Vermillion
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2007
- Messages
- 4,411
So after looking that the issue with the Cinnamon DE for Snowdog yesterday I started poking around other "big" distros just to see and play with them a bit since I had the laptop available to me while at work.
I was generally interested to see if the issue with Cinnamon was a more common issue than not. So I figured what the hell. I have the ability to do it.
So what I did was grab a few from the top 15 in the page hit list on distrowatch. I ignored the "normal" ones like Debian/Fedora/openSUSE/CentOS etc. I also skipped Ubuntu (and it's DE variations) itself with the exception of Kubuntu since I was comparing that to KDE Neon yesterday for the other thread yesterday.
Here's what I've loaded so far:
Mint Cinnamon
Mint MATE
KDE Neon
Kubuntu
elementary
Antergos
Deepin was left off because it wanted 2 days to download.
Zorin and Manjaro unfortunately were left off because SourceForge is blocked here at the office for some stupid reason. I'll grab those tonight at home and possibly give those a shot tomorrow.
And of course I use heavily Arch itself and Solus.
Look at that list though. Ubuntu is the common thing. Almost every one of them is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian. So most are a fork of a fork. All with their own default DEs. Some of those DEs are a horrible experience.
I'm not saying creating another distro is a bad thing. It's not. But if you create a distro make it worthwhile. Here's what I've found with each distro so far. I'm also fully aware that I'm giving most of these distros just a small time for actual use but I used Xubuntu for a long time before I moved to Arch. So I know Ubuntu pretty well which means most of what I'm dealing with right now is nothing but different DEs and the user interface. So I don't need a whole lot of time to get a feel for the distro.
Mint Cinnamon - Cinnamon with Muffin is garbage. Period. Their fork of Mutter call Muffin is horrible. Why fork Mutter? Why!? And on top of it you can't change the compositor. Not OK. I really don't understand how this version of Mint can be so popular with the glaring DE issues. It would drive me bat-shit crazy.
Mint MATE - quite nice once you change to compton or compiz for compositing. However, what does Mint MATE bring to the table compared to Ubuntu MATE? That would be not a damn thing really outside of Mint being only LTS based. So this one really does fall under...why does this exist?
KDE Neon - Actually quite nice. Plasma 5.10 is fast, fluid and very nice looking. It's Ubuntu with rolling releases of KDE. I actually like this one after using it. KDE isn't my thing but if I had use a KDE based system Neon would have some consideration. Oh who am I kidding...I'd just use Arch and KDE.
Kubuntu - It's Plasma 5.9.3. It's fast and fluid. It's Ubuntu running KDE. Not much different than KDE Neon other than being a slightly older version of Plasma.
elementary - I had high hopes for this one as a lot of people like it. It's been nothing but a pain in the ass. The touchpad doesn't work right. Every other Ubuntu based distro works just fine but this one is jerky and the cursor jumps all over the screen especially when two finger scrolling. They broke Ubuntu. I don't even know how you do that. Pantheon isn't a bad DE. It's nice looking and it's fluid. I hate it though as I hate the macOS look. I also have to ask did they really have to fork Mutter and chunks of the Gnome stack? Who knows but at least theirs works and is still nice and smooth unlike Cinnamon.
Antergos - Arch for the newbie user. The installer is wonderful. The options? So much better than any other installer out there. I chose MATE at my DE during the install. Then they give you options for your browser choice (Chromium or Firefox). They give you the option for installing UFW and GUFW comes with that. It's a very nice experience. It's Arch for a beginner. The only issue I found is that there is no good compositor included by default. So while I didn't have any tearing it was a little jerky until I install Compton. It's also interesting to see the difference between MATE here and MATE on Mint. Just little things like the desktop-settings piece isn't in Antergos. Meaning that nice chunk of code probably didn't make it back up the mainline into MATE itself. I haven't verified that though. Overall Antergos is a fork of a distro that truly aims at a target and hits the mark. Antergos wanted to make installing Arch easy in order to bring it to the masses. They did it wonderfully.
Arch - It's Arch. It's whatever you want it to be. Yes, it requires more work and requires the user to actually learn something for a change but the sky is the limit and you can change DEs all you want.
Solus - A distro built from the ground up and not just another Ubuntu derivative. If I can't have Arch I'll take Solus. Fast, fluid, and an original DE (Budgie) to top it off. Best part about Budgie is that is built on the Gnome stack (just like Pantheon) but they didn't fork anything. So it just friggin works and works really well. LTS kernel as well and with the recent edition of clr-boot-manager they're looking into also giving users the option to install supported mainstream kernels. Solus is doing things differently. They're making themselves appeal to the masses because they aren't just another Ubuntu fork.
Again I'm not trying to make it sound like more distros are a bad thing. I guess I'm just tired of seeing more and more forks of Ubuntu with a forked DE with a few changes from the original and a theme. It's starting to look at the Android custom ROM section of a Nexus device on XDA. Any day now I'm expecting to see a thread somewhere called "My t0t4lly b1ch1n L1nux d1str0". It'll be Ubuntu with XFCE, Compton and some new theme that looks like Windows.
Seriously though the forking needs to stop unless it really needs to be done. A lot of it feels like stuff is being forked just to fork it. Forks like that mean improvements probably don't go but up the mainline. That's not good. You also have the forks that totally fuck up the original. *cough* *muffin* *cough* Pantheon forked Mutter but at least that one still works. It's still a smooth and fluid interface.
So there you have it. Flame away!
I was generally interested to see if the issue with Cinnamon was a more common issue than not. So I figured what the hell. I have the ability to do it.
So what I did was grab a few from the top 15 in the page hit list on distrowatch. I ignored the "normal" ones like Debian/Fedora/openSUSE/CentOS etc. I also skipped Ubuntu (and it's DE variations) itself with the exception of Kubuntu since I was comparing that to KDE Neon yesterday for the other thread yesterday.
Here's what I've loaded so far:
Mint Cinnamon
Mint MATE
KDE Neon
Kubuntu
elementary
Antergos
Deepin was left off because it wanted 2 days to download.
Zorin and Manjaro unfortunately were left off because SourceForge is blocked here at the office for some stupid reason. I'll grab those tonight at home and possibly give those a shot tomorrow.
And of course I use heavily Arch itself and Solus.
Look at that list though. Ubuntu is the common thing. Almost every one of them is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian. So most are a fork of a fork. All with their own default DEs. Some of those DEs are a horrible experience.
I'm not saying creating another distro is a bad thing. It's not. But if you create a distro make it worthwhile. Here's what I've found with each distro so far. I'm also fully aware that I'm giving most of these distros just a small time for actual use but I used Xubuntu for a long time before I moved to Arch. So I know Ubuntu pretty well which means most of what I'm dealing with right now is nothing but different DEs and the user interface. So I don't need a whole lot of time to get a feel for the distro.
Mint Cinnamon - Cinnamon with Muffin is garbage. Period. Their fork of Mutter call Muffin is horrible. Why fork Mutter? Why!? And on top of it you can't change the compositor. Not OK. I really don't understand how this version of Mint can be so popular with the glaring DE issues. It would drive me bat-shit crazy.
Mint MATE - quite nice once you change to compton or compiz for compositing. However, what does Mint MATE bring to the table compared to Ubuntu MATE? That would be not a damn thing really outside of Mint being only LTS based. So this one really does fall under...why does this exist?
KDE Neon - Actually quite nice. Plasma 5.10 is fast, fluid and very nice looking. It's Ubuntu with rolling releases of KDE. I actually like this one after using it. KDE isn't my thing but if I had use a KDE based system Neon would have some consideration. Oh who am I kidding...I'd just use Arch and KDE.
Kubuntu - It's Plasma 5.9.3. It's fast and fluid. It's Ubuntu running KDE. Not much different than KDE Neon other than being a slightly older version of Plasma.
elementary - I had high hopes for this one as a lot of people like it. It's been nothing but a pain in the ass. The touchpad doesn't work right. Every other Ubuntu based distro works just fine but this one is jerky and the cursor jumps all over the screen especially when two finger scrolling. They broke Ubuntu. I don't even know how you do that. Pantheon isn't a bad DE. It's nice looking and it's fluid. I hate it though as I hate the macOS look. I also have to ask did they really have to fork Mutter and chunks of the Gnome stack? Who knows but at least theirs works and is still nice and smooth unlike Cinnamon.
Antergos - Arch for the newbie user. The installer is wonderful. The options? So much better than any other installer out there. I chose MATE at my DE during the install. Then they give you options for your browser choice (Chromium or Firefox). They give you the option for installing UFW and GUFW comes with that. It's a very nice experience. It's Arch for a beginner. The only issue I found is that there is no good compositor included by default. So while I didn't have any tearing it was a little jerky until I install Compton. It's also interesting to see the difference between MATE here and MATE on Mint. Just little things like the desktop-settings piece isn't in Antergos. Meaning that nice chunk of code probably didn't make it back up the mainline into MATE itself. I haven't verified that though. Overall Antergos is a fork of a distro that truly aims at a target and hits the mark. Antergos wanted to make installing Arch easy in order to bring it to the masses. They did it wonderfully.
Arch - It's Arch. It's whatever you want it to be. Yes, it requires more work and requires the user to actually learn something for a change but the sky is the limit and you can change DEs all you want.
Solus - A distro built from the ground up and not just another Ubuntu derivative. If I can't have Arch I'll take Solus. Fast, fluid, and an original DE (Budgie) to top it off. Best part about Budgie is that is built on the Gnome stack (just like Pantheon) but they didn't fork anything. So it just friggin works and works really well. LTS kernel as well and with the recent edition of clr-boot-manager they're looking into also giving users the option to install supported mainstream kernels. Solus is doing things differently. They're making themselves appeal to the masses because they aren't just another Ubuntu fork.
Again I'm not trying to make it sound like more distros are a bad thing. I guess I'm just tired of seeing more and more forks of Ubuntu with a forked DE with a few changes from the original and a theme. It's starting to look at the Android custom ROM section of a Nexus device on XDA. Any day now I'm expecting to see a thread somewhere called "My t0t4lly b1ch1n L1nux d1str0". It'll be Ubuntu with XFCE, Compton and some new theme that looks like Windows.
Seriously though the forking needs to stop unless it really needs to be done. A lot of it feels like stuff is being forked just to fork it. Forks like that mean improvements probably don't go but up the mainline. That's not good. You also have the forks that totally fuck up the original. *cough* *muffin* *cough* Pantheon forked Mutter but at least that one still works. It's still a smooth and fluid interface.
So there you have it. Flame away!