mintCast 142: World of Linux III
News:
- The latest Nemo from GIT has already got some interesting new features (webupd8.org)
- Five things Desktop Linux has to do to beat Windows 8. (zdnet.com)
- Limerick Ireland goes in for Open Source. (thevarguy.com)
- Bern Switzerland mandates the use of Open Source. (thepowerbase.com)
- The Linux Kernel says goodbye to Intel’s i386 chip. (zdnet.com)
- Raspberry Pi gets an Appstore. (webupd8.org)
- Lightning Round Follow-ups:
- Lightworks professional-grade video editor (phoronix.com)
- Valve to open their Linux beta starting this week (phoronix.com)
- Steam for Linux Your Desktop Environment (softpedia.com)
- THQ evaluating bringing their games to Linux (phoronix.com)
The Main Topic: The World of Linux III
- #98 Swift Linux (swiftlinux.org)
- #72 Linux Lite (linuxdistrocommunity.com)
- #189 xPUD (xpud.org)
- #50 Slax (slax.org)
- #?? Whonix (sourceforge.net)
- #92 SalineOS (salineos.com)
Featured Website:
- Distrowatch (distrowatch.com)
Tip:
- If you have the Cinnamon Desktop Environment, you can record your desktop without any extra program, simply go “Shift + Ctrl + Alt + R” and you will see a record icon in the bottom right corner. To stop recording, repeat the combination and goto your home directory and the recording is saved as a “.webm”.
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Hosts:: Rob, Scott, James
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I actually used to use one of these seemingly obscure distros. I have an older Gateway Pentium 4 box with 490 MB of RAM. LMDE Xfce (when it still existed) used too much RAM to comfortably use it on that machine when I run a lot of applications. My solution was to install Swift Linux and add Xfce to it, which used about 110 MB of RAM idle. I now use Debian Testing proper with Xfce, which uses about 70 MB of RAM idle and about 220 with iceweasel, libreoffice writer, geany, lxtask, synapse, and xfce4-terminal running. However, Swift Linux is based on LMDE, so it could be an option for those who want to keep using Xfce on LMDE (or another non-supported desktop environment). It will have fairly lightweight applications and still have icewm installed, but it could be an alternative if you don’t want to use the unofficial LMDE Xfce (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=118890).
I’ve also used SalineOS, which is interesting and fast, but it doesn’t offer too much more than Debian does after tweaking it a little bit (I enjoy building my system up from pure debian). The beauty of Debian Stable is that you get a very stable system with a good amount of backported packages (you can get the latest firefox/iceweasel release, the latest icedove esr release, libreoffice 3.5, etc.). Squeeze is nearing the end of its stable cycle (it will be old-stable soon), so it has very old applications. When Wheezy is released in feb/march, it will have newer applications.
Some other interesting distros that don’t get a lot of press are:
Manjaro – it is an Arch based distro with lots of desktops (including Cinnamon), with Xfce as the default. It is somewhat behind the Arch repos (only slightly), but the applications go through a lot more testing and I haven’t had it break yet (whereas Arch breaks a lot for me).
ElementaryOS – it has lots of custom applications that are very simple and elegant, and it has its own DE and WM called Pantheon and Gala.
Mepis
Bodhi
ChrunchBang
Sabayon
Voyager
Also, interestingly enough, the default Debian (not LMDE, Debian) installer actually installs VBox additions by defualt. Debian is criticized for not having certain drivers easily accessible, but it does install these guest additions (tested on both Debian 6.0.6 and Debian 7.0).
I agree with your thoughts on Microsoft’s half-assed implementation of world-wide standards. They’re steadily losing turf in the office battle ground and, IMO, it’s partially due to they’re refusal to play nicely with the rest of the software world.
On a lighter note, Bodhi Linux has taken the prize of ‘Best Linux Distro’ in my opinion. Upon discovering the Enlightenment desktop, I’ve never considered switching back to any other DE; although I still love to play around with new releases of XFCE and Cinnamon.
The long-awaited E17 release was today, 12-21, (but hasn’t hit Bodhi’s repos yet) and I think it may deserve a mention in a future MintCast episode 😉
Thanks again fellas, love the show!
-J
I definitely agree about mentioning E17. I really like Bodhi, and I think that they’re very smart to do a new major release only on LTS releases (other releases are becoming more and more experimental). Besides Bodhi, there aren’t many good E17 distros. By favorite pure-debian E17 distro is Snow Linux E17, which is very nice (and in some ways better than Bodhi). Bodhi is still much more committed to E17, but I prefer to stay away from the Ubuntu base when possible.