to have ONE de on all devices (since their is really no ARM GNOME tablet version at least from Manjaro) I tried the fedora mobile it was ok, but not really usable on a daily level. ARM plasma manjaro is user ready level.
at the moment I use the GNOME apps on the KDE tablet, but kde has cool native apps as well.
Regards, Alex
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I’ve been diving into a shell script the past week to automatically complete daily and weekly timesheets for work. My scripting experience is very limited so I’m learning everything as I go but it’s fun. Unfortunately 14 hour work days don’t leave much spare time to work on it.
After the first day of trying to fill out pdfs for 3 different people on my phone at the end of each day I got so frustrated with the sheer incompetence of the “smart” phone interface I needed to save my sanity. Thanks Linux!
This week I disabled SecureBoot on my Inspiron because I’ve found that it causes me more headaches than it’s worth when running Linux. As such I’m playing with PopOS again (which previously wouldn’t boot, probably due to a lack of Microsoft-blessed shim). Who knows when I’ll get bored with it and spin up something else.
This week I cleaned up the laptop of my wife. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 on ZFS and I updated the system for the first time this month. The laptop is an 2011 HP Elitebook 8540p with a i5-M560, 4GB DDR3 and a 250 GB HDD (7200rpm). It feels, like it takes hours to boot the system (~80 seconds). However the system has excellent graphics 15.8" screen (1920 x 1080) with a Nvidia NVS 5100M with 48 cuda cores 
It works perfectly with the new font scaling features.
I have installed KDE-Connect and connected to my wife’s phone. I copied all her photos to the laptop using Grsync on top of KDE-Connect.
Afterwards I installed Windows 10 Pro in Virtualbox using the Windows 7 sticker glued to the PC. Windows nicely activated. I did give Windows 2 GB, so the system (host) depends a lot on the SWAP partition. However it is workable since, I installed some programs and updated Windows to the newest version.
The system has some problems:
- The battery is completely dead;
- The charger is missing, so I use my own HP charger to run that laptop.
- The memory is too small 4 GB and slow (1066 MHz). However I want to update my own laptop from 8 GB (1333 MHz) to 16 GB (1600 MHz) and could move the 8 GB to this laptop.
- The HDD still has 190 GB free, so I consider too install instead my spare 128 GB SSD. First try increasing memory to 8 GB with a 3 GB L1ARC memory cache. Except for the boot time it should solve all other performance issues, since the system should be running largely from memory cache (hit rates ~98%).
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You might be better served by Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or Ubuntu Mate on that spec laptop with 4 GB. I use a few different older laptops every day with 4 GB, and enjoy the experience, but I’m running Ubuntu Mate on two of them, and MX Linux on the third.
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This week I have a new computer coming in. been 7 years since Ive upgraded. looking forward to it!
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I am planning ahead to give openSUSE a thorough try again but this time I will take Tumbleweed and try it at least for a month. It is almost vacation time so I can play with it.
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what is the difference between openSUSE Leap and openSUSE Tumbleweed, the Leap has a version number tumbleweed has not, is it a rolling release, hence no version number?
I never give OpenSuse a try as a Business Linux, back when I started started with Scientific Linux / CentOS then Fedora fully and stuck with the RedHat Enterprise Linux Family of Linux OSs.
OpenSuse,Solus and Gentoo are on my list to give them a try on my test PC, now trying out NixOS.
Regards, Alex
Tumbleweed is a rolling release. Great name, isn’t it? Here is a little break down of the two:
thanks for the info, English is not my native language but yeah name sounds cool for a rolling release.
Regards, Alex
Without the Windows 10 VM there is no problem for my wife with 4 GB and Ubuntu. Besides the country of residence, the Dominican Republic is closed for flights from the USA, as soon as it opens I will order 2 x 8 GB memory and do the memory swap. I only did the trick with Windows to get an activated Windows 10. You have to do the activation on the original PC with the sticker Afterwards I can move the Windows VM to any PC.
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After being emboldened to boot straight off an USB-attached SATA drive on a Raspbery Pi 4 (running Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit beta), I looked into doing this for Ubuntu 64bit as well (because it’s easy to install Wireguard there).
No, I couldn’t boot straight from USB in Ubuntu 64bit, but I could come pretty close to getting all the goodness of the speed of a USB drive. Here’s what I did, which was really simple. The 2 partitions on an Ubuntu MicroSD card on the Raspberry Pi have the partition labeling “writable” (where the root fs is), and “system-boot” (which gets mounted on /boot/firmware).
I did the following while the MicroSD card was “offline”, meaning, not running Ubuntu live within the Raspberry Pi, but was rather plugged into my MX linux laptop:
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On the MicroSD card, I renamed the “writable”-labelled partition to a label of “writable-off” (using gparted).
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I created 2 partitions on my USB-attached SATA hard drive, similar to the ones on the MicroSD card (vfat-formatted, and ext4-formatted, respectively), calling them “system-boot-off”, and “writable”.
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Then I “cp -a”-ed the contents of the “writable-off” partition to the “writable” partition on the USB SATA drive.
So now the Raspberry Pi still boots Ubuntu from a MicroSD card, thanks to a “system-boot” partition there, but now it finds the “writable”-labelled partition over on the USB SATA drive, so the rest of the OS runs from there (where it’s 2-3x faster than if it ran on the MicroSD card).
So it’s not a true USB boot, but I still get all the speed from the USB SATA drive.
Update on my week - I recently received a Free Software Foundation membership card (which I’ll be honest - I’d forgotten I ordered some time last year) and on it was a copy of Trisquel/Triskel 8.0. This threw me down a rabbit hole of finding the latest beta of Triskel 9.0 which I’m playing with on Boxes.
I must say - for a GNU-blessed FOSS-only distribution, Triskel 9.0 is looking really nice! The last time I played with anything blessed by the FSF it was GnuSense, and I was left with much to be desired. It’s encouraging to see that progress has been made in the last decade on only FOSS software and modern hardware.
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I’ve been playing with Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, also a FSF endorsed distribution, to see if it can replace BLAG Linux and GNU as my daily driver. I’m really liking the rolling release on my “workstation.” Trisquel is a pretty ok distro as well, the development is just so so slow.
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Honestly that’s why it fell off my radar entirely. I think I went to their site and saw how old 8.0 was and no discernible progress and figured it was dead. How difficult is Parabola compared to straight Arch?
The documentation is slightly worse, but most things are straight equivalent. Typical GNU/FSF hard-line snags with some software blacklisted (but I guess that’s kind of why people use it) but I’m running Plasma 5.19 and haven’t yet run into many papercuts.
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I just discovered that the Island Nation of Niue is blocked by my work firewall, so I’ll have to check out Parabola on my personal laptop tonight. Haha.
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