#linux endeasvourOS

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 60

Hello people and welcome back to my ongoing series about my time playing with Linux.  Since I originally started this blog it is now been going for 2 years.  That is unreal.  I never thought it would manage to last this long, which makes it my longest ongoing project I think I have even done.  Scary...

Anyway enough waffle onto the task at hand.  Since we last spoke I have once again changed things with the Xeon.  Over the last few months it has been many things.  I have ran EndeavourOS, Namib Linux, Windows 10, Haiku, Hackintosh (Mac OS X High Sierra) and now the latest Linux Project it is now running is BlueStar Linux.

BlueStar Linux is another Arch based Linux from the team in the USA.  It is using KDE for its main Desktop Environment.  Now me and KDE have had a very strange relationship  as it normally has crashed spectacularly on me.  With about a million segmentation faults.

However this one I am using is working no problem.  Maybe it’s because every time I have used KDE it has been with an Nvidia card and this is an AMD Radeon.  It seems to be working fine, the transparency is working and all the programs are running fine without keeling over which was my main complaint.

Another thing I must say is that it seems to running things much faster than it did with Namib or EndeavourOS even though they were both installed on the same 240GB SSD.  So KDE is working quicker than MATE which is something I never thought I would ever see.   I know they have been working on refining it but it seems they have done a damned impressive job.

When it installed it included a dock called Latte which was quite nice but its icons were incredibly small for some reason.  So after a bit of fiddling I in the end just changed across to Cairo Dock which is what I have been using for quite a while.

It initially covered the screen with quite a few widgets but they were quite easily removed.  I don’t like my desktop been full of clutter I know some people like having CPU monitors and other extraneous stuff on screen I just find them annoying.

So I ended up with just a digital clock in the upper right and I can live with that.

Now I normally sit and try and get Vulkan and stuff working which means changing all of the drivers.  To be honest I can’t be bothered as its not as if I play games on this machine given it’s the test bed machine so I have decided just to stick with the base Radeon driver and it is working fine for most things.

It manages to run Hedgewars and Gdash which is fine for me.  I spend far too long trying to get games to work under Lutris and then never play them.

I did not like the original colour scheme of BlueStar Linux it was a Dark Green almost black setup with Yellow text and a very hard to see black cursor.  Don’t get me wrong it looked aesthetically nice but not very practical.  I also changed my cursor to Red Diamond which is still black but it has some nice red inflections and animations making it very visible.

It originally comes with Octopi to install software and update but I quickly changed it to Pamac as that’s what I prefer.  Don’t get me wrong the Synaptic type installer is more than functional but very basic.  

To be honest I really thought I was going to hate BlueStar but to be honest it’s actually quite impressed me.  It runs quite smooth and to be honest hasn’t crashed on me once which is quite a surprise.  SO I have to give credit to the KDE team who have obviously done a damned good job fixing bugs.

Would I say the same if it had a Nvidia card in here.  I honestly can’t say.  Considering when I had tried to install BlueStar Linux in the past on a machine with Nvidia I could not even get to the main desktop to install it would crash out as at the time Nouveau didn’t support the card I had.

One minor caveat I could not get it to install Shutter which is my preferred screen capture program due to not finding half the libraries similar to what i had with Manjaro but I installed Flameshot instead and can live it.

So what version of Linux would you like to see on the Xeon next?  Let me know at linuxlifetumblr@gmail.com after all it is the test bed machine so it is designed for distro testing.

On the i7 due it being Christmas I have had very little time to sit in front of the machine.  All it has been is regular system updates which I have had no problems with.  I did play a few Commodore 64 games using VICE but other than that it has been having a quiet holiday.

Well that brings us up to date with everything that has been going on in My Linux Life.  So thank you for reading and until next time, take care....

PS : I never thought I would manage to blog for 6 months, never mind 2 years and beyond...