EndeavourOS and Zorin OS

[Beerislife]

One of my Monday morning pleasures is to watch the Sunday edition of Explaining Computers on Youtube (Time difference!) I love the way Chris explains stuff, and I like watching his SBC videos.

Anyway, yesterday's video was about Zorin OS 16. Wow! Does that look buuuutaful or what! I downloaded it straight away and put it on a USB stick. Very impressive it is too!

I used to recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon edition to people wanting to abandon MS and get into Linux. That has suddenly changed, it's simple and beautiful, straight out of the box. All I've done here is change the wallpaper to one of my favourite city, and selected the dark theme with red highlights!

https://imgur.com/XmDNBwQ

Sorry, this forum is severely borked so I'm not even going to bother trying to attach pics!

If I were to install it though, I'd remove Evolution and replace it with Thunderbird and Gnome Calendar! On my backup machine, of course!

I was also impressed with EndeavourOS. Could that be a replacement for KDE Neon as my daily driver? Thinking about it.

[Fred47]

Yea but it's not KDE

[verndog]

Yea but it's not KDE

What's not KDE? EndeavourOS? Sure it is. I have the Plasma version installed and I'm really impressed.

[Beerislife]

If the boss was still using a laptop with Linux Mint installed I'd swap it out for Zorin OS in a heartbeat. But she now has a more simple system, a Chromebook!

EndeavourOS comes in various flavours but the live image is Xfce. During install you can choose what DE or WM to install.

[GreyGeek]

I made a LiveUSB of EndeavourOS and gave it a try after seeing the DrunkLinuxUser review of it (but he was using a VM and never installed it to bare silicone).

After playing with it a lot of the rouge and lipstick rubbed off.

I have been seeing a lot about the latest KDE Neon and made a persistent LiveUSB for it. I ran that LiveUSB and liked what I saw. I know I've been writing that I was going to stick to Kubuntu 20.04 until 23.04 came out. Well, scratch that. I am posting this from my newly minted KDE Neo User Edition. It is configured with just the @ subvolume, as was my Kubuntu install. So, my btrfs backup script works as before. Updating my data from the last Kubuntu @ snapshot was a snap.

My GT650M loaded nicely with nvidia-390.144 and gives me a fast desktop, just like it was with Kubuntu. Steam installed beautifully and Universe Sandbox^2. So did python3, jupyter notebook and a ton of python modules for notebook, so all of my previous coding and analysis works nicely. I haven't tried my CubicSDR radio receiver yet, but I'm confident it will work nicely.

The only niggle I have is that I can't get my EKG monitor exe to install. But, I'll work that out in time.

My systemd-analyze time in Kubuntu was 6 secs to a desktop. With Neon it is 9 seconds, the difference being the snapd.service. Discover also includes flatpak installs, and flatpak-session.helper is running as a service, but I don't see snapd in the processes.

KDE Neon is a rolling release. The User Edition runs on the front edge but not the bleeding edge, and that played a large part in my decision to move to it. I wanted to see how the new stuff run but I'm not up to untangleing code blowups. I can get by without the EKG software because I can read the EKG digitial display directly as it takes my wife's EKG.

So, off I go to the KDE Neon forum.

[Beerislife]

Welcome to Neon!

There is a bug in the latest Dolphin. Every time you extract a tarball or zipfile with the right click > extract option, a folder opens after completion. It looks to be fixed in a new version.

Otherwise it's working great. Wow! New Kernel, time for a reboot...

[Beerislife]

I was this close to installing Zorin on my ThinkPad but first I wanted to see how it handled virtual desktops... Oh no! It's the same as Gnome 3/Gnomes Hell! If this function was handled the same way as Cinnamon, I would not have hesitated!

[dequire]

One of my Monday morning pleasures is to watch the Sunday edition of Explaining Computers on Youtube (Time difference!) I love the way Chris explains stuff, and I like watching his SBC videos.

I really enjoy his channel as well. He even gets into advanced topics like quantum computing, all whilke keeping it simple and enjoyable to watch. Oh and he's so British he's almost a caricature of being British! Love it.

[GreyGeek]

Me too!

And, I'll add a note about my attempt to install my EKG software (written circa 2007) on KDE Neon. I installed it on my Kubuntu 20.04 and it went fine. However, everything I've manually with winecfg, winetricks and such has failed. According to the msgs on the background Konsole the problem occurs when the install software goes out to a Windows server to fetch KB and can't find it because Microsoft has shut down those servers. I downloaded a trial copy of the latest Crossover and tried it. It hung up repeatedly.

I also tried to install SpaceEngine098.exe and it also failed to install, either manually or with crossover.

To add insult to injury, when I ran Crossover's uninstall app it, too, failed and did only a partial uninstall. I reinstalled the app and then did "sudo dpkg --purge crossover" and that did it.

I used Crossover a decade or so ago and it worked fine. At this point I suspect that there is a bug in the i386 architecture (wine32).

Luckily, the EKG device has a digital monitor on it which I can use to observe and play back the recording. I may examine the data transfered to the EKG_Viewer program and see if I can plot it myself.

[kenj70]

.........
So, off I go to the KDE Neon forum.

Whenever I went to the KDE Neon forum it often took four days (and sometimes never) to get someone to respond. That is one of the reasons I switched to Kubuntu. And you folks are much more friendly!

-=Ken=-

[Beerislife]

Is there another KDE Neon forum besides the one buried in these forums?

[claydoh]

Is there another KDE Neon forum besides the one buried in these forums?

In KDE's forum. It originally was meant as a developer channel for things such as the build systems and the like

The KDE neon subreddit has more traffic, and the general KDE sub seems to have more Neon users participating.


Remember that Neon is Ubuntu 20.04 so anything related to OS level things like hardware support its all the same.

Otherwise a general KDE related venue is more than enough.

In other words Neon doesn't have a need for a distro specific forum so much.

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[Beerislife]

As I thought.

There isn't much traffic here in the Kubuntu forums and even less in the Neon sub-forum. I already belong to too many (Fedora, a very old friend, Mint, and maybe two more) and I don't want to sign up for more

Happy enough here.

[Don B. Cilly]

By far the best KDE neon forum is this one :-)
Neon and Kubuntu are in fact so similar, 99% of what applies to one, applies to the other.

I also think 99% of GG's "problems" are simply Wine-related. I always found a fresh install of Wine problematic at best.
It doesn't matter if you just copy all your stuff to ~/.wine. The core install will give you plenty of problems on its own.

[claydoh]

I find more useful 'action' on Reddit myself, I think I am more active on there, but that is because it is more specifically KDE-centric, so I learn more, sooner.
*buntu 20.04 OS specific subjects are easily researched, on the rare occasion I need to.