Looking for distros to test in virtual, still

[buster]

So I have already on my machine Kubuntu, Peppermint, MXlinux, SUSE, Mageia, and Mint. Just removed deepin and Lite, both excellent. Have played with UbuntuMate and Xubuntu.

The thing is some distros don't like me, or so it seems - Openmandriva (tho it is the final rc) and Zorin, which had a number of glitches. Both lasted less than a day.

Have also tried Fedora Plasma, which was very good, PCLinuxOS which is unpleasant in virtual, Neon, which seemed to have no reason to be one of my long term friends, Manjaro, which was an unpleasant guest,and Ubuntu, which is solid, but I'm not partial to Gnome.

No need to suggest these, 'cause I ain't goin' there: Arch, Gentoo, Centos, AntiX, or Slackware (surprise).

I like easy, solid, pleasant. Light if possible. I think I've tested all the distros that fit that category. I'm hoping someone will say, "This is  great one you missed Harry, give it a try. You'll love it."

I mean, I need to fill the rainy days.

[fox]

Solus, AntiX, Sparky

[Jason]

Expand your horizons, Buster. Arch is really not that hard to install assuming you can follow instructions carefully. Shouldn't be difficult for a retired teacher. And you get the satisfaction of a distro you built yourself. There is no compiling involved unlike with Gentoo and you don't have to read all the docs although you'll learn more if you do. I set out the steps on a post somewhere in the forums. You're not too old to learn new things.

Otherwise, check out Pop OS.

[buster]

Thanks Mike. Tried AntiX a few years ago, but I'll take a look at Solus, though I think I did try it once. Can't see a desktop environment I'd like in Sparky but may try it later.

Just downloaded Solus.

[buster]

" You're not too old to learn new things"

That isn't exactly the problem Jason. It's just that my brain is already full.

[fox]

Although you have tried Peppermint, they just released a major update.

[fox]

Here is another one: Pop_OS 19.04 .

[buster]

Not interested in learning enough to install Arch - seems a lot like work to me, and would interfere with my reading and gardening. Solus had to go because of drag and drop problems from guest to host.

One thought that has come out of these many installs, is that we should maybe, as a group, be studying the desktop, instead of the distro. Most good desktops have a solid underlying distro that can be slide under it - Xfce, Lxde, Gnome, KDE......

Favourite desktops could be presented and defended, especially unusual ones.

[Jason]

One thought that has come out of these many installs, is that we should maybe, as a group, be studying the desktop, instead of the distro. Most good desktops have a solid underlying distro that can be slide under it - Xfce, Lxde, Gnome, KDE......

Favourite desktops could be presented and defended, especially unusual ones.

I think you make a good point. To tweak a common saying from US politics, "It's the desktop, stupid!". Hoping some members would be willing to take on demonstrating their favourite desktop environments. I did one on Plasma not that long ago.

[buster]

Found a good Budgie that doesn't seem to attract much attention - Ubuntu Budgie. Seems well made. Easy. Drag and drop work from the get go. Gnome background seems to make it a bit heavy at times.

Looking forward to trying it out. But it doesn't get much encouragement from the DistroWatch hit list, which surprises me so far. Good web site.

[Jason]

Mike has said complimentary things about Ubuntu Budgie in the forums elsewhere, I believe. I think Budgie came from Solus originally or at least Solus was the first to use it. I think that the flavour is fairly new (like last 6 months at least in the last year) which is probably why Distrowatch doesn't give it a lot of love.

I still go back to the Distrowatch being a page rank list which is going to be highly influenced by how much it's mentioned on the website (updates and such). So distros that are heavily promoted because they're being updated or have regular news are going to rank higher as they "push" more users to those pages to find out more.

Now that Mike is retiring maybe he can do a regression analysis comparing the number of times the distro is mentioned to how how the ranking is for that page. ;-)

[fox]

What about Zorin? They just put out a new release.

[buster]

So I tried Zorin Dr Mike. There appears to be little wrong with it in virtual, but it seems to err, for our undoubtedly sophisticated taste, on the side of simplicity. Probably good for beginners. Win 5 or 7 sort of thing.

Worth trying, but it has no advantages over Kubuntu, Mint, Peppermint or Suse for what I do. And maybe some disadvantages.

Thanks though. Using Kubuntu mostly at the moment. May reinstall LinuxLite.

[fox]

And here I always thought you were a simple kind of guy - no command line, eh?  Actually, I think Zorin can be used with the same command line tools as (K)Ubuntu, but it is set up with shortcuts that make it unnecessary. To be honest, I’ve only read about it but never tried it. I’m sure that Jason has, though, and if I recall correctly, he gave a presentation on an older version of Zorin a few years ago.

At any rate, I have a new one for you to try, called Enso OS. It has a lot of the design features of Elementary, but it uses the Xfce desktop. I haven’t tried this one either, but it does look interesting.

[Jason]

Here's another one for you, Namib GNU/Linux. And apparently, it's Canadian.