 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1058, 19 February 2024 |
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Welcome to this year's 8th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Some Linux distributions focus on being general purpose operating systems, capable of fulfilling a wide range of tasks. Projects such as Debian and Fedora tend not to optimize for any one field of use, but provide a wide range of tools and packages for a range of tasks. Other projects narrow their focus in order to excel in one area, often exclusively. We see this sort of optimization in projects like UBports which runs on mobile devices or Tiny Core Linux which strives to be as small as possible. This week we begin with a look at Drauger OS, a project which places a strong focus on gaming. The Drauger OS distribution provides a number of gaming applications and compatibility tools while trimming away other desktop software. We share some observations on Drauger in this week's Feature Story. Then, in our News column, we talk about UBports changing the way the project organizes its development branches and labels its releases. We also report on TrueNAS rolling out faster deduplication for ZFS storage pools while FreeBSD plans to slowly phase out support for 32-bit processors and publishes its quarterly status report. Plus we share some updates on System76's COSMIC desktop environment as it nears its first development release. In our Questions and Answers column we talk about how much disk space to allocate to a fresh Linux installation and we ask our readers to weigh in with their experiences in this week's Opinion Poll. Plus we are pleased to share information on this week's new releases and list the torrents we are seeding. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
Drauger OS 7.6
The Drauger OS project develops an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution which features the Xfce desktop and places a focus on gaming. The project's website describes the distribution as follows:
Drauger OS is a Linux desktop gaming operating system. It aims to provide a platform for gamers to use where they can get great performance without sacrificing their security. Furthermore, it aims to make it easy for anyone to game, whether they use a keyboard and mouse, or some sort of controller.
Since Drauger OS is based on Ubuntu LTS releases, it is stable, secure, and receives updates from the Ubuntu repositories for 5 years (even if a given Drauger OS release is not supported the full 5 years by Drauger OS development).
I browsed the Drauger website, looking for details as to what the distribution does to focus on gaming. As far as I could tell, there isn't any overview of gaming-focused features on the website or in the distribution's wiki. There are comments about there being no media editing applications or common applications, such as LibreOffice, included by default. This covered what Drauger OS does not do, but I didn't find any indication that Drauger OS provides things gamers might want, such as an optimized kernel scheduler, video drivers, or pre-installed software like WINE or Steam.
Drauger is offered in a single edition which is 3.7GB in size. Booting from this downloaded media brings up a boot menu where we are asked if we want to install the distribution, launch the live session, or run the live session in safe graphics mode. These three options all have roughly the same effect. Whichever one we select, the Drauger media quickly boots and displays a specially themed Xfce desktop environment. If we select the Install option, a custom graphical installer is launched for us. If one of the Live options is selected then the Xfce desktop is displayed and a welcome window opens to greet us. I'll touch on the welcome window again later as it shows up again in the installed copy of the distribution. On the desktop there are icons for opening the Nemo file manager and launching the system installer.
Drauger OS 7.6 -- Greeted by the welcome window
(full image size: 722kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Installing
Drauger OS ships with a custom system installer which basically walks us through the same steps, mostly in the same order, as its parent distribution's Ubiquity installer would. It starts off by offering three install options: Quick, OEM, and Normal. There isn't any explanation regarding the differences, but presumably OEM sets up the system without a user account. I went with the Normal option.
The installer next shows a hub screen where we can click modules to set configuration options. This basically adds an extra step or screen between each required stage of the process. We're guided through choosing our keyboard layout, location, and creating a username and password combination. There is a hub screen simply called Options which offers to enable automatic login and gives us the chance to install proprietary add-ons such as NVIDIA drivers.
The disk partitioning section offers guided and manual options. The manual approach uses GParted to set up disk partitions. The guided method appears to take over the entire disk and we're given a checkbox to toggle whether we want to set up a separate /home partition.
With these steps completed the installer shows a conformation screen and then a progress bar as it works to set up the operating system. When the installer is finished it offers us four choices: Exit, Restart (the computer), Send Report, and Advanced. The Send Report option will apparently notify the developers Drauger OS has been installed and send them some information about our hardware. The Advanced button opens a window where we are offered the chance to delete our new installation, add a PPA software repository, or dump our configuration to a file for troubleshooting purposes.
Early impressions
My trial with the installed copy of Drauger OS got off to a poor start. Simply trying to boot the distribution resulted in an immediate kernel panic. I tried booting again and once more ran into an immediate kernel panic. This struck me as odd because the distribution had booted smoothly when running from the live media.
I did a bit of checking and comparing and what I discovered is Drauger OS ships with two versions of the kernel: Linux 6.2.9 and 6.6.11. The live media uses the 6.2.9 kernel and this worked well for me in my test environments. The installed operating system has both kernels available and defaults to using 6.6.11 which would panic. Going into the Advanced section of the boot menu and manually picking Drauger's 6.2.9 kernel would successfully boot the distribution.
Using different kernels on the live media and the installed copy strikes me as being odd. Typically a live medium is used for three purposes: testing hardware compatibility, providing an easy way to launch the installer (and related tools), and rescuing a broken system. Switching out the kernel at install time effectively takes away the effectiveness of live media in the first scenario.
Once I sorted out the kernel issue, Drauger booted to a graphical login screen where we can sign in as our user or a guest user. The guest session has no password and any changes we make to the guest account are erased when we sign out. The guest account's desktop looks quite a bit different than our regular user's desktop. Our regular user account has a thick panel placed across the top of the screen which holds the application menu (represented by the distribution's icon), a task switcher, and a system tray. Down the left side of the screen is a thick dock with three icons. At the bottom of the display we find a virtual desktop overview widget. The regular account uses a dark them and, when we sign in, a welcome window appears.
The guest account shows a thin panel across the top of the desktop where the application menu is identified by the word "Applications" and a single dock is placed across the bottom of the screen. When using the guest account, clicking the launchers for some programs (such as the terminal) work, but other launchers do not. The Synaptic and file manager icons do nothing when clicked in the guest account. The guest account uses a light theme and does not display a welcome window.
When I first signed into my regular user account a welcome window appeared. This window shows a grid of buttons which provide access to documentation, on-line resources, and some local tools such as the Additional Drivers utility. It also includes a Tutorial tool which pops-up a series of windows around the desktop with text describing what the various desktop elements (panel, dock, and virtual desktop overview) do. There is a README file which talks mostly about how to install the distribution. Plus there are links for visiting the project's website.
I found the launchers in the welcome window worked and there were no issues there. Though I did find it interesting I couldn't resize the welcome window. Clicking the borders of the window would let me move the welcome screen, though not resize it. Other application windows behaved normally when their edges were clicked and dragged.
Hardware
I briefly played with Drauger OS in VirtualBox, though that's not its target platform. The distribution ran in VirtualBox and worked passably well, offering average performance. When running on my laptop, Drauger mostly worked well, properly detecting all of my hardware. I did run into one quirk where, once the system booted, my keyboard would fail to respond for a couple of minutes. My trackpad worked, but the computer acted like the keyboard wasn't there for a few minutes. I've seen this happen before a few times, but it's rare. It doesn't seem to be a bug exactly, just a quirk that slows down getting logged in.
The distribution was able to boot in both UEFI and Legacy BIOS modes, at least as long as the proper 6.2 kernel was selected. I didn't get the 6.6 kernel to boot and so decided to switch my default boot option. There isn't a tool included in the distribution to do this so I ended up changing the GRUB configuration manually.
Drauger OS 7.6 -- Browsing the application menu and the settings panel
(full image size: 711kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Drauger used a fairly normal amount of memory during my trial, requiring 465MB of RAM when signed into the Xfce desktop. This places the distribution in the mid-weight category, about on par with other projects running Xfce, and lighter than distributions running GNOME or KDE Plasma. When it came to disk space though I was surprised to see a fresh install took up 17GB of storage. Drauger bills itself as shipping with few applications and not many non-gaming tools, so I expected it to be smaller. As it turns out, over 4GB of this 17GB was taken up by a hidden swap file stored on the root partition. Drauger uses this swap file instead of a separate swap partition, which means the operating system was about 12GB in size, about 50% larger than most other mainstream desktop distributions.
I was curious what was packed into Drauger to make it large, which brings me to...
Included software
Drauger ships with some common desktop applications, including the Firefox web browser and the Nemo file manager. A document viewer, image viewer, and the Flameshot screenshot utility are installed for us. The distribution ships with a few media applications, including the Audacious music player, the mpv media player, and the Cheese webcam utility. There is a graphical tool for installing additional, third-party hardware drivers, and the BleachBit disk clean-up tool. There is a launcher for an e-mail client, though none is installed on the system. Timeshift is installed to help us manage system snapshots.
In line with the project's gaming theme, the distribution includes a number of tools to help people install games. These include WINE, PlayOnLinux, the Steam gaming portal, Lutris, the Heroic Game Launcher, and GameHub.
Not everything is game focused though. Drauger OS also includes the GNU Compiler Collection. We're also given the GNU command line utilities and manual pages. Drauger runs the systemd init software and ships with two kernels: Linux 6.2 and 6.6.
Drauger puts some of its launchers right out in front of the user, placing them on the left-hand dock. Specifically, there are icons for launching Steam, Firefox, and Synaptic on the dock. There are also two arrows on the dock which can be clicked to provide access to additional launchers. One opens the Drauger Installer. This installer isn't a system installer, rather it assists the user in installing a single Deb package. The other hidden launchers open the Heroic Games Launcher, GameHub, and Lutris - portals for fetching and launching video games.
While having these gaming portals front and centre for the user (or front and slightly to the left) is convenient, there were some items I missed or ran into quirks with while using them. For example, there doesn't appear to be any graphical tool installed to help users configure boot options. Since Drauger ships with two kernels I'd somewhat expected to find an easy way to switch between them or install alternative kernels optimized for gaming or responsiveness. On a less visible topic, the vi text editor, a staple of most distributions, is not included. People wishing to edit text files from the command line can use Nano instead.
One bit of weird behaviour I ran into involved the Firefox browser. Its default home page was set to /home/<username>/%u (or, more specifically, /home/jesse/%u, in my case). This resource is not a valid location so Firefox just shows an error page whenever it's opened until we change the default home page. This seems like an obvious error and one I'm surprised didn't get fixed in testing before the release.
Software management
Drauger OS ships with multiple tools for managing software packages. Synaptic is the package manager which is most visible to the user. This low-level package manager provides a lot of functionality (we can manage repositories, fetch updates, search for low-level packages, and perform installs and upgrades with it). Synaptic isn't flashy or streamlined, but it offers a lot of functions. My time with Synaptic mostly went well. Early on I ran into an issue where I had refreshed my package database and tried to fetch upgraded packages. Synaptic failed saying some dependencies were missing. I switched to a terminal and used APT to fetch the waiting upgrades and this worked as expected. I'm not sure why APT worked where Synaptic failed (since Synaptic is a front-end for APT). I suspect Synaptic was performing a full or "dist-upgrade" procedure while APT was performing a more conservative, regular upgrade. Other than this hiccup, Synaptic worked well for me.
Drauger OS 7.6 -- Exploring the software centre
(full image size: 559kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The second software manager is GNOME Software Centre. While Synaptic appears to just pull from Ubuntu's 22.04 "Jammy" repositories, GNOME Software pulls from these classic repositories as well as the Flatpak Flathub repository. GNOME Software is divided into three tabs: Explore, Installed, and Updates. The Explore tab worked for me and was able to help me find and install new Deb packages. The Installed tab showed me items already on the system and was able to remove Deb packages. The Updates tab would show waiting updates, but was unable to handle them. I also found I was unable to fetch and install new Flatpak bundles. Whenever I tried to work with updates GNOME Software would unhelpfully report "Something went wrong", sometimes adding the waiting updates had unmet dependencies. When working with Flatpak packages any action was met with an error which read "Invalid NULL filename".
I turned to the command line where I tried using Flatpak to fetch a few games and the VLC media player. I also tried to update the existing Flatpak bundles (Firefox is a Flatpak on Drauger OS). Any attempt to use Flatpak, whether as a regular user or as the root user, resulted in an error during the download process with a message declaring: "Invalid NULL filename". In short, Flatpak management and most actions available through the GNOME Software application didn't work.
Drauger OS 7.6 -- Error while trying to update Flatpak packages
(full image size: 525kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Gaming and devices
The Drauger website indicates the project has a focus on gaming, though as I mentioned before, it's short on explaining what features gamers might enjoy. While exploring the distribution I didn't find many game-focused features. There are a few gaming portals, such as Steam, PlayOnLinux, and Lutris installed for us. Though these tools are also available on most other desktop distributions with a few mouse clicks.
Drauger immediately detected and was able to use a spare Nintendo Switch controller I plugged into my machine, though parent distributions, such as Debian and Ubuntu, also treat the controlled as a plug-n-play item that is automatically supported, so Drauger doesn't stand out in the crowd in this regard.
I tried some of the gaming portals Drauger provides. I started with Steam which allowed me to sign into my Steam account. Then Steam crashed. I tried to sign into Steam again and the Steam process was running (visible in a task monitor), but the window wasn't visible. The desktop started to lag. I logged out and then signed back in again to try again. This time Steam ran normally. Using Steam I could access my library of games and install new ones
I tried fetching a few games through Lutris too. The first two games I tried to install failed with the error message: "YOu [sic] are not authenticated to "%s", 'gpg". This was vague and unhelpful. I tried a third game which installed, but then failed to launch with the error: "Failed to retrieve libretro information." A fourth game installed, but also failed to launch, this time with an error saying my web address was "empty" and I should check the game's configuration. This felt odd as the game was a stand-alone game and doesn't not require a network connection.
Drauger OS 7.6 -- Lutris failing to launch a game
(full image size: 743kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
All of this is to say Drauger ships with some gaming portal utilities, but they don't always work well. Which isn't necessarily Drauger's fault. Lutris and PlayOnLinux usually don't perform well for me on other distributions either with a random sampling of games and applications.
Conclusions
I appreciate what Drauger OS is attempting to do. The project is taking a Ubuntu base and trimming it down to make it more like a gaming platform, or a gaming portal platform. The large icons and reduced number of applications give Drauger's desktop a console-like feel, not unlike an XBox or PlayStation. From a visual perspective, the distribution seems to be hitting the mark.
On the other hand, Drauger presented me with several issues. The problem with the default kernel on the live media being different from the one which is used when the distribution is installed really stood out as an issue since one of the kernels failed to boot in my test environments. The Firefox browser using a local, invalid URL for its home page was a smaller issue, but a bit baffling as I was surprised it didn't get caught before the current version was released.
What surprised and concerned me most about using Drauger is the distribution seems to struggle in areas where other Ubuntu-based distributions usually do not. I was unable to install or upgrade any Flatpak packages, for instance, with Drauger. This is something which usually "just works" on other distributions, at least when working from the command line. Similarly, this week was one of the few times I've run into a dependency error while using Synaptic. Drauger uses its own system installer which, while it works, isn't as streamlined and friendly as either Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer or the Calamares installer used by at least one Ubuntu community edition.
In short, I feel like I could have achieved a similar, perhaps better experience, had I installed another light-to-mid weight Ubuntu edition, such as Lubuntu or Xubuntu, and side-stepped the problems I ran into this week using Drauger's customized experience. It's never a good sign when a child distribution's customizations make it less convenient to use compared to its parent, especially in its area of focus, such as installing games.
The project is doing some nice things for gamers, like providing easy access to Steam, WINE, and Lutris, but these are easy to install on most other distributions too. At the same time, Drauger doesn't appear to be providing a solid foundation or customized tweaks gamers might find useful, like a custom kernel, emulators, links to gaming forums, on-line chat software, or a leaner base system.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
UBports changes release version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication, FreeBSD plans to phase out 32-bit processor support, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop
The UBports team is changing the way new releases of the project's mobile operating system are organized and labelled. The intention is to make it more clear which versions of UBports are security updates and which ones are feature updates. "Each release of Ubuntu Touch will use the format of '<<year>.<month>.<minor>', where '<year>' and '<month>' are the expected year and month of the release. The feature releases will start with the '<minor>' version of '0'. These releases can contain new features, major changes etc. For example, the first release to use Ubuntu 24.04 as base will (probably) use the version 24.6.0. We plan to have a feature release every 6 months. After that, each point release will increment the '<minor>' version by '1'. The releases will contain only security patches, bug fixes or small changes, as well as updates from the base Ubuntu version. We plan to have a minor release every 2 months. We will support each feature release for approximately 1 month after the next feature release is released (i.e. we will have 1 more update, aka point release)." Additional details are offered in the project's blog post.
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The TrueNAS project has announced a number of new features becoming available to users, including Fast Dedup which should become available for users later in 2024. A post on the iXsystems website shares highlights of Fast Dedup: "'Fast Dedup has been a longstanding desired feature of ZFS and TrueNAS, and can deliver 5X the usable capacity and 20X the performance.' said Kris Moore, SVP of Engineering. 'These attributes will significantly improve the economics of OpenZFS storage relative to cloud storage and proprietary storage, and our team could not be more ecstatic to see this come to fruition.'"
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The FreeBSD project is planning to slowly phase out support for older CPU architectures, including 32-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM platforms. John Baldwin shared an outline of plans for the next few versions of FreeBSD: "FreeBSD is deprecating 32-bit platforms over the next couple of major releases. We anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7. Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be retained through at least the lifetime of the stable/16 branch if not longer. (There is currently no plan to remove support for 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels.)"
The FreeBSD project published its quarterly newsletter this past week. The newsletter covers ongoing work and progress being made by the project's team. One of the intriguing new items is the idea of service jails: "Service jails extend the rc system to allow automatic jailing of rc.d services. A service jail inherits the filesystem of the parent host or jail, but uses all other limits of the jail (process visibility, restricted network access, filesystem mounting permissions, sysvipc) by default. Additional configuration allows inheritance of the IPs of the parent, sysvipc, memory page locking, and use of the bhyve virtual machine monitor (vmm)."
* * * * *
System76, the maker of Pop!_OS, has been working on a new desktop environment, called COSMIC. The new desktop, which is expected to replace GNOME on the Pop!_OS distribution, is nearing its first development release. The company has published a blog post with some of the desktop's latest features: "The screenshot tool has been implemented! Take screenshots of your entire screen, a specific window, or a selected area. Floating Window Stacks - This feature is now implemented in COSMIC. Currently, stacking allows you to pair tiled windows together across applications like tabs in a web browser. In COSMIC, you'll also have the ability to stack floating (non-tiled) windows. This can be done by simply dragging a window to the stack header; drag it out of the header to remove it from the stack. Meanwhile, launching an application while a stack is selected will add that application to the stack."
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
How much disk space to allocate
Making-space-for-everything asks: I'm looking to set up my first Linux distro, probably Linux Mint, and want to know how much space to allocate? I plan to dual-boot with Windows 11, if that makes a difference. I'll probably do some gaming and set up some virtual machines to play around.
DistroWatch answers: Typically Linux distributions are set up with three disk partitions for a new installation. One holds the operating system (this is called the root partition); one holds user's files and settings (this is called the /home partition); and there is often a third partition to hold data temporarily which is called swap space.
These days it is common for the swap partition (if one is created) to be the same size as the computer's RAM as this allows us to put the machine into hibernation mode. In other words, if you have a computer with 8GB of RAM in it, then your swap space might be 8GB in size, assuming you want to use hibernation. If you don't intend to use the hibernate feature to save energy when not using your computer, then you can usually get away with a smaller swap partition, maybe 1GB. (Please note that hibernation is separate from sleep mode. Swap space is not required to put your computer into sleep mode.)
The /home partition should be large enough to hold any data you plan to keep and any third-party games you plan to install. Since this could be virtually any size from 1GB up to several terabytes (depending on your needs), the /home partition usually takes up any remaining space after the other two partitions have been created.
This leaves us with the root partition. Up until a handful of years ago, I would have said you can typically get by with a 20GB to 25GB root partition for the operating system and probably have some room left over. However, these days a lot of distributions are shipping technologies which are bulky or which eat up space over time. Portable package formats, filesystem snapshots, Nix package generations, and swap files can quickly gobble up additional gigabytes. These days it is easy to consume 25GB of space for the root partition and need more if we want to install development tools or take filesystem snapshots.
At this point, I would suggest setting up a root partition of about 32GB. A swap partition about equal in size to your RAM (if you want to use hibernation) or 1GB if you don't. Then allocate any remaining space to /home. However, when you're dual booting "any remaining space" is a tricky concept because you already have another operating system on your computer.
Try to take a rough estimate of how much space you need for gaming and your virtual machines. Probably assume at least 32GB of space for each virtual machine and maybe 10GB per big budget game to get a rough estimate. Then, because we always forget something or want more stuff, double the number you come up with to get an estimate of how big your /home partition should be. We can always use make use of more disk space.
You may be wondering why the operating system and user data are often kept on separate partitions. This is not necessary, but it's a good habit to get into. Keeping your files and settings on a separate partition from the operating system means you can re-install your distribution or even switch to another distribution while keeping your personal data (your /home partition) untouched. This saves us from restoring all of our files from a backup every time we re-install or switch operating systems.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
SparkyLinux 2024.02
SparkyLinux is a lightweight, Debian based distribution which is available in several editions. The project's latest release is from its semi-rolling branch. "This is an update of Sparky semi-rolling ISO images of the Debian Testing line, which provides fixed CLI Installer issue of installing Sparky on Btrfs and XFS filesystems, package updating as usually, and new features. Main changes: all packages upgraded from Debian and Sparky testing repos as of February 11, 2024. Linux kernel 6.6.13 (6.7.4, 6.6.16-LTS, 6.1.77-LTS, 5.15.148-LTS in Sparky repos). GRUB 2.12. Pipewire 1.0.3. Sparky CLI installer changes: added XFS and Btrfs filesystems back to the installer; the last issue did not let you install Sparky on the file systems properly, course the GRUB booloader can't be installed on the mentioned file systems. Now, the CLI installer has an option to choose additional ~500MB /boot partition which is auto-formatted to ext4, so Sparky can be boot fine." Additional details can be found in the project's release announcement.
GhostBSD 24.01.1
GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD. The project's latest release, GhostBSD 24.01.1, is based on FreeBSD 14-STABLE and changes the way the root and first users are handled at install time. "This new release is based on FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE. Update Station got a significant change to upgrade to a major FreeBSD version, allowing upgrading GhostBSD from 13.2-STABLE to 14.0-STABLE. Also, a major change to the installer is the user created is an admin, and the root user gets the same password as the admin. If the admin password is changed after the installation, the root password will not change. Enhancement, improvements, and new features: Adding support for the future installer and simplified desktop configuration. Search also in PKG description (not only PKG name). New wallpapers for 24.01. Preparing GhostBSD to upgrade to 14.0. Adding search to description and Added -U to pkg query to search." Additional information is provided in the project's release announcement. GhostBSD is available in an official edition featuring the MATE desktop and a community edition running the Xfce desktop.
GhostBSD 24.01.1 -- Running the MATE desktop
(full image size: 1.4MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,960
- Total data uploaded: 44.0TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
How big is your root partition?
In this week's Questions and Answers column we talked about how much space should be set aside for a root partition. We would like to hear how much space you set aside to hold your operating system - do you keep things minimal, or leave a lot of room for the system and its packages to grow?
You can see the results of our previous poll on how long people wait for a project to establish itself before trying a new distribution in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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How large is your root partition?
| 0-5GB: | 74 (5%) |
| 6-10GB: | 46 (3%) |
| 11-15GB: | 48 (3%) |
| 16-20GB: | 121 (8%) |
| 21-25GB: | 65 (4%) |
| 26-30GB: | 102 (6%) |
| 31-35GB: | 74 (5%) |
| 36-40GB: | 72 (5%) |
| 41-45GB: | 30 (2%) |
| 46-50GB: | 118 (7%) |
| 51+GB: | 849 (53%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 26 February 2024. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Issue 1124 (2025-06-02): Picking up a Pico, tips for protecting privacy, Rhino tests Plasma desktop, Arch installer supports snapshots, new features from UBports, Ubuntu tests monthly snapshots |
| • Issue 1123 (2025-05-26): CRUX 3.8, preventing a laptop from sleeping, FreeBSD improves laptop support, Fedora confirms GNOME X11 session being dropped, HardenedBSD introduces Rust in userland build, KDE developing a virtual machine manager |
| • Issue 1122 (2025-05-19): GoboLinux 017.01, RHEL 10.0 and Debian 12 updates, openSUSE retires YaST, running X11 apps on Wayland |
| • Issue 1121 (2025-05-12): Bluefin 41, custom file manager actions, openSUSE joins End of 10 while dropping Deepin desktop, Fedora offers tips for building atomic distros, Ubuntu considers replacing sudo with sudo-rs |
| • Issue 1120 (2025-05-05): CachyOS 250330, what it means when a distro breaks, Kali updates repository key, Trinity receives an update, UBports tests directory encryption, Gentoo faces losing key infrastructure |
| • Issue 1119 (2025-04-28): Ubuntu MATE 25.04, what is missing from Linux, CachyOS ships OCCT, Debian enters soft freeze, Fedora discusses removing X11 session from GNOME, Murena plans business services, NetBSD on a Wii |
| • Issue 1118 (2025-04-21): Fedora 42, strange characters in Vim, Nitrux introduces new package tools, Fedora extends reproducibility efforts, PINE64 updates multiple devices running Debian |
| • Issue 1117 (2025-04-14): Shebang 25.0, EndeavourOS 2025.03.19, running applications from other distros on the desktop, Debian gets APT upgrade, Mint introduces OEM options for LMDE, postmarketOS packages GNOME 48 and COSMIC, Redox testing USB support |
| • Issue 1116 (2025-04-07): The Sense HAT, Android and mobile operating systems, FreeBSD improves on laptops, openSUSE publishes many new updates, Fedora appoints new Project Leader, UBports testing VoLTE |
| • Issue 1115 (2025-03-31): GrapheneOS 2025, the rise of portable package formats, MidnightBSD and openSUSE experiment with new package management features, Plank dock reborn, key infrastructure projects lose funding, postmarketOS to focus on reliability |
| • Issue 1114 (2025-03-24): Bazzite 41, checking which processes are writing to disk, Rocky unveils new Hardened branch, GNOME 48 released, generating images for the Raspberry Pi |
| • Issue 1113 (2025-03-17): MocaccinoOS 1.8.1, how to contribute to open source, Murena extends on-line installer, Garuda tests COSMIC edition, Ubuntu to replace coreutils with Rust alternatives, Chimera Linux drops RISC-V builds |
| • Issue 1112 (2025-03-10): Solus 4.7, distros which work with Secure Boot, UBports publishes bug fix, postmarketOS considers a new name, Debian running on Android |
| • Issue 1111 (2025-03-03): Orbitiny 0.01, the effect of Ubuntu Core Desktop, Gentoo offers disk images, elementary OS invites feature ideas, FreeBSD starts PinePhone Pro port, Mint warns of upcoming Firefox issue |
| • Issue 1110 (2025-02-24): iodeOS 6.0, learning to program, Arch retiring old repositories, openSUSE makes progress on reproducible builds, Fedora is getting more serious about open hardware, Tails changes its install instructions to offer better privacy, Murena's de-Googled tablet goes on sale |
| • Issue 1109 (2025-02-17): Rhino Linux 2025.1, MX Linux 23.5 with Xfce 4.20, replacing X.Org tools with Wayland tools, GhostBSD moving its base to FreeBSD -RELEASE, Redox stabilizes its ABI, UBports testing 24.04, Asahi changing its leadership, OBS in dispute with Fedora |
| • Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
| • Issue 1107 (2025-02-03): siduction 2024.1.0, timing tasks, Lomiri ported to postmarketOS, Alpine joins Open Collective, a new desktop for Linux called Orbitiny |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Parted Magic
Parted Magic is a small live CD/USB/PXE with its elemental purpose being to partition hard drives. Although GParted and Parted are the main programs, the CD/USB also offers other applications, such as Partition Image, TestDisk, fdisk, sfdisk, dd, ddrescue, etc. In August 2013 the distribution became a commercial product and is no longer available as a free download.
Status: Active
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Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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