Screenshots from Bullseye GNOME. The desktop background is a beautiful shot of what's still the only home for Life that we know of.
Showing posts with label desktops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label desktops. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Monday, January 25, 2021
at long last, split view in thunar!
I don't know why it took so long, but: "Xfce’s Thunar File Manager Gets Split View, File Creation Times, and More"
That should take care of the main annoyance I've had with Thunar - the lack of a split view window. I think I'll be able to test it out soon in Arch. Looking forward to it!
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
ulyssa
For years, Linux Mint (site: https://linuxmint.com/) has been one of the best options for folks new to the Linux world. Released on January 8, Linux Mint 20.1 "Ulyssa" ships in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce flavors. I downloaded linuxmint-20.1-xfce-64bit.iso and took a look at the Xfce version in a live session.
"Ulyssa" booted up quickly and easily from a flash drive on the three laptops I tried it on. The Xfce desktop's setup has a pleasant and comfy feel to it. They've loaded the release with a nice selection of tools, making it a breeze for the user to jump right in and get things done. I felt that I was working with one of the best live sessions I've seen.
Linux Mint 20.1 Xfce release notes: https://linuxmint.com/rel_ulyssa_xfce.php
Monday, August 17, 2020
looking more attractive
Visitors to the MX Linux website might be pleasantly surprised by some recent developments:
Yep, MX includes Fluxbox on their main isos along with the default Xfce, and now there's also a KDE iso! Kinda makes me a bit nostalgic for the old Mepis days, when I mainly used KDE.
For more info about available MX Linux downloads, see: https://mxlinux.org/download-links/
I took a look at MX's Fluxbox setup a few months back (https://monksblog-malspa.blogspot.com/2020/05/fluxbox-in-mx.html), but it seems that there's been a lot of work done on it since then. Check out the latest announcement about it, here.
I haven't look at the KDE spin yet. It might be a nice option for some users, if choices like KDE Neon, Kubuntu, and Debian w/ KDE Plasma aren't enough.
Monday, May 4, 2020
focal, installed
I finally got around to installing Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa"). I went with the "Minimal installation" option, which gives me a fair amount of control over what goes into the installed system. I elected to "Download updates while installing Kubuntu" and to "Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats". I chose the "Manual" installation type and set up the partitions myself.
The installation itself went quickly and painlessly. After that, I spent quite a bit of time configuring and customizing things to taste, and now I've got a system that differs quite a bit from the default setup I tested out in the live session.
One thing that was bugging me was that I don't really want to mess around with Ubuntu's controversial snap packages at this time, and I didn't know if there were any snaps present in my new installation. I ran the following command to check:
$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
No snaps, but then I ran the apt search snapd command, which showed that the snapd package was in fact present. I took care of that by running sudo apt purge snapd. Also, I did some other cleaning:
$ rm -rf ~/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd
I've removed some other things, like unattended-upgrades, vlc, snapd, muon, and plasma-discover. And I added some of my favorite apps: ntp, localepurge, geany, doublecmd-qt, audacious, nomacs, geeqie, mc, synaptic, inxi, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, neofetch.
I'm quite pleased with what I've seen so far. Kubuntu LTS releases have worked out very well for me in the past; as much as I love Debian and Arch, I've been running Kubuntu on my "primary" computer, and Focal Fossa looks even better than previous releases. Here's a link to a review of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS by the great Dedoimedo. Enjoy!
The installation itself went quickly and painlessly. After that, I spent quite a bit of time configuring and customizing things to taste, and now I've got a system that differs quite a bit from the default setup I tested out in the live session.
One thing that was bugging me was that I don't really want to mess around with Ubuntu's controversial snap packages at this time, and I didn't know if there were any snaps present in my new installation. I ran the following command to check:
$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.
No snaps, but then I ran the apt search snapd command, which showed that the snapd package was in fact present. I took care of that by running sudo apt purge snapd. Also, I did some other cleaning:
$ rm -rf ~/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd
I've removed some other things, like unattended-upgrades, vlc, snapd, muon, and plasma-discover. And I added some of my favorite apps: ntp, localepurge, geany, doublecmd-qt, audacious, nomacs, geeqie, mc, synaptic, inxi, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, neofetch.
I'm quite pleased with what I've seen so far. Kubuntu LTS releases have worked out very well for me in the past; as much as I love Debian and Arch, I've been running Kubuntu on my "primary" computer, and Focal Fossa looks even better than previous releases. Here's a link to a review of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS by the great Dedoimedo. Enjoy!
Thursday, April 30, 2020
kubuntu focal live
Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa") was released last week. I downloaded the iso and took a look around in the live session; I haven't installed it yet, still hanging with 19.10. Some shots:
Discover and Muon:
This was my first look at the Elisa music player (see https://kde.org/applications/multimedia/org.kde.elisa and https://github.com/KDE/elisa), playing some music files from a flash drive. The VLC media player is also included.
An online review of Elisa: https://technastic.com/elisa-music-player-kde/.
Doesn't look like it'll be replacing Audacious on any of my installed systems.
Overall, the live session feels very nice, and it's loaded with enough useful apps to get the user up and running. I finally went into the settings and added a virtual desktop -- I don't see the sense of being limited to only one desktop/workspace, and haven't had to do that since my Windows XP days -- but other than that I didn't tweak the default configurations at all. Nothing but love here for KDE Plasma! I'll get around to trying Kubuntu 20.04 on bare metal soon, hopefully.
Discover and Muon:
This was my first look at the Elisa music player (see https://kde.org/applications/multimedia/org.kde.elisa and https://github.com/KDE/elisa), playing some music files from a flash drive. The VLC media player is also included.
An online review of Elisa: https://technastic.com/elisa-music-player-kde/.
Doesn't look like it'll be replacing Audacious on any of my installed systems.
Overall, the live session feels very nice, and it's loaded with enough useful apps to get the user up and running. I finally went into the settings and added a virtual desktop -- I don't see the sense of being limited to only one desktop/workspace, and haven't had to do that since my Windows XP days -- but other than that I didn't tweak the default configurations at all. Nothing but love here for KDE Plasma! I'll get around to trying Kubuntu 20.04 on bare metal soon, hopefully.
Monday, January 27, 2020
wintry
A couple of shots of my LXQt desktop in Arch, with a left-side, vertical panel, and an auto-hiding panel (horizontal, top right).
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
warming up to lxqt
I finally got LXQt configured into a setup I really like. I put a shortened, vertical panel at the upper left of the desktop, and I have a little horizontal panel, set to auto-hide, at the upper right.
There's an icon for the LXQt menu at the bottom of the vertical panel, while the Openbox menu is accessible by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
The Configuration Center is simple but nice enough. It was kinda annoying that LXDE (from which sprang LXQt) didn't have something like it.
I put a "Leave" button on the horizontal panel; this shot shows the dialog box that button brings up:
Not a perfect desktop environment (is there such a thing?), but LXQt is light, simple, and a pleasure to use. Development on the project has come along slowly; it'll be interesting to see how the LXQt desktop looks in, say, five years.
There's an icon for the LXQt menu at the bottom of the vertical panel, while the Openbox menu is accessible by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
The Configuration Center is simple but nice enough. It was kinda annoying that LXDE (from which sprang LXQt) didn't have something like it.
I put a "Leave" button on the horizontal panel; this shot shows the dialog box that button brings up:
Not a perfect desktop environment (is there such a thing?), but LXQt is light, simple, and a pleasure to use. Development on the project has come along slowly; it'll be interesting to see how the LXQt desktop looks in, say, five years.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
another nice mx release
I'm taking a look at the recently released MX-19 "patito feo" (odd codename choice -- translates into "ugly duckling"), which is based on Debian Buster and antiX-19:
MX-19 ships with the Xfce desktop environment and a nice selection of apps and tools, including Firefox, Galculator, FeatherPad, Thunar, Geany, GIMP, nomacs, inxi, the LibreOffice suite, VLC media player, qpdfview, GParted, Synaptic, and the excellent collection of MX Tools.
The official release announcement can be found here: https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-19-patito-feo-released/
MX-19 ships with the Xfce desktop environment and a nice selection of apps and tools, including Firefox, Galculator, FeatherPad, Thunar, Geany, GIMP, nomacs, inxi, the LibreOffice suite, VLC media player, qpdfview, GParted, Synaptic, and the excellent collection of MX Tools.
The official release announcement can be found here: https://mxlinux.org/blog/mx-19-patito-feo-released/
Thursday, October 10, 2019
excellent xfce live session
The Debian Stable-based SolydXK 10 was released on September 27, 2019: https://solydxk.com/news/solydxk-10-released-based-on-debian-buster-1
SolydXK offers two isos: SolydX (with Xfce) and SolydK (with KDE Plasma). I took a look at the "SolydX 64-bit" version in live sessions from a flash drive, on a couple of different computers.
The SolydXK website recommends using the dd command to write the iso to media, but I used the cp command as shown here, from the ~/downloads directory:
$ cd downloads
$ sudo cp solydx_10_64_201909.iso /dev/sdb && sync
I had no problems booting either computer with the flash drive. SolydX presents a nice, basic Xfce setup with a customized theme.
SolydX ships with a nice collection of apps, inluding Firefox ESR, LibreOffice, VLC, Ristretto, USB Creator, Mousepad, Thunar, Synaptic, Galculator, GParted, xfce4-terminal, inxi, rsync, mc, and xfce4-terminal.
I like that SolydXK is so closely based on Buster, the current Debian Stable. Here's a look at the SolydXK soures.list file:
solydxk@solydxk:/etc/apt$ cat sources.list
deb https://repository.solydxk.com solydxk-10 main upstream import
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
I haven't yet taken a look at the SolydK version of SolydXK 10, but the SolydX live session rates up there with the best I've seen.
SolydXK at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=solydxk
SolydXK home page: https://solydxk.com/
SolydXK offers two isos: SolydX (with Xfce) and SolydK (with KDE Plasma). I took a look at the "SolydX 64-bit" version in live sessions from a flash drive, on a couple of different computers.
The SolydXK website recommends using the dd command to write the iso to media, but I used the cp command as shown here, from the ~/downloads directory:
$ cd downloads
$ sudo cp solydx_10_64_201909.iso /dev/sdb && sync
I had no problems booting either computer with the flash drive. SolydX presents a nice, basic Xfce setup with a customized theme.
SolydX ships with a nice collection of apps, inluding Firefox ESR, LibreOffice, VLC, Ristretto, USB Creator, Mousepad, Thunar, Synaptic, Galculator, GParted, xfce4-terminal, inxi, rsync, mc, and xfce4-terminal.
I like that SolydXK is so closely based on Buster, the current Debian Stable. Here's a look at the SolydXK soures.list file:
solydxk@solydxk:/etc/apt$ cat sources.list
deb https://repository.solydxk.com solydxk-10 main upstream import
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org buster/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
I haven't yet taken a look at the SolydK version of SolydXK 10, but the SolydX live session rates up there with the best I've seen.
SolydXK at DistroWatch: https://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=solydxk
SolydXK home page: https://solydxk.com/
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Saturday, July 27, 2019
buster lxqt w/ openbox
I've been running the Jessie-based BunsenLabs "Deuterium" on my "test" computer, patiently waiting for the Buster-based BL "Lithium" release. On a whim, I decided to take a look at Debian Buster LXQt to see how it might do on that computer.
I started out by downloading debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-lxqt.iso and getting that onto a flash drive. The live session booted up on two of my machines, but I couldn't get into the live session using my "test" computer; booting with the Graphical Debian Installer option worked fine with that hardware, however.
Buster LXQt ships with a standard desktop setup and a nice collection of apps, including Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, PCManFM-qt, the LibreOffice suite, Audacious music player, qpdfview, LXImage, and QTerminal, among many others.
I found xfce4-screenshooter in the menu along with another screenshot tool, ScreenGrab, which seems to be a nice app. ScreenGrab gets the job done, and also it stays open between screenshots, unlike xfce4-screenshooter.
Here's a shot of PCManFM-qt, which offers a nice, commander-style split view. I found some items in the Trash. How they got there is a mystery; I didn't intentionally put them there!
I added Openbox, installed a handful of other packages, and did a heck of a lot of tinkering and tweaking -- so much, in fact, that I didn't do a good job of taking notes on everything that I did, which is something that I'm normally very meticulous about. Debian Stable doesn't really give the user a great out-of-the-box experience, but it's excellent for the "do-it-yourself" user who wants to put together a nice, customized system.
A couple more shots of my Openbox desktop, showing QTerminal, ScreenGrab, my tint2 setup, and my Openbox menu:
I like a vertical panel along the left side. For Openbox, tint2 gives me just what I need. For the LXQt sessions, I was able to get a decent left-side vertical panel -- not perfect (I wasn't satisfied with the config options available for the LXQt panel), but it'll do.
As a former CrunchBang user and fanboy, my original plan was to stick with BunsenLabs (perhaps the best Debian-based Openbox distro out there right now) for this computer, and to do a quick-and-easy installation of "Lithium" once it came out. As things have turned out, I'm happy with this Buster LXQt (with Openbox) setup, even though it took a lot of work to get things the way I like them. The thing is that while BunsenLabs is better than "straight" Debian for installing and getting to work right away, I'm never quite satisfied with the default BL setup (same goes for any distro, really!), so either way I was gonna spend a lot of time tinkering and tweaking.
Seems to me that LXQt still needs more polish, especially when it comes to GUI configuration options, but it isn't so bad, overall. It's a decent solution for those who need a light-weight desktop environment for low-performance hardware.
I started out by downloading debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-lxqt.iso and getting that onto a flash drive. The live session booted up on two of my machines, but I couldn't get into the live session using my "test" computer; booting with the Graphical Debian Installer option worked fine with that hardware, however.
Buster LXQt ships with a standard desktop setup and a nice collection of apps, including Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, PCManFM-qt, the LibreOffice suite, Audacious music player, qpdfview, LXImage, and QTerminal, among many others.
I found xfce4-screenshooter in the menu along with another screenshot tool, ScreenGrab, which seems to be a nice app. ScreenGrab gets the job done, and also it stays open between screenshots, unlike xfce4-screenshooter.
Here's a shot of PCManFM-qt, which offers a nice, commander-style split view. I found some items in the Trash. How they got there is a mystery; I didn't intentionally put them there!
I added Openbox, installed a handful of other packages, and did a heck of a lot of tinkering and tweaking -- so much, in fact, that I didn't do a good job of taking notes on everything that I did, which is something that I'm normally very meticulous about. Debian Stable doesn't really give the user a great out-of-the-box experience, but it's excellent for the "do-it-yourself" user who wants to put together a nice, customized system.
A couple more shots of my Openbox desktop, showing QTerminal, ScreenGrab, my tint2 setup, and my Openbox menu:
I like a vertical panel along the left side. For Openbox, tint2 gives me just what I need. For the LXQt sessions, I was able to get a decent left-side vertical panel -- not perfect (I wasn't satisfied with the config options available for the LXQt panel), but it'll do.
As a former CrunchBang user and fanboy, my original plan was to stick with BunsenLabs (perhaps the best Debian-based Openbox distro out there right now) for this computer, and to do a quick-and-easy installation of "Lithium" once it came out. As things have turned out, I'm happy with this Buster LXQt (with Openbox) setup, even though it took a lot of work to get things the way I like them. The thing is that while BunsenLabs is better than "straight" Debian for installing and getting to work right away, I'm never quite satisfied with the default BL setup (same goes for any distro, really!), so either way I was gonna spend a lot of time tinkering and tweaking.
Seems to me that LXQt still needs more polish, especially when it comes to GUI configuration options, but it isn't so bad, overall. It's a decent solution for those who need a light-weight desktop environment for low-performance hardware.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
fresh buster installation
A few shots of my Xfce desktop in Debian Buster (still the current "Testing") (see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting and https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/), which I installed using debian-buster-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.iso, on my old Compaq Presario CQ57:
Some of the packages I added post-install:
doublecmd-gtk geany nomacs audacious udiskie ntp galculator lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings mc evince geeqie gparted localepurge firmware-linux-free firmware-linux-nonfree firmware-realtek neofetch inxi orage
I'm using the following lines in my /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
A Debian "network install" (see: https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/) gives me a nice starting point for when I want to kinda build my own system from the ground up, and with Xfce I have a lot of options and flexibility for setting up the desktop to suit my tastes. I bring in a handful of apps that I prefer to use instead of some of the Xfce defaults -- Double Commander instead of Thunar, Geany instead of Mousepad, and Nomacs instead of Ristretto, for example.
The end result is a near-perfect setup, in my opinion.
There had been some concern that Synaptic would be left out of Debian Buster. I don't really use Synaptic anymore as I prefer to do my package management from the command line, but I found that Synaptic came in as part of the default installation. Also, Synaptic now shows up in the Buster repos when I search for it at the Debian Packages site. Good news for many users.
The Debian project's home page: https://www.debian.org/
Some of the packages I added post-install:
doublecmd-gtk geany nomacs audacious udiskie ntp galculator lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings mc evince geeqie gparted localepurge firmware-linux-free firmware-linux-nonfree firmware-realtek neofetch inxi orage
I'm using the following lines in my /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
A Debian "network install" (see: https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/) gives me a nice starting point for when I want to kinda build my own system from the ground up, and with Xfce I have a lot of options and flexibility for setting up the desktop to suit my tastes. I bring in a handful of apps that I prefer to use instead of some of the Xfce defaults -- Double Commander instead of Thunar, Geany instead of Mousepad, and Nomacs instead of Ristretto, for example.
The end result is a near-perfect setup, in my opinion.
There had been some concern that Synaptic would be left out of Debian Buster. I don't really use Synaptic anymore as I prefer to do my package management from the command line, but I found that Synaptic came in as part of the default installation. Also, Synaptic now shows up in the Buster repos when I search for it at the Debian Packages site. Good news for many users.
The Debian project's home page: https://www.debian.org/
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