Upgraded the Pop!_OS 19.10
– Discovered an issue with the embedded folder feature in application view in Gnome 3.34.1. One of the folders which housed an app I uninstalled dismembered itself. A reset of the environment helped.
Started a Linux Administrator class (working on an undergrad in cybersecurity and networking)
Thanks to a thread on podcast players, discovered Pocket Casts and wrapped the web player in a desktop app (thanks Web2Desk)
Started playing “OverTheWire”
Catching up on podcasts, and recently subscribed to Darknet Diaries (very entertaining)
While it’s distro-hopping I am trying to put a stop to it. I always come back to Ubuntu when a new release comes out. I’ve never been one for bouncing around until I started doing my own blog site, which because of health reasons I’ve backed off a little. This summer was one of many multiple Arch installs, ArcoLinux installs and Manjaro. I really like XFCE, it’s usually my go-to. I did enjoy Arch and ArcoLinux. In Arch, I didXFCE but found it lacking some, and in ArcoLinux I enjoyed I3WM & Awesome. I plan to revisit these later this year or early next year. I Manjaro I did XFCE and enjoyed everything except Thunars’ inability to get widows tiled correctly, so I tried installing I3WM on top of XFCE. Installing I3 over XFCE just gives you a cross of the two and need to download more programs for I3WM. It’s a shame the Erik Dubois couldn’t make more videos. Actually, his videos are great! But the main question is how has your Linux week been like and I’ve digressed. Again. This fall found me Saturday night dual-booting Ubuntu and OpenSuse. For some reason, I just couldn’t get used to OpenSuse. So today I removed OpenSuse and installed Debian Buster and I really like it. I might lose Ubuntu in a week or two for something different and BDL has an Arch install tutorial that I might just fire up a VM and try it out. Any suggestions?
Well I jumped from Manjaro to Salient OS yesterday, for a more bleeding edge Arch approach.
I’d have installed vanilla Arch again, but Salient was just a lot quicker and comes with a bunch of stuff I’d be installing anyway, like Lutris, Steam, Ardour, KdenLive etc.
Plus the wallpaper selection out of the box is outstanding and fits right in with my personal aesthetic tastes
I’ll probably be installing Plasma again tonight to replace the XFCE default desktop, haven’t decided yet.
My Linux week was absolutely quiet as I worked hard the whole week and was away from keyboard more than I liked.
Now I am planning to play with old Gtk2 based LXDE and compare it to the rest of GTk3 based DEs and to appreciate the lightness of good old Gtk2 if that makes any sense.
My last week has been stable and fun. I’ve been just using and updating the main distros on my machines. MX-19 or all of them, with a mix of Debian 11 (Bullseye/Testing), SparkyLinux 6 (their semi-rolling release based on Debian Testing), Manjaro, ArcoLinux and EndeavourOS on secondary partitions.
I did have to resolve and update version glitch on ArcoLinux and EneavourOS (upgrade to pacmac would have broken dependencies with pamac, kalu and yay. I had to delete pamac, kalu and yay, update pacman and then re-install pamac and yay. The EndeavourOS kalu utility still isn’t compatible with the new pacman, but I can live without it and I’m sure they’ll update it somewhen.
Anyway, that stopped the week from being totally trouble free and boring
No changes on my production machine.
Checking out some things on the test drives.
Tried to find a way to install Chromium Browser as a deb-Package on Ubuntu 19.10. At the end I always got a snap. Made a video about that on my german youtube channel.
Other than that I liked Ubuntu 19.10.
Tried out Pop OS 19.10 and enjoyed it very much. In my opinion it is better than Ubuntu 19.10.
Tried out MX 19. What a great Distro. Made a video on my german channel. Jerry Bond responded to me, that they will fix the german translation in Boot repair in the next update. Awesome! They care about users in other countries.
Received the Raspberry Pi 4 today and got Pi-hole up and running, fantastic.
After checking my Timeshift to see the backups were working like clockwork, checked my system install time on my main computer. Coming from a historically fast distro-hopping status, I’ve been on Pop!_OS for over a month now.
Most of the rest of the days were quiet, as work gets in the way, but quiet is good and stable as well!
I installed Pop OS last night on an SSD I bought specifically to try other distros on. I hate vanilla Gnome, so I needed to work out how to install extensions, themes etc as it’s my first time really using Gnome at all since the launch of version 3.
Tentatively not bad. Definitely could never use a vanilla Gnome DE, but with the right extensions & theme it’s not bad…
I had the same apprehensiveness toward Gnome when I started using it full time with Pop!_OS. Once I figured out the extension manager, it made it much more palatable.
I upgraded from Fedora 30 to Fedora 31 just now. Zero problems. Absolutely perfect - even the progress bar worked, which is something I really need to report back to the DL team
The past week was very boring, a lot of small stuff.
I had new 3d acceleration problems with Virtualbox 6.0.14 in half the guests, both with Windows and Ubuntu guests. Created a bug-report and tried out a test version of Virtualbox version 6.0.15 on request of the maintainers. It changed the bugs somewhat, but it did not get any better.
Tried Gnome-boxes in Ubuntu Mate. I had been using QEMU/KVM, but I did not like Boxes. Boxes copied those qcow files again to another folder, but I hoped to share the VMs between Gnome Boxes and QEMU. Gnome Boxes is typically a tool for the sincere amateur. I deleted it again, I prefer QEMU for KVM and Virtualbox for the VMs, that I use every day. One Virtualbox-VM “Windows XP” has been installed in 2011 and runs on its 3rd desktop now
My Linux week had me nuke and paving my daily driver laptop to MX Linux 19. It all went pretty smoothly, no complaints.
I also tried out Pop OS for the first time on an external SSD. I’m loving the dark theme. Gnome is livable, once I learned to use the search tool a lot, once opening the Activities menu.
I also made a little breakthrough with respect to running an x2go server on a hosted VM. When you use Debian 10 with the MATE desktop, x2go client connects to that with virtually no quirks or problems to speak of. I fairly recently tried the distros Xubuntu, Linux Mint MATE, and MX Linux 18 for connecting to over x2go, and they all had various eyesores waiting for you once you connected.
For me, Buster with MATE makes a great combo on any server where I actually want a desktop to connect to (with x2go), not just an ssh shell.
Recently installed Webmin on the Raspberry Pi and set up a SSH tunnel for extra security, works great!
Installed Peppermint OS on my other laptop, influenced by @JasonEvangelho.
– Got the CAC reader up and running, saves a lot of time with work related tasks.
Enjoying the Pi-hole still, running hard, 24/7!
Honestly, this post may be better to be pinned. Nice to see what everyone is accomplishing every week
My Linux week this last week has been mostly podcast related, myself and @zaivala recorded our 7th episode of Distrohoppers Digest last Wednesday, and on Sunday we joined our co-hosts and recorded episode 321 of mintCast.
After the recording of Distrohoppers I nuked the MX19 install on the test laptop and I’m now running Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome for next months review. As was said above after a little tweaking and the addition of the Arc menu (thanks BDLL), I’m starting to get used to it, and have been using daily since last Wednesday. Apart from the UI it is Ubuntu under the hood, and as a long term Linux Mint Mate user I have no problems with getting software installed from any of the usual methods CLI (apt and snaps) Synaptic (once installed) and the software center. Despite this being an interim release it seems stable. So far so good.
So far, my week involved taking delivery of another Thinkpad, an X240 and deciding I prefer my X230, the previous generation. The X240 has more limited max RAM (8GB rather than 16GB), less USB ports (only 1 USB3 rather than 2), and I don’t think it actually runs any faster.
It’s a nice enough machine, a refurbished example that cleaned up nicely. I got it with the minimum 320GB HDD and Windows 7 (because no OS wasn’t an option - I immediately wiped the HDD), to keep the cost down, (£179 inc. free delivery). I have an SSD I can swap in if I so choose but I may leave the HDD in it though and use it as a machine for testing distros.
I partitioned the HDD into 2 equal primary partitions (plus an 8GB swap). I have my MX-19 on sda1 and I’ll use sda2 for the test distro, (currently ArcoLinuxB just to make sure everything is working fine).
I didn’t NEED the machine, but I’ve had a stinking cold for the last week and decided some “retail therapy” would cheer me up.
Honestly, this post may be better to be pinned. Nice to see what everyone is accomplishing every week