back to article Oreon Lime is AlmaLinux with a desktop twist

Oreon Lime R2 blends AlmaLinux with a bunch of extra tools and repositories, plus some helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop. It's sort of akin to an LTS version of Fedora 34. Amid legions of Debian, Ubuntu, and indeed Arch derivatives, the Oreon Project offers something different: A desktop-focused distro based on AlmaLinux. …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who Knows Best????

    Quote: "...helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop...."

    YOU ARE KIDDING...........

    Anyone with any sense is heading to something like XFCE4!

    GNOME 2........wonderful!

    GNOME3.........hellish!!

    GNOME4.........even more hellish!!

    ......and that's before we get to the programming nightmare of GTK4!!!!

    ......what was wrong with GTK3? Nothing at all!!

    ......and then we get GTK4 with absolutely NO BACKWARD COMPATABILITY............

    Get the picture? ....the GNOME team just know better than you do.............PERIOD!!

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Who Knows Best????

      [Author here]

      > Anyone with any sense is heading to something like XFCE4!

      Personally, I agree, yes.

      But the thing is this: the big enterprise distros -- SLE, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS versions -- come only with GNOME and nothing but GNOME. For better or for worse, it _is_ the industry standard.

      Their free products all offer lots of alternatives. Fedora, ordinary Ubuntu, openSUSE, all come with a wide choice of desktops, but if you want that fancy paid enterprise support and those years of updates, you have to use what it comes with. In SLE, for example, no other desktop is in the repos. No KDE; it's GNOME or Gnothing. IceWM is an option, if you want a simple window manager.

      If you install one of the freebie remixes, you don't get the years of support. You don't get support at all.

      Decades ago I knew people who ran CentOS as their desktop OS just so they could build skills and familiarity with the default corporate Linux distro. They wanted to know what they could do with what came in the box. Nice extras that you can't get from the corporate paid version's repos are no good. You need to know how to drive what it comes with by default.

      It is possible to turn GNOME >= 40 into a somewhat familiar Win9x-like desktop with a few extensions. Alma and Oracle and Rocky and so on don't do that: you get the default experience, or GNOME Classic, AKA "Fallback Mode." They don't tweak it because they offer other (and yes, IMHO, better) alternatives.

      What Oreon does is to tame that default environment for you, in a way that you could do yourself with a locked-down corporate box where you don't even have root permissions. That is worth having and it's worth knowing how to do.

      It's not a case of "don't do that, switch desktops". It's a case of "this is the corporate tool and this is all you get, but here's how to make it a bit more tolerable."

      1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge

        Re: Who Knows Best????

        Could you not just compile your favourite DE from source, though?

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Who Knows Best????

          [Author here]

          > Could you not just compile your favourite DE from source, though?

          I think you're missing the point here.

          Yes you could -- although without root access you couldn't install it so it won't do you any good. But there's no need. Oreon comes with EPEL enabled and I linked to their description from the article. You can install all sorts of things from there, but they won't get the decade of updates (from launch). They're add-ons.

          It's not about _how_ you get alternatives. It's about _whether you CAN_ get them.

          You can _get_ other desktops. That is not the issue. The bigger issue is learning to work with what you get -- if, say, you're working with real paid-for RHEL and you _can't_ add new repos or install additional software -- maybe because you don't have admin rights, maybe because it would violate company policy, maybe because it would mean getting explicit permission and that's too hard, maybe because you need to support a fleet of the things and you can't add it to all of them.

          There are lots of possible reasons you can't just switch desktops. There are lots of reasons you can't just install random stuff on an enterprise box, some technical, some legal, some about policies, et cetera et bleedin' cetera ad nauseam.

          But an unprivileged user account _can_ make GNOME a bit more tolerable with a few addons that need no admin permissions -- if you know how. Oreon means you can see how that works and learn what you can do.

          As I said: a reason to use this is because you want to learn to drive RHEL. Not Fedora, not other distros, but actual RHEL. It's a sort of worked example of what you _can_ do with an enterprise distro if you're mad enough to want to... or if you have no choice.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Who Knows Best????

        Liam: Thanks for the argued response......but you seem to be basically agreeing that "GNOME knows best"......

        No....no....no.....some of us like GNOME2 (and XFCE4)......some of us like GTK3.........

        The GNOME team are authoritarian a**holes....... using dollars and corporate contracts as leverage to IMPOSE crap on the rest of us.

        Thank goodness for "open source".........but maybe the authoritarians will win!! Sad, sad........

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Who Knows Best????

          > Liam: Thanks for the argued response......but you seem to be basically agreeing that "GNOME knows best"......

          No, not at all. Not even slightly. Not even hinting at it.

          I am saying _you may not have a choice_ so here is a demo of what you can do if you are not _allowed_ to change it.

          The deal with RHEL is:

          *You get support on what is in the repos and nothing else, so don't add anything else.*

          The deal with running a RHELative is:

          *If you want a decade of updates, add as little as possible to that baseline.*

          If you get free updates to GNOME 40 for another 8 years, and no other desktop, then you stick to GNOME 40 for the next 8 years... but maybe you smooth out the bumps a bit with some addons. It doesn't matter if those addons don't work with GNOME 41 or anything after because as long as you stick to the RHEL 9 baseline you ain't getting anything newer than GNOME 40.

          You're saying "I don't want Product X, I prefer Product Y!"

          I happen to agree. I prefer Prod Y as well. But in this instance, we don't have Prod Y, we have Prod X and we're going to have Prod X until 2032 because that's what's going to keep getting the updates until that year... so I am saying this will help you to learn to live with Prod X.

          If you don't want 8 years of updates, feel free to use something else.

          But a lot of big companies do want it and pay RH billions to get it. One way to get and keep a job is to know how to work with that slightly unpleasant, and definitely uncool, corporate tool.

          Talking about other tools is totally irrelevant.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Who Knows Best????

            > as long as you stick to the RHEL 9 baseline you ain't getting anything newer than GNOME 40.

            It has not been true of previous RHEL releases that the GNOME desktop remains on a single release for the entire support lifetime, and it almost certainly won't be true of RHEL 9 and GNOME 40, either.

            gnome-shell is listed as a Compatibility level 4 component, for exactly this reason: to communicate to users that it will probably be updated in some future minor release, and that ABI/API compatibility are not guaranteed.

        2. PhilipN Silver badge

          Re: Who Knows Best????

          “you seem to be basically agreeing that "GNOME knows best"......”

          No he isn’t. Where do you get that from?

      3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Who Knows Best????

        "the big enterprise distros -- SLE, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS versions -- come only with GNOME and nothing but GNOME"

        By and large they're aiming at the server market. If they even run a desktop at all it will be for management. A derivative aimed at the desktop only offering GNOME does look a bit odd.

        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Who Knows Best????

          > If they even run a desktop at all it will be for management.

          Yeah, you say that, but there are an awful lot of point-'n'-drool merchants out there who only know how to click their ways around.

          They may not be installing GNOME on prod servers, but they are learning how to build those prod servers on local kit and local VMs on which they will install a GUI so they can drive it and build the Ansible playbook or whatever they will later use to deploy those prod servers.

          If you build your playbook or whatever on a nonstandard box -- say, Fedora -- then it may not work when confined to the RHEL repos. But if you stick to the stock components, with a bit of luck, it'll work on the real deal.

          Secondly: don't assume that because a skilled competent professional knows how to do stuff without a desktop, that the real live prod systems in the real world are built and deployed and maintained by skilled competent professionals. They aren't.

          In real life they're run by the cheapest minimally-capable chancers who could get the job.

  2. VicMortimer Silver badge

    WHY?

    How is this even remotely useful? If you want to install Alma Linux so you've got a RedFlat clone, install that. Otherwise, might as well install Fefloora. I see ZERO usefulness in having a separate "desktop" distro of what's supposed to be a clone of a dead-end server distro. I've used CentOS as a desktop in the past, it was fine. I ditched the asshats when CentOS was killed.

    Also, meh. Xubuntu is what I'm putting on servers and desktops. GNOME has been unusable for many years now.

    (Though I'm seriously considering switching to Devuan, if systemd pisses me off one more time I'm done.)

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > How is this even remotely useful?

      I am not saying it is. I am trying to explain why someone somewhere might want it.

      > I see ZERO usefulness in having a separate "desktop" distro of what's supposed to be a clone of a dead-end server distro.

      Read the other comments. I have tried to answer that, at length. If that wasn't enough, I don't see what more I can say and I think we're done here.

      > Xubuntu is what I'm putting on servers and desktops.

      Xubuntu? On a server?

      Look, my old home server used to run it, because I am lazy, but why *X*ubuntu on a _server_?

      I think you're accidentally making my point for me here. In real life people _do_ put GUIs on servers, even though in an ideal world they should not -- because having one it makes life easier. If you're going to do that and you're stuck in the realm of "stuff that works on RHEL" then you have one choice: you can have any desktop you like as long as it's GNOME.

      [Aside: I had to do a terabyte of dedupe and cleaning on the descendant of that home server a couple of months ago. After trying, and discarding, Nomad BSD, I put Xubuntu on an external USB 3 HDD and used that. It worked. I think my point stands, though.]

      > GNOME has been unusable for many years now.

      Personally I agree. However I have had many smart informed colleagues who like it. _Chacun a son gout._

      > (Though I'm seriously considering switching to Devuan, if systemd pisses me off one more time I'm done.)

      Try MX Linux.

      Or Alpine.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Trust?

    Whenever I consider a new distribution, the first thing that I do is learn about the people who are running the project, in order to determine why I should trust them with low-level access to all of my computing resources. I may also take a look at their git repos to see if the build process looks secure.

    Have you looked at any of this? Do you trust Brandon Lester with low level access to your computer? Do they have the experience necessary to build a secure OS? Have you looked at their git repo on gitea (https://gitea.com/oreonproject/Oreon-Lime-R2/)? Or the GitHub repos (https://github.com/oreonproject)?

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Trust?

      > Have you looked at any of this?

      You know what... yes, I have.

      My impression is that he's a kid, who is trying new stuff, experimenting, and learning.

      And I think that's great, that we need more such bold efforts from young people, and instead of decrying his efforts, that the best thing I can do is treat it seriously, look at it, provide constructive feedback and offer pointers and suggestions about what works and what doesn't, and maybe where to drop some efforts and focus and pursue others.

      I do not know Mr Lester at all but from comments in other places I think he may be as little as 15, and if so, I think this a hugely impressive project with some pretty professional looking materials and so on.

      On a parallel theme I have worked inside 2 of the big 3 enterprise Linux vendors, and you would be amazed how little more clue they have than bold teenagers such as Rudra Saraswat and (I suspect) Brandon Lester. They are just a bunch of people flailing around and trying stuff out, thwarted by inept clueless managers, and even so they have brought big professional players such as Microsoft and Apple and indeed Google real competition.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Trust?

        I agree that we want to encourage people to contribute to Free Software, but I think that "treating the project seriously" means evaluating the project objectively, using the same criteria that we would use to evaluate any other system.

        If I want to know more about AlmaLinux, I can easily find not only a list of the people who run the project (https://wiki.almalinux.org/Transparency.html#we-strive-to-be-transparent), but I can readily learn more about those members from their public profiles. I can evaluate their prior experience to decide whether I trust their work. I can talk to people who've met them in person.

        None of that seems to be true for Oreon. Oreon's site describes a team (https://oreonproject.org/our-team/), but it's hard to find any evidence that the people listed there -- other than Brandon -- are actually contributing to the project. I don't see activity listed in their GitHub histories, and only Brandon is listed as a member of the "oreonproject" project on GitHub. And information about Brandon is hard to come by. That's a lot of red flags: working in isolation, misrepresenting the team membership, a general lack of transparency that is expected of other projects. And none of those red flags have anything to do with Brandon's age.

        If we ignore serious security risks because mentioning them is inconvenient, or would discourage the author, then we are not treating the project seriously. And if suggesting that there are more important considerations when selecting an operating system than whether its web site looks nice is "decrying his efforts", then it seems like we have placed him entirely outside the realm of criticism, which seems unreasonable.

  4. Al fazed
    Thumb Up

    Liam

    you are a star. Your presentation of the facts, good, bad and ugly came across clearly. I gained a comprehensive, professional opinion on potentially a new and more useful/useable Operating System.

    Thank you for contributing such clarity to what can otherwise be quite a confusing scenario.

    ALF

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Liam

      Thank you very much indeed! :-)

  5. Bebu
    Windows

    Compressed swap.

    a dedicated swap partition as well as ZRAM support. Simply enabling compressed swap would work better, we suspect.

    Wasn't sure what was meant here - something like zcache instead of zram, or swap on a compressed logical volume (lvmvdo?)

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Compressed swap.

      > Wasn't sure what was meant here

      Ah, sorry. My bad; I considered adding more explanation but decided not to for reasons of space (and relevance).

      > something like zcache instead of zram

      Possible but probably not as productive.

      > or swap on a compressed logical volume (lvmvdo?)

      No.

      ZRAM creates compressed RAMdisks (1 per CPU core), then puts dynamically-sized swap on them. So the kernel pages a program out of memory, effectively, it's compressed but kept in memory. It's much quicker to uncompress it from RAM to RAM than load an uncompressed image from disk -- even SSD.

      ZRAM is handy for small-memory machines with multiple tasks and slow storage -- e.g. Raspberry Pi. Low memory means lots of paging programs in and out. That means lots of writing to SD card, which wears it out.

      Linux has the ability to handle multiple swap devices and set priorities on them. So, ZRAM _and_ conventional swap means that -- if properly configured -- when RAM is full and programs are swapped out, it will stash compressed copies in RAM, and then if that fills up and the stuff hasn't been accessed for a while, it will move from RAMdisk to real disk (uncompressed).

      But ZSWAP makes that unnecessary. If you have rewritable storage to hand, and a reasonable amount of RAM, then ZSWAP takes stuff being paged out and compresses it before it goes into the swap file or swap partition.

      So, if a 1GB program is swapped out, it only takes (say) 50% of that in the swap storage. The OS compresses the data on the fly, so it only writes ~500MB to swap, and when it's swapped back in, it reads ~500MB, decompresses it on the fly back into RAM.

      Basically if you have a fairly fast CPU and not enough RAM then putting:

      ````

      zswap.enabled=1

      ````

      ... into your kernel command line reduces the amount of data swapped in and out by half.

      I have some older machines which are maxed out with 8GB or 16GB of RAM but on which I occasionally load 20-30GB of programs. Notably Electron apps which are horrible memory hogs. This 1 setting changes regular disk thrashing to modest amounts of disk activity and a more responsive system.

      Most machines have at least 4 logical cores now, and some of mine have 8 or more. I don't care if one of those cores is maxed out if it buys me a more responsive system.

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