This is NOT a review of KDE vs Gnome vs Cinnamon vs Mate

MATE Desktop
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This is NOT a review of KDE vs Gnome vs Cinnamon vs Mate vs whatever. What I do is install the bare minimum straight to tty from each distro that offers that installation.

Full disclosure I did my tests in a virtual machine, VirtualBox, and my criteria is: how much hard drive space did it take just for the base install. Then afterwards I compare a simple Xorg vs Wayland install with a tiling WM so no full blown desktop environment; just to see how much RAM is used in a basic install.

With Debian, when I go to add GDM just to have a graphical login screen it installed the full Gnome desktop experience which was absolutely not what I wanted. After the fact I learned that I could pass “–no-install-recommends” and “–no-install-suggests” to bypass all that. Yeah… mixed results sometimes those command line arguments were ignored.

I also have the same experience with sddm, which is built on Qt. Surprise! KDE Plasma was installed, not what I wanted. Well ok cool, I never seen KDE Plasma before, played with it for a minute but I’m on a virtual machine and it’s sluggish so I quit out.

I also did this same barrage of tests with Fedora and now I feel torn because I like them both.At the end of the day what still irks me is I still don’t have full control of things. For example, I don’t want anything audio related so I don’t want pipewire and oh what’s that other thing something plummer, don’t want services running if I’m not using them. In one case I could simply remove packages I don’t want, in other cases I’m not allowed due to dependencies.
.As far as “minimal” install options go it’s still up to the maintainers to decide what’s the base level. If I really wanted to go minimal there are other options.

I was doing all of this because I’m in a situation where I have limited hardware and my only way forware (edit: forward) as far as OS is Linux. Also I’m bored and have free time :slight_smile:

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Nice adventure!
Looking forward to reading more of your distribution hopping activities.

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Well thank you! I had written up another post about FreeBSD but I scrubbed it, waiting to verbalize it correctly. Nice to meet you.

Funny thing, I fired up my Debian vm and just for hahas I did apt update. Well it got mad at me, first of all I think it was me installing Firefox and I had added the Fasttrack repo. Then it was a typo in my sourcs.list. deb(comma)debian.org instead of deb.debian.org. So I deleted the fasttrack list and corrected the typo and now I’m waiting for apt to basically update everything… because I had added the unstable repo. Ha!

Well the update didn’t go smoothly. Bunch of updates but most notably kernel 6.16.4. For some reason my display is a bit wonky as in not refreshing properly. Video driver remains the same, vboxSvga. Upon starting Sway the bg wallpaper only shows half, and opening a terminal again only half renders. A simple CTRL+L clears it up and the whole window renders correctly. Yet I seem to have to do this for every window I open.

So then I fired up my Fedora vm which I’m currently in, made a snapshot, and did the update routine again. Not really worth mentioning but I’ll do it anyways: in Debian I had to sudo to use the reboot command whereas in Fedora I did not. Little quirks between the two.

All in all I have to say Fedora just works. It wasn’t my first choice because I have a bit of resentment against Red Hat and I’ll leave that drama right there. Sure it’s easy to break a system on my own regardless of package system but it’s nice to see modern distros handle things gracefully when the user does make mistakes.

I prefer to stay with long standing distros instead of new flashy ones for the sake of stability and support, fast mirrors also a plus :slight_smile:

FreeBBSD has been a challenge for me. Even after many times banging my head trying to get to a normal desktop I still keep the ISO around and try again and again. I did get Xorg and i3 fully up and running, so my next challenge is Sway. I had read that Wayland can be tricky when used in a vm because of the fake video driver. Hyprland flat out doesn’t work at all both VirtualBox nor VMware. GhostBSD flat out told me I need at least 4 gigs of RAM to run it. Oh… kay…

What I’m really doing in this distro hopping is to find a proper home. Obviously I’m not going to use Windows 11 and I mentioned in another post my feelings about Apple. So what other Linux distos have I tested?

Arch: love it’s minimalist approach. It’s actually not that hard to install especially with the archinstall script. What stopped me from continuing to use it is the DDOS attacks on their servers which is not their fault but it does impede my progress. The archinstall script does offer various desktop setups yet the Wayland ones simply don’t work in a VM. Hence my movement to Fedora and Debian, and I was sucessful setting things up from scratch.

Then there’s a bunch of hybrid distros that do make life a little easier by setting things up as far as desktop environments go. I’m not in the market for a Windows look-alike so I made a hard pass on Mint and the likes.

Some day when I have a bit more $ I’ll actually get a real computer and at this point it looks like I’ll be driving Fedora. Or maybe flirt with Gentoo again. I find it amusing that in certain cases a distro would deviate from where config files are placed, so as I try different distros I’d have to search online where that stupid config file is.

Closing point: I sorta balked at the install size even after doing a minimal install of each distro. Then I went and looked at C:\Windows. 8 gigs. Shaking my head ugh.

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Also I’m bored and have free time

Good for you! I would have so many free time as you, but in someway I have work responsabilities so I can’t really distro hop.

now I’m finally glad I found peace with Fedora. I’m looking for stability — I distro hopped too much in the past, haha.

By the way, it’s nice to read about someone else’s distro hopping adventures to learn news about Linux and related stuff.

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I’m very happy to read multiple well written articles and comments about editors, tools, and distributions that are explanatory rather than making claims that such and such is the next nirvana. We all know that there are many ways to do things and it’s okay to do things many different ways.

What works best for you and what works best for me is more a statement about our workloads and what we’ve grown familiar to rather than a factual statement about what is the best. Numerous articles, books and references suggest Aaa or Ggg is the number one do it all utility. Anyone who’s been around as long as I have realizes that while there are some tools that tend to stand out, there are actually quite a few that get the job done well.

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I enjoy reading about other distros; however, I have actively avoided distro hopping or ‘surface’ testing other distros.

Ten years ago, when I switched from Windows to Linux, I read everything I could find (paper evaluation) of Linux distros, and Linux Mint has worked well for me. I heavily customize the install with QEMU-KVM, ZFS arrays, esoteric rules in netfilter/iptables, Tor, Privoxy, AppArmor/Firejail, etcetera, and Linux Mint always gets the job done.

Admittedly, if I had the time, I would like to tinker with Qubes OS:

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Marshall, though we have different approaches, I nevertheless appreciate your approach and explanation of what works best for you. I’m a bit “tied up” with other things this week, but I have every intention of returningto read and investigate your methods; thank you for writing and sharing them with us!

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You are very welcome! :slight_smile:

When I switched from Windows to Linux, I noticed that Linux, which may seem fragmented at times, is actually a big box of digital Lego for the fertile imagination to be snapped together as one sees fit. Linux and the related technologies were a huge learning curve for me, but I had not had so much fun as those childhood days of designing Lego assemblies that were NOT shown on the box. In many ways, Linux also reminds me of those Commodore 8-bit days when everything was fresh and new.

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