Ubuntu versus Arch

 

Now before I begin, I know there is going to be some arch guy telling me just how wrong I am. Save your breath for somebody else. 20 plus years experience makes me absolutely certain I am right.

And this is not some shot across Arch or Manjaro's bow. Because they have a solid place in the Linux community, and the have earned that place.

But the truth is that for the great majority of Linux users, something like Ubuntu is the best choice for them. Why?

If you are not a car person, you might not get this, but Ubuntu is a Subaru forester. It's not going to go 300 miles an hour. It's not the sharpest thing on the road. It's not ugly, it's practical. And I love it.

Ubuntu is the car you buy that 20 years later, if you've kept the maintenance up on it, it's run without a hiccup continuously. A car you can give to the kid at 20 years of age and know it's not going to be dead on the street somewhere. Reliability is it's name.

Arch (especially Manjaro, but this fits most archs)... are that sweet 72 Plymouth road runner with the holley double pumpers, 440 hemi in competition orange. The car that has been tuned to perfection by her owner. When it's tuned right it's formidable, beautiful...

But in a week's time the timing is off, the carb is screwed up, and the tank is nearly empty because Plymouth's purpose was not fuel economy.

The Arch users car doesn't want to turn over, and he spends an hour and a half getting it running again. 

The Ubuntu user walks up to his car for 20 years straight, and it has turned over every time. Yeah, it needs a oil change every 3k miles. Yeah, once every 5-7 years she needs new tires. And yes, the Ubuntu machine has never blown the doors off the competition. But the Ubuntu user isn't yelling at his machine because it just won't start. 

This is, for the most part, a very accurate statement. Their have been outliers over the years, but as a whole this description is spot on.

To sum this up for non car people. Ubuntu is rock solid and reliable the great majority of time. Arch is not reliable, but if you get it tuned right, it's a beautiful thing to behold. But you will be fixing it far more often.

There's a reason none of the companies I work with are running Arch on their servers. It's usually fedora, red hat, Ubuntu or Debian.

One strange last thing to note... And in truth I never understood this.. most of arch is identical to Ubuntu, fedora, Debian, etc... Their is different tweaks in the UI or GUI, there are different package managers, but in truth in the guts of the machine, they are running the same kernel with the same set of gnu utilities, and either the exact same programs, or ones that serve the same purpose.

For the life of me, I have never understood why arch and Ubuntu run so very differently...

-Denny

Flameshot - My favorite screenshot utility for Linux

A friend of mine by the name of Peter Brown introduced me to Flameshot, and I love this screenshooter.

I always have been a fan of xfce4-screenshooter, simply for the fact that it was "just enough" of a screenshooter utility. And it still is, but... Flameshot has very useful tools and is just so handy I am now a Flameshot man.

Any screen capture utility can take the entire screen. Where Flameshot shines is all the extra tools that are available for you when you select a section of an image.

Before I show my own screenshots of this awesome app, I wanted to add this great gif from https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot. It does a lot better job than my own work below.

I had to share that, the team made such a great showing of their useful works. These next shots are of the tools I love the most.

Here is Flameshot's menu. There are some great options here, like sharing to imgur, pinning it to the desktop, and stuff like that. But my favorite options are those below the image.

First off, holding right click gives you this quick color chooser. I usually pick the red or blue because those seem the most visible, but it's nice having the options.

These screen captures are out of sync, so forgive me, but I love the draw arrows utility, which is what this one is showcasing. The arrow on the bottom tool set here is so useful for pointing out details of screenshots you capture.

Scrolling the mousewheel will let you choose the size of your text. (and other tools). This is so useful for adding info quickly to images. (Yes, this software is awesome.)

There's a lot going on here, but what I am trying to point out is the blur tool. As you can see in the middle, I was able to blur out some of the text. The tool that does this is the one that looks like a bunch of dots together, on the bottom bar.

This is me showing the addition of circles, open boxes and filled boxes. I use these tools often to highlight specific portions of my images.

This is me just showing the useful right click menu (once you launched flamshot) in your window manager's running apps section.

These tools prove useful for me very often.

For help in installing this software, go here: https://flameshot.js.org/#/getting-start

Here is their homepage: https://flameshot.js.org/

I think you'll be glad to add this app to your app tool belt. :)

-Denny

MX Linux 19.2 - antiX on steroids

 

With the release of MX Linux I just had to try it out. I've been a fan of antiX for some time, and MX Linux being a child of antiX in many ways, I have also had an affinity for it as well.

There are a few "flavors" to choose from, XFCE, KDE and a fluxbox option.

I tried the XFCE option. The first thing I have to say is, for a lightweight distro, it's rather beautiful. I also like the amount of tools that were readily at my fingertips.

So, whenever I take one of these jaunts through a new Linux distro, the first thing I notice is what the major tools are that I would use every day. This is usually the browser, the text editor, the file manager, the media manager, and the terminal app.

MX comes with firefox browser, vlc media player, thunar file manager, a text editor that I have never seen before called featherpad text editor, and good ole' xfce4 terminal.

I have to say, two things I loved immediately, tons of tools and a quick button to get to the guts of what hardware is installed. These two things might make MX my standby usb key distro for pc problem solving.

Here are the screenshots I grabbed while strolling through the live boot: (click to enlarge)

This is a great starter screen. Tons of information at my fingertips, all the tools i could ever want for tweaking, codecs for my media.. quick access password info for checking out the distro... This is simple and genius, I love it.

This is just a vanilla shot of the distro. clean, simple, beautiful. And that conky is simple, beautiful, and gives me the info I want now. There are a lot of conky options pre-installed for those conky lovers out there. (I monked with it for a bit, see one of my other conky setups below)

I found this and I like it. Quick access through "mx tools" for nvidia driver install, codecs install, and so much more.

MX isn't the lightest distro I've seen. Peppermint OS (still my fave lightweight) is gentler on ram than this. But still, MX is no slouch.

There were a lot of beautiful wallpapers, this one is my fave.

This was the text editor available. I've never heard of it, but it is gentle on resources and runs well enough.

This (and this screenshot below) are one of the things that got special attention from me. This is a very useful tool if your use for MX is to diagnose a computer's issues through live boot.

This is the quick system info screen i show above in menu. Again, I love this idea. Quick info at my fingertips.

This definitely hearkens back to MX's old school antiX heritage. I haven't seen a PPP connection in a very long time. If you have one, you are good to go.

This was just me messing with one of the many conkey pre-installs. There are a lot of other options. Very nice indeed.

All in all this is a very well rounded distro. And MX seems to get better with age. If you would like more information, I am including MX's website and distrowatch page URLs below.

Homepage: https://mxlinux.org/

Distrowatch: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx

-Denny

Bunsen Labs Lithium review - August 2020

I have been keeping an eye on BunsenLabs since it's inception. To say I was a fan of it's predecessor,, CrunchBang, is an understatement.

So when lithium came out, I wanted to delve into it and see how things have progressed.

It's not bad for a lightweight Linux distro. I have seen lighter, and my current favorite "light" Linux distro is Peppermint Os. 

Bunsen does an excellent job though. Very clean, sharp looking (for using openbox) and very straight forward.

If you prefer Debian over Ubuntu clockworks, then this is the better choice over Peppermint. Peppermint is easier on ram, there's no doubt. But Bunsen is no hog.

Here are some screenshots of my romp through this unique distro: (Click on them to enlarge them)

This is the vanilla Bunsen start up feel. I am not a fan of this color scheme, but it's not ugly. And I do like the quick info conky on the right side.

This is my tweaking to add color and mess with the options.

This is a screenfetch with firefox running a youtube video, to see how much ram it ate. This is not bad at all, quite reasonable on the ram here. I was quite pleased.

This is a screenfetch with the system at rest. Not bad, but Peppermint likes to sit at about 280 or less ram used. I'm not certain why Peppermint sits so wonderfully low. Still, this is very good. My bloated Ubuntu 20.04 install likes to hover at twice this ram at rest.

The default installed apps were Firefox for browser, Geany for a text editor, good ole' Thunar for file manager (I love Thunar, it's so rock solid and reliable.), and VLC for the media player.

If I were making Bunsen, i'd probably choose the same apps.

Bunsen is the easiest to configure light weight openbox set up I have ever seen. You can tweak everything with config files of coarse, but BunsenLabs goes one step further, and has GUI's (visual menus) for everything.. meaning you don't have to hunt down where that specific config file is to make changes. I love that feature.

I would not suggest bunsenlabs for a new linux initiate. But if your an old hat at Linux, love tweaking things, and especially love light tight distros or have a bit of nostalgia for ole' CrunchBang, this distro is for you.

-Denny

If you want to read up on and/or download the distro, you can do that here: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

If you are like me and like to peruse the DistroWatch page on a distro, that's here: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bunsenlabs

 

Talkatone - Turn your no service android phone into a wifi phone

"Talkatone is the best option for replacing your native phone to call and text for free without using cell minutes. By contrast, Skype, Viber and Facetime are only free if the recipient has also already installed the app. Download the app on App Store or Google play." -https://www.talkatone.com/

A friend needed a phone for making local calls. Budget was non existing, and I only had an older Kyocera Durascout running android 4, but thanks to Talkatone he can now make phone calls wherever he can get wifi now.

I was so impressed with the service that I wanted to share it with the world.

It's available for android or iPhone systems, and it's free.

Not only was it easy to set up, but the call quality was exceptional. He can call any local number as long as he has WiFi access now.

It also comes with free texting, so win win.

Give it a try if you are just trying to save money by not using your cell minutes or cell text services as well.

But for finding a new purpose for "service dead" phones, it's stellar.
-Denny

Talkatone is the best option for replacing your native phone to call and text for free without using cell minutes. By contrast, Skype, Viber and Facetime are only free if the recipient has also already installed the app. Download the app on App Store or Google play.

 4.6, 22.7K Ratings

 4.2, 132K Ratings

4MLinux, I love you.

"4MLinux is a small, independent, general-purpose Linux distribution with a strong focus on the following four "M" of computing:
- Maintenance (system rescue Live CD),
- Multimedia (full support for a huge number of image, audio and video formats),
- Miniserver (DNS, FTP, HTTP, MySQL, NFS, Proxy, SMTP, SSH, and Telnet),
- Mystery (meaning a collection of classic Linux games).

The latest stable version is:
4MLinux 30.0" -4mlinux.com's about page

I love this distro. From the very quick and easy server options to the extremely light feel with a still solid, possibly even "daily driver" feel, and the wonderful quirky-ness of the old minimalist distro's of the past...

It's awesome. I personally chose the 4mserver version because I like to be firmly rooted in 64 bit land, and i have to admit i love the super simple server packages this little "distro that can" has.

I also love the old DSL Linux feel. (Damn small linux, for you newer Linux initiates).

And, I have to admit, I love the quirky old games and the old dos game titles, which installed themselves seamlessly, by the way.

I died about 200 times on frogger, but it was time well spent.

Here are some screenshots of my little treck through the distro: (Click to enlarge)

In case you are already curious about this distro, and want to dive right in, these are the relevant links:

4MLinux - home
4MLinux download | SourceForge.net (choose files tab if you don't want the 32 bit version)
DistroWatch.com: 4MLinux

4MLinux forks:

Antivirus Live CD - home
BakAndImgCD - home
The Smallest Server Suite - home

Other useful 4mlinux sites:

4MLinux Blog
LinuxQuestions.org (4mlinux user forums)
http://4mlinux.com/download.html (4mlinux mirrors)

Reviews:

DistroWatch
Everyday Linux User

It's been a long time since a tight, small footprint linux distro gave me that good ole' dsl days nostalgic feel... as i said in the opener, i love this. gets me in the feels.

-Denny

(P.S., Here's that cool background image, in case you dig that too. (I do) )

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them

A big thanks to the TechCrunch people for bringing this bit of information to the world... Facebook caught with their fingers in the cookie jar... i guess at least they are paying for those cookies.

Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them