Linux distros drop their feelgood hits of the summer Taking advantage of the summer lull, there are new versions of a slew of distros: Nitrux, Ubuntu DDE, Linux Lite, Manjaro, and siblings Mageia, OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS. Nitrux Nitrux 3.0 is a major release of the only distro we've seen that's come out of Mexico. We looked at release 2.5 late last year and came away …
We don't know what the artistic differences are between Mageia and OpenMandriva, but they continue to pursue very similar goals and we still feel that they should try to settle their differences and cooperate.
I don't know about that.
I've tried both Mageia and OpenMandriva when I was having difficulties with PCLinuxOS.
True, they still have the good old *drak tools available. Which, in my opinion, is a very good thing. But OpenMandriva seems to have moved farther away from its roots than the other two. The installer is Calamares, and for someone expecting the familiar Mandrake installer, that struck a jarring note right away. After that the presence of systemd and sudo made me realise that things had changed, and for me not for the better. When I tried Mageia I found out that Mageia also used systemd. That caused some difficulties when I ran into sound problems and although the Mageia forum was friendly and helpful I felt out of place.
I tried PCLinuxOS one last time and to my joy it worked straight out of the box. No wading through obscure, to me, error logs and mystic incantations to get stuff to work. I was home and glad of it.
One thing I will say is that all of the people I contacted when I had problems with all of these distros could not have been kinder or more patient. The Mandriva derivatives may be unfashionable and some what sidelined by the likes of MX Linux, Mint and Ubuntu but they are all still easy to use and configure with the *drak tools provided. It may be that a bit of cross-fertilisation would help but the basic approaches by the devs seem a bit too wide to bridge.
My choice is PCLinuxOS but the other two are just as easy to get started with.
Happy Mageia user here (started with Mandrake (4, I think - way back in 2003/2004, through Mandriva and then Mageia). I decided to do an upgrade on one of my laptops last night (I usually do clean installs) and it went about its business with just one small hitch: after finishing downloading and installing updates, it stopped and complained that it could not find a particular python module or script. So I tried to search for updates again, hoping it would find it, but QT then threw an error, refusing to open the Install module again.
Opening a terminal I then ran urpmi --auto-update and it then went through the rest of the upgrade (downloading and installing 2400 packages).
Rebooted (as it obviously was a kernel update) and all was well.
The whole procedure took 43 minutes (and this included upgrading Libre Office, Darktable, Gimp, Digikam, Firefox and Filezilla, as it should).
Now for the other laptop and then my desktop, which will be a clean install as I want to change a couple of things.
A good question.
Use Windows for work and my home machines are ex work machines (when they have become a bit old and past it).
I install Linux on them*, but the distro depends on the machine spec & its always useful to know how "lightweight" a distro is.
* Most recent "cast off" as dual boot, as the succession goes on the next "oldest" gets converted to Linux only boot.
Can get a lot of longevity out of old kit, e.g. one old box has some external storage and acts as music "server" to avoid lots of MP3, Ogg, FLAC etc cluttering up mine & partners computer.
Another connected to a "dumb" TV and used for BritBox etc. to give alternative viewing options as live TV often a bit underwhelming. A better option (in my view) than a "smart" TV connected to the internet & no guarantee its "apps" will get updates / keep working for long
[Author here]
> Linux Lite [...] is relatively easy to adapt to.
It is sort of growing on me, but TBH, I think Mint is as straightforward or more so.
LL uses proprietary components, such as Chrome, but doesn't lean in. If it's going to do that, why not bundle Edge, which is more familiar to Windows folks and has handy stuff like vertical tabs?
Why not bundle a ribbon-based office suite?
Why not the latest Xfce?
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