Distro hopping with an LxQt distro - Sparky Linux

[fox]

I was in the mood for distro hopping, so I looked over the offerings in Distrowatch for something interesting that I hadn't tried before. On my long list were AntiX, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Qubes OS, Sparky Linux and ExTiX. I liked what I saw in Jason's Lubuntu 20.04 presentation with the LxQt desktop, so I decided I wanted to try a distro with that desktop. As I wanted to look at it live first, my choices narrowed very quickly, to Sparky Linux and Extix. I started with Sparky. I made a live usb from it and tried to boot it on my home 2011 iMac, but it wouldn't boot at all. I was able to boot it on my 2012 Mac mini, and I was pretty impressed with it. Everything I tried worked out of the box, and LxQt was customizable enough to be enjoyable. This gave me an appetite to try ExTiX as well as LUbuntu (daily build) and see if one or both will boot on my iMac. Also I have openSuse Leap installed on it, so I'm looking into adding the LxQt desktop to it. Stay tuned.

Has anyone out there tried Sparky Linux before? What do you think of it?

[ssfc72]

I have booted up Sparky from a usb pendrive a few years ago but I can't remember anything about it, other than I didn't find anything interesting enough, to keep using it. So I haven't bothered with it since.

[fox]

Try the latest version with LxQt on your multiboot. It's very fast, and looks well put together. I think you'll like it. I still want to figure out how to get it to boot on my iMac because I could install it there on my Thunderbolt external drive.

[fox]

Both ExTiX and Lubuntu (daily build) boot on my iMac. Each one has a problem. ExTiX doesn't come with a lot of software; not even a productivity suite. When I tried downloading LibreOffice, it downloaded but wouldn't boot. I couldn't figure out how to fix it. Abiword downloaded and worked.

With Lubuntu, the boot took about 2 minutes to boot because it was checking my disk. There was instructions on how to cancel this with the keyboard, but it didn't work. I think that this isn't particular to Lubuntu because I got the same delay with the Ubuntu 20.04 daily build, except that there I didn't know what was going on because the boot-up isn't verbose. I'm sure that this will either be fixed or it will only affect the live disk. Jason, did you experience this?

Once Lubuntu did boot up, it worked very well. LxQt is fast and a whole lot more attractive than Lxde. I would have to play with it more to decide whether I would actually use it on a regular basis. I would be interested in anyone else's assessment of LxQt.

One other thing I forgot to mention about Sparky. The panel works fine on the bottom, but if you move it to the left side, the text that comes on in the taskbar part of the panel (spells out open window in Firefox) spreads out along the bar, takes up a lot of space and cannot be easily read. There may be a setting in LxQt that turns off the window name in the taskbar.

[Jason]

With Lubuntu, the boot took about 2 minutes to boot because it was checking my disk. There was instructions on how to cancel this with the keyboard, but it didn't work. I think that this isn't particular to Lubuntu because I got the same delay with the Ubuntu 20.04 daily build, except that there I didn't know what was going on because the boot-up isn't verbose. I'm sure that this will either be fixed or it will only affect the live disk. Jason, did you experience this?

I didn't experience it but I'm also not using the most recent daily build. You're basically using an alpha so some things will sometimes be broken.

[buster]

Slightly off topic, but I put in a recommendation for Peppermint about a year ago, which doesn't have to be used as a cloud centric system but as a hard drive based system as well. I almost switched over to it. I also discovered, when re-reading the thread, two sentences that I had written that I had forgotten about, and I like them.  Sometimes I surprise myself:

"One is the real world, and the others are facsimiles to various degrees. I don't try to defend my view of the modern world. In fact I seldom discuss it. But personally, I am more connected to an existence that lets rain fall on my head, and roots make me trip."

https://plugintolinux.ca/forum/index.php/topic,756.0.html

[fox]

I didn't experience it but I'm also not using the most recent daily build. You're basically using an alpha so some things will sometimes be broken.

I just rebooted with it, and found that by hitting the "esc" key, I couldn't stop the check but it seemed to speed it up. (Alternatively, something changed in my system between the time I did the first try and the second.) At any rate, the boot-up still isn't fast, but it's now under a minute.

I also played with the LxQt panel and found that if you want to turn off the text name in the taskbar, which I would if I place the panel on the left instead of the bottom, the names do turn off. But the space that the taskbar icons take is still a lot, and it doesn't look very nice. I'll have to play some more with it, but at present, I would say that if I use LxQt, I would leave the panel on the bottom. I suppose that another idea would be to have a second panel on the left with just the menu and app shortcuts on it, and leave the taskbar, clock and other stuff on the right side, on the bottom bar.

[fox]

In case anyone is interested in LxQt, its panel is more customizable than I thought. If you want to put it vertically on your display, you can adjust the taskbar portion of it so that the name of the site on the bar isn't displayed and the amount of space allotted to any window in the taskbar is small. I tried this in Sparky Linux and was pleasantly surprised. One can also change the colour of the panel, its width and the size of displayed icons. I wouldn't say it's as customizable as Plasma, but close.

[fox]

Sparky Linux just did an update because of boot problems with the live usb installer. It now boots on my 2011 iMac. It booted up in something between 40 sec and a minute. It detected my wifi card, and it's very fast. I'm posting from the live usb now.

Cheese detected my videocam. The PCmanFM file app detected my internal volumes and could even see files on the MacOS volume. It has several ways to deal with upgrading and repositories, but I tried the APTus program. It's GUI, but when you execute something, you see it running in a terminal, which is nice. I was also able to add a second panel to the left side of the display and put frequently used apps on it. I could change its width and that of the icons on it. So I can make it function more or less like the Gnome panel in Ubuntu. I wish that the live usb was persistent. One could do that by installing the distro onto a second usb stick, but I won't bother to do that.

I'm impressed with Sparky LxQt and am tempted to install it on my drive.

[Jason]

Sounds like it's a very adaptable distro. It surprises me sometimes that Linux can operate so well on Macs although I know you've had to work a lot of snafus over the years.


Btw, even in Ubuntu, when updating, you can see it occurring in the terminal by clicking on the button that says 'more details' or something along that line. The GUIs are simply front ends for the terminal commands as is the case in a lot of Linux software. For example, gparted does what it does by executing parted commands in the background. You could, if you're feeling adventurous enough and with some masochistic tendencies, do everything in the CLI using parted that you do in gparted. Sometimes I just like doing updating using the CLI because it 'feels' faster, perhaps because I'm not waiting for the GUI to get the output from the commands and finish up. When I'm maintaining the PLUG server, there is no GUI. I could install one but there are still things you will do in the terminal like updates. I prefer just not to waste resources on a GUI when it's not necessary. The server only has 1 GB of RAM after all.