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Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won’t be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function
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Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won’t be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function
Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.
I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.
Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.
It might not be Wayland-related at all.
I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I’m assuming it’s normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the “Automatic” pick works.
If it doesn’t work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.
My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it’s still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.
I’m working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn’t happening anymore. I haven’t been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.
There isn’t an alsa command on my system either, so that’s no surprise. But we’ll need more information to track down the cause, such as:
lspci | grep Audio
)pactl info
)alsamixer
.deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware
in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware
is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I’ve had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.
I haven’t had much experience with Kubuntu, but I do know it has more preinstalled apps, slightly older versions of those apps (where KDE Neon has the latest version of every KDE app the day it releases), but slightly newer non-KDE apps in the non-LTS releases, and is more beholden to Canonical’s decisions, such as advertising Ubuntu Pro during upgrades or forcibly installing some programs as snaps. Kubuntu might hold your hand a bit more under certain circumstances, while KDE Neon keeps things simpler, but the difference in ease of use is not that significant, especially if you have any experience with Linux in the last ten years or so.
Any software that is in the Xubuntu repositories will also be available in other Ubuntu derivatives, and most likely Debian and all its derivatives as well. Only the official spins are likely to advertise Ubuntu Pro.
Mint XFCE is a good replacement, but I’m also partial to KDE Neon, which keeps preinstalled software to a minimum and is by far the most performant KDE distro I have tried. I myself use regular Debian, with KDE, though you can choose XFCE during the install.
VLC’s file format support is amazing for a project that rolls its own codecs, etc, but it’s missing some important features for me on the music front, primarily gapless playback and library management. I generally prefer to use software tailored to my DE. I’ve yet to find a better video player anywhere though; GNOME Videos and Kaffeine come closest and are a little easier to use, but are still far away from VLC’s capabilities.
Elisa is just the latest (and most actively developed) addition to the long list of music players developed under the KDE umbrella.
Right now I’d say the best open-source DAW for Linux is LMMS if you want to do everything just on your laptop, or Ardour if you want to use external instruments.
LMMS has some shockingly versatile built in synths, including a port of ZynAddSubFX, supports LADSPA/LV2 plugins, and supports using Wine to run 32-bit Windows VSTs. I’m unsure of Ardour’s VST support, but it at least supports LV2 plugins. Either of those, if you install them through your distro, will likely include Calf Studio Gear, an extensive collection of LV2 effects and a couple synths. As for ones that run natively on Linux, there’s synthv1, samplv1, drumkv1, and padthv1, though I’ve had trouble getting them working myself.
I’ve found some good stuff on the Linux Audio Wiki but IDK how up to date most of it is.
There’s Bodhi Linux, which is basically Ubuntu+Enlightenment.
Lighter, I think. About on par with LXQt or Trinity (KDE 3).
I loved the default theme, the splash screen, all of the customization options, and how lightweight it was, but it’s missing some of the conveniences and polish of GNOME, KDE, or even LXQt and Xfce. Using an independent toolkit meant that none of my apps looked consistent, even after trying my best to find a theme that supported everything, and if I explored the settings beyond a surface level things started looking ancient and clunky.
Definitely underrated, and really impressive for how much they could pack into a desktop targeted at older PCs, but still missing quite a bit.
I have to borrow a school laptop just to do proctored exams, because their “lockdown browser” doesn’t support Linux, and even if it did, it seems to do some things in kernel mode, so I don’t want it on my system.
Surprisingly, most classes at my university are entirely FOSS based, aside from that one piece of software, an obscure scientific program that only one assignment used, and MATLAB (which is easily replaced by GNU Octave.)
I was speaking of the Debian “full archive” 21-DVD sets: https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-full.html
But I don’t know about how they package it, so it might not be a “box set” as you describe.
It’s very new. Previously the system would just drop to a console with a message saying “Kernel panic: not syncing: [reason]” and a whole bunch of debug info.
But still, on a well-maintained system, that pretty much never happens. Mainly because Linux is significantly more resilient to faults in device drivers than Windows.