Ubuntu 20.04 Screenshot

Just some eye candy.  It is not a bad looking distro.  I have used Pop!_OS for a fair amount of time, and I think this is not far off from that as far as looks go.

Too early to tell about bugs and performance, although so far I have not had a single hiccup (post ubuntu dash) or slow down.

Memory usage appears high in this shot, but I had browsers open, thunderbird open and of course the screenshot utility itself...  but CPU usage has been very low.  But everyone knows, Gnome takes more memory than most other desktops.  To be honest though, Gnome feels more polished to me than any other desktop.

You can see that the CPU usage has remained low and stable, the memory really does not fluctuate much.

All in all it seems pretty slick.

Ubuntu 20.04

Dissatisfied with OpenSUSE and not super thrilled with Solus 4.1 Gnome, I started poking around as I am wont to do.  I found on Distrowatch that then next LTS version of Ubuntu was in Beta, to be released in about 2 weeks.

I cut my teeth on linux with Slackware, but the moment the very first release of Ubuntu was announced, I downloaded and installed it.

It was amazing!  I was smitten by it.  I used it for several years along side my macs, my amiga and my BeOS machines.

I don't remember what happened... but at some point changes were made to Ubuntu that I did not like and found frustrating.  I stopped using Ubuntu at that point (had to be 10 or 15 years ago now).

So I saw the new release and thought I should at least look around and see what people had to say... I bopped around from youtube linux sites to Reddit to other places and found mostly favorable takes on 20.04 (alpha/beta).  One comment that caught my eye was "this is the best version of Ubuntu that I have seen since 16.04."   That tipped me over the edge, I downloaded 20.04, and installed it.

This isn't a review, per se, as I don't really DO reviews, just a commentary.  The installation was simple (no different, really, from any of the recent distros using a similar installed (ubiquity).  It installed alongside my windows installation, so that was good.

So, first impressions... I like the theme, it was not overwhelming in any way.  I switched it from normal to dark mode immediately.  I also uninstalled Ubuntu-Dash, and then installed Dash To Panel.  On top of that I installed Arc Menu and weather (I had installed the bare bones version of Ubuntu).

Once I got the desktop looking like I wanted, I installed some apps I frequently use, like libre office, Sublime Text, Microsoft VSCode, Rhythmbox, MPV, stuff like that.  I also made the fonts a little larger so I can see them on my 1440P monitor... but otherwise I kept the default fonts.  I also installed Thunderbird for email, tweaked my terminal, stuff like that.

I have to say it has been a pretty smooth experience and memory usage was on par with what I expected from a Gnome based desktop, so no surprises there.

It is attractive, seems to be well put together except for some minor hiccups with Ubuntu dash (forcing me to uninstall it) it has been a nice experience.  I am thinking as an experiment for MYSELF, I might try to keep this LTS version running for a year.  Or at least until DEC 31 of this year.  :)

I HAVE done that before, stuck with a particular brand of linux for a long time, but it has been awhile. 

I do have one fear:  when the actual 20.04 is released, will my update be smooth and NOT break all my tweaks... or will it destroy it?  We shall see...

More on OpenSUSE

Well, this has been the most successful openSUSE experiment I have had in awhile... still... I have run into configuration issues.  Most of them are around codecs and non-free software.  Whereas Fedora makes it SUPER simple to just clickety-click, add repo, install non-free software, openSUSE makes it clickety click, install and... FAIL.

I am not sure what is the difficulty here, but repos seem to be out of sync, requirements ancient, stuff like that.  It is a little disappointing that I cannot get VLC or Firefox running with the required libraries... or, when I DO add the libraries, I have to MANUALLY install various dependencies for the libraries themselves.  Super annoying.  And I still cannot get Firefox working properly with our local news website.

There IS an easy workaround:  Google Chrome.  Comes self packaged with all the goodies you will ever need.  I am aware it phones home and google can monitor my every thought wave but... they already do through my smart phone, and other ways.  (Paranoid much am I?)

Anyway, so I am still running openSUSE because it is working (with Chrome) and I can also play all of my games so far.  Not sure how long this experiment will last though.  I don't know what it is but openSUSE just does not feel good.

OpenSUSE?

I have never been a fan of openSUSE, simply because I always ran into some kind of problem during install or post install trying to configure and run my preferred applications.

But I am a hopper so I cycle around and from time to time I get back to those distros I could not previously use, and I try again.

I am also growing stir crazy from the whole corona virus mess... working at home for weeks.  So I actually took a day off for sanity and played with linux and am doing some programming as well.

First I attempted to install openSUSE using GeckoLinux, which is basically a bunch of openSuse "spins."  It failed miserably and I could be heard yelling "A HA! OPENSUSE NEVER WORKS!"  But instead I downloaded the official Tumbleweed distro and tried again.

It worked!  Flawlessly, at that.  I even got NVidia drivers installed and working first try.  It DID take a little research though.

Part of my "test" for every distro is to be able to install and play two of my favorite games:  Star Stable Online and Diablo 3.  Now, Steam is important too... but these two are "guages" to me.  If I can get them up and running in WINE on linux, I am golden.  SSO installed easily, and Diablo seems to have installed as well, just downloading all the data now.  I will try the games once Diablo load finishes.

Otherwise, I installed Thunderbird, some fonts, a couple of GTK themes, installed Dash To Panel, Arc Menu and a few other extensions.  All working.  Looking pretty good actually.

Gnome is a little behind, but I can live with that, especially since some of my preferred extensions are not working on the latest version of Gnome.  So, while performance might suffer a little, it evens out.

Performance-wise, SUSE seems to be a little memory hungry in the sense that it definitely does a lot of in memory caching.  That is not necessarily bad, just an observation that my cache bar in my memory monitor fills the graph.

So far so good!  First time I've ever been OK with openSUSE and because of that I think I will try to stick with it for at least a week or two.  It will be interesting to see how smoothly updating occurs.

Anyway, hope you are staying safe and sound!

Aaaaaaand full circle back to Solus

I'm like the energizer bunny hopping from one distro to another.  :)

I really enjoyed my time with the Fedora KDE Spin.  I would heartily recommend it, it was solid, I ran into no update issues even with Nvidia drivers (Fedora updates kernel fairly frequently), and I was able to configure it to look like I wanted it to look.

Despite the fact that KDE was more memory efficient, performed well, and gave me few headaches, I am just not a huge KDE fan.  Don't get me wrong... I *liked* it, I am just do not prefer it over gtk-based UIs.

When I started shifting back to linux a couple of years ago, I believe it was Solus that I started with.  I enjoyed it, but it felt a little restrictive in some ways back then... and it helped trigger my  distro hopping.  Since the "shake up" that occurred last year the Solus team has been working like crazy to improve Solus.  I'd say their work has paid off and this was a very smooth install, and performance has been quite good.  I immediately installed Nvidia drivers through their utility, installed Wine and related apps, installed my favorite games and so far the game performance seems even better than with Fedora.  Subjective I guess, but it could also be recent updates to the game that made IT more efficient as well.

Anywho... this is where I am at right now.

Still using Fedora with KDE

It has been running very smoothly for the most part.  I have not encountered any "update woes" as I have in the past with Fedora.  So far so good.  Able to play Starstable and Diablo 3 very nicely.  And many Steam titles work as well with Photon turned on.

I still want to poke around and try other things.  I will give it a short rest though.  Can't constantly reconfigure my system.  :)  But I do keep all documents, music, video, pictures and some other items on shared drives which I simply mount the way I want them whenever I spin up a new distro.

Anyway, just a quick update.

KDE adventure

Ages ago, back between 2005 and 2011, I had switched from Macs to an All-in-one IBM pc.  What I ended up installing on it was PC-BSD because the networking that came with it out of the box worked very well with my company's firewall/network security.

It came with a KDE interface.  I used it for a year until I switched back to a mac and purchased a product that I was able to log into work with...  But while I have not been a KDE fan in recent times, mostly GTK/Gnome, I did have fond memories of that year.

A week or so ago I began hunting around for a good KDE distro.  The caveat was that I did want to be able to install WINE and PLAYONLINUX so I could play a couple of my favorite games.  I tried Neon, KaOS, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu and Fedora.

KaOS is, without a doubt, the best looking KDE distro (of course that is subjective).  But it was limiting when it came to getting gaming software set up.  OpenSUSE was OK but the actual installation did not end well for me.  Neon is the KDE kitchen sink and worked alright, but I did run into one or two struggles with Ubuntu software.  Kubuntu was loaded to the hilt, and it worked well, but I felt there were some KDE performance issues.  Finally I installed the KDE spin of Fedora 31.  I always have a love/not-love-so-much relationship with Fedora as I always end up breaking something in some update.  But so far it has been very nice.  KDE performs very well, and Fedora performs well in general.

There is also a KDE version of Solus that I might try...

Anyway, just an update of my computing adventures.