I can reproduce that with a fresh install of Arch in a virtual machine. Gnome desktop and conky, with conky being put into autostart using the tweaks tool of the Gnome desktop. Have a look:
As the output of ‘ps’ shows, conky is definitely running, but it is not being displayed. Changing anything in its config, and then changing it back and saving that config makes it reload, and being displayed – same as if you ‘killall conky’ and reload it using the meta key and its icon.
Does not happen in Debian Trixie, but even with ps and pstree as well as Gnome Mutter’s ‘Looking Glass’ debugger I can’t figure out where the differences are. Happens only in Wayland, not when logging in using X.
Ooops – not *this* Trixie 😉 Although, as is well known, the Debian developers name their releases after characters from Toy Story, so this *is* Trixie. Enchanté 🙂
Well, as you can probably guess, I did it – approximately 3 weeks before the planned release date, and this time even one week before the planned deep freeze, I updated and upgraded my system according to the link in my last post which leads to the installation manual. Or, to make it a bit shorter, I did the following:
edited my /etc/apt/sources.list file, and
temporarily commented out any backports/updates lines until trixie will become stable
changed any other instance of the word ‘bookworm’ to ‘trixie’
saved that file
performed a sudo apt update, followed by – as suggested –
sudo apt upgrade –without-new-pkgs, and finally
sudo apt full-upgrade and
sudo reboot
Done. Simple as that. Oh, and after the reboot I also performed a sudo apt autoremove to get rid of some old stuff which isn’t needed anymore.
I had to exchange a Gnome extension for the weather to a newer one afterwards, but that was about it. Runs perfectly fine – but what else would you expect from Debian?
So here’s the output from fastfetch:
Still a happy user of Debian, after all those years… and thanks for reading.
A user from Indonesia who calls himself “Fosslicious” has a nice video on YT showing how to make KDE on EndeavourOS look really good. I especially liked that analog clock à la Google of the “Utterly Sweet” theme he’s using in Plasma. Have a look:
Really a nice one – you’ll probably have to stop it a few times, as he’s going really fast through all these settings. But I never thought KDE could look that good 😉
Quick (TL:DR) answer: because both are great, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both might be perfect for wholly different purposes.
So let me explain.
The upcoming Debian “Trixie” will have a kernel 6.12.something, while Arch has 6.15.7 while I’m writing this – might change real soon in a rolling release distribution. Likewise, Debian will have the ESR versions of Thunderbird and Firefox, while Arch will have the latest. Or let’s have a look at something for, say, composers – let’s choose musescore:
This was Arch, now let’s see Debian:
Ok, this is still “Bookworm”, so let’s see the packages site in a browser – same, musescore3. Same with other programs like Ardour, or for photographers, RawTherapee or Darktable.
So Debian packages are old, yes. That’s what makes Debian great for its stability, and this is something people like me often want. But on the other hand, creatives often want the latest and greatest, they might need the new features of the latest program versions…
… which is why I installed both. Simple. And free as in beer *and* as in free speech. 🙂
Oh, and in case you’re a creative: what’s the “pro-audio” group in Arch is the “multimedia-all” in Debian, called the Debian Multimedia Pure Blend. Easy, and without any 3rd party repositories (like the very good kx.studio).
P.S.: my late brother Willi first used Ubuntu Linux, like many others, and he also installed that for friends and family. Once I showed him Debian, he never looked back. And who brought *me* to Debian, you might ask? That was my former colleague Peter from Austria. And although I now use both Arch Linux *and* Debian, I’m still thankful for that 🙂
This is a short howto video I’ve made for my friends over at wikiloops.com, and who might be considering switching from Windows 10 (or even older versions) over to some free Linux setup to make and record music with. Sorry about the bad sound quality; I should have used my studio mic instead of the webcam’s built-in microphone…
Oh my… being curious, I tried the built-in webbrowser of the Gnome desktop, which used to be called “Epiphany”, and which is now simply called “Web”. And with that browser, I started viewing a well-known site full of trackers, which is spiegel.de
This got me more or less immediately:
Really? Selling a free product for 0 (zero) Euro? On which you can install Windows in parallel? (Hint: you can’t – Windows always has to be installed first in case you want that)
Oh my oh my – I really hope that no one ever falls for things like these. And most importantly: do never, I repeat *never* ever click on one of those links, in no browser – that these people are up to no good is obvious.
That was a short experiment – and now I’m back to Librewolf, which is a correctly configured Firefox with uBlock Origin already installed. There are others, like Mullvad, Zen, and the likes, or you could even use Firefox itself in case you want to configure it for security and privacy yourself, and don’t forget to install uBlock Origin in that case – you won’t even see that crap like above.
Never again… isn’t it time to overcome capitalism, and to stop all that ad crap once and for all?
That article of his is titled “End of Windows 10: Don’t Worry Be Happy“, and like the title suggests, it’s for the Windows 10 users who still are not sure what to do after October of this year, when Microsoft will end its support for that OS.
Unlike some of his commenters, who – more or less predictably – started pro and con arguments about his recommended distributions, I found his article very clear and precise, and I agree to most of it, so I consider this as recommended reading if you’re in the target group (Linux newbies, Windows converts so to say).
Just some thoughts follow:
His first “con” point is the learning curve this implies, and he is true. This shouldn’t put you off too much tho, and I have examples. My aunt in Cologne is 85 years old now, and when we – my brother Willi (RIP) and me – first installed Ubuntu on a machine which was a present for her, she didn’t like it at all. In the end, she got so used to it that she upgraded to newer versions of Ubuntu herself, without any help from my late brother who lived nearby. And Willi himself was a psychologist, not a computer nerd, but when he changed from Ubuntu to Debian himself (my recommendation), he never looked back. So yes, there *is* a learning curve of course, like with most things in life, but it shouldn’t put anyone off; help will always be at hand (although I also saw the RTFM which one commenter mentioned in regard of Debian) 😉
One point on which I don’t really approve that much is when Bobby wrote:
“And yes, it gets even better: you’re not limited to just one. On Linux, you can install multiple desktop environments side by side and switch between them whenever you like.”
Well… I try a lot, and on my partition with Arch Linux I have both Gnome and KDE desktops, but usually I don’t switch between them that often. The reason is that while you can tell these different desktops to *not* change your desktop – as in the “working area” that much (normally each one would leave more or less its own widgets, symbolic links like folders, or a trash can), it’s still a pain the the proverbial back side, as they all use different fonts and leave more configurations than you would like in your /home directory – so when coming back to Gnome from KDE for instance, it *will* look different than before. And I don’t like to mess around with desktops too much, or to reset Gnome to its defaults, only to apply my own stuff again later.
So to see different desktops I normally use VMs, like here:
What you’re seeing there is my Arch Linux running both the upcoming Debian 13 Trixie (using Gnome and conky on it) and OpenSuse Tumbleweed which is just a rolling release distro like Arch – and it’s getting the new KDE Plasma 6.4 desktop environment which was mentioned in Bobby’s first mentioned article from above.
And yes, like some commenter wrote, I didn’t even have to open a terminal to upgrade from KDE Plasma 6.3.5 to 6.4, the discover service on OpenSuse informed me with a little red dot about those updates. And Gnome on Debian usually does the same.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed (Bobby recommended Leap instead) might even be better than Arch as a rolling release distribution, because you can also roll back easily, while Arch really has a steeper learning curve, and I wouldn’t recommend that to newbies…
But anyway – I just wanted to recommend Bobby’s site, because he writes more often and far better than me about this stuff. I usually find his articles via LXer – there are many more links to Linux-related stuff on that site, so that one’s recommended as well.
Aki understands a bit of Japanese, and some of their former schoolmates *are* half Japanese. I wouldn’t have seen or understood this of course, and not only because I almost never use the *graphical* installer – the old style ncurses one is familiar enough to me.
George Whittaker wrote an article about the new Linux Mint 22 in Linux Magazine. And indeed that is a fine distribution – as long as your computer has at least the 3GB of main memory to even start it. I tried the live image on my wife’s old Lenovo SL500 with only 2GB, and it didn’t even start that live image.
But I agree with Rich Edmonds of MSN in that it is probably *the* distribution for Windows converts, like those coming from Windows 10 who don’t have a machine capable of running Win11.
Any Linux would be better than going to Win11 of course, but this one makes it easy indeed. So if your machine has 3-4GB or more of RAM, give it a try. If not, try Debian. The newly installed Debian Trixie (which is not even out yet) runs in about 570MB once you have it on disk or on SSD, provided you’ll use XFCE instead of Gnome. With a Gnome desktop it needs a bit over 1.1GB when running, as tested in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine.
Oh, and Mint isn’t for newbies only – my friend Peter is certainly not new to Linux, but uses Mint regularly for new installations as he told me. I’m older, so I’m using its granddaddy which is Debian (Ubuntu would be the in-between parent, so to say) 😉
And regarding that headline above: I’ve tried Mint in a VM as well, and of course it’s nice, and also sleek and speedy – and it updates much faster than Windows as well 😉 It takes about 720MB or so when running idle, so its Cinnamon desktop is somewhere in between XFCE and Gnome.
