13 Mar
2023
13 Mar
'23
9 p.m.
For a start, I'll need to get months of treatment if I'm to recover from my
exposure to the Trisquel folks. It's no exaggeration to say that they
might well consider Richard M. Stallman insufficiently pure ideologically.
Perhaps it comes from guilt; they acknowledge that without Canonical a/k/a
Ubuntu they could not exist. It's a little like Judge Roy Bean's comment
on reformed prostitutes, indeed, reformed anything. One referred to Debian
as a "fallen gold standard," and I pointed out that gold is actually up
$52 today, but I doubt that changed any minds. It's too bad. A simply
de-Canonicaled Ubuntu would be a good thing.
Which leaves Debian. If I weren't bone lazy I would have adopted it instead
of Ubuntu many years ago. Thanks to everyone here for the many useful tips
in that regard, and other regards, though I think it's pretty clear that
Debian is the answer. It's rye whisky, while most other distros are
umbrella drinks.
I have one question (well, many, but this one just surprised me): of the
many ISOs in the TDE repository, there isn't a Debian one. Is there some
reason for this or simply nobody to make one?
Like any good former OS/2 user, as a matter of reflex I have /home on its
own partition, pictures on their own partition and drive, and so on. I'll
probably further back up /home on an empty partition of another drive as
well. (Having mentioned OS/2, let me once again whine about it having been
wise from the get-go to segregate applications in their own directories,
as opposed to intermingling them with everything else.)
Anyway, having asked and been advised, I thought it right to let everybody
know where I am ending up.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
13 Mar
13 Mar
9:56 p.m.
On Monday 13 March 2023 14:00:41 dep via tde-users wrote:
For a start, I'll need to get months of treatment
if I'm to recover from my
exposure to the Trisquel folks. It's no exaggeration to say that they
might well consider Richard M. Stallman insufficiently pure ideologically.
It has been years since I tried out Trisquel, so I didn't realize that they
had become such ideologues.
You might consider giving antiX (especially) a try. There is another person on
this list who is a big fan of MX Linux and its relative antiX. I tried them
both, a little, and prefer antiX of the two, mainly because there is (or was)
a TDE version out there. (Don't know if it's current, but there used to be
one somewhere.) Anyway, that might solve your immediate problem quicker than
trying to learn Debian/Devuan from scratch. Everything is already packaged
together.
My reasons for not going that way are two:
First, that I had already got into Debian (and was soon to be moving on to
Devuan), so I didn't see any reason to change to antiX when I already was
liking Debian/Devuan, once I had cracked the nut and figured out how to get
it installed.
Second (my only real complaint), antiX changed permissions in my home folder,
as a sort of default behavior during installation. (Permissions were changed
to something like myself [owner] and some other name [group] throughout my
entire home folder.) I don't know what that was about; it could be that antiX
is correct, and I've been doing it wrong all these years. But anyway, I
didn't care for that.
Also, back then I was running a desktop with four internal hard drives, and I
found that antiX could not configure these during the installation process,
but they got treated like unrecognized external hard drives. Again, there was
probably an easy enough workaround, but it didn't suit my needs at that time.
As for operation, antiX was very fast, didn't seem to be cluttered with
unnecessary crap, and had all the basic stuff one would need. Still, for
myself, now that I had got into Debian/Devuan, I didn't see the need to give
antiX more of a chance when I already had what I wanted.
For myself, though, I consider MX Linux and antiX to be real Debian (or
actually, maybe, Devuan, since no systemd there). If I didn't make myself
clear earlier (because Michael hadn't commented yet), those are also good
distros,
The 'Buntus I don't consider to be real Debian at all. As for being
Debian-based, I would say that there is an hereditary relationship there, but
it doesn't mean much in practical terms. Likewise, our bodies contain
stardust, yet I am not a star.
As for personal preferences, well, don't mistake those for fundamental
considerations. There are some other Debian/Devuan forks out there that are
real, and true to the original Debian code, but I don't have any current
information about new developments; I just hear snips of gossip online.
Debian, Devuan, MX Linux, antiX: I'm pretty sure that one of those will get
you up and running without too much suffering.
Bill
10:21 p.m.
said William Morder via tde-users:
| You might consider giving antiX (especially) a try. There is another
| person on this list who is a big fan of MX Linux and its relative antiX.
| I tried them both, a little, and prefer antiX of the two, mainly because
| there is (or was) a TDE version out there. (Don't know if it's current,
| but there used to be one somewhere.) Anyway, that might solve your
| immediate problem quicker than trying to learn Debian/Devuan from
| scratch. Everything is already packaged together.
Thanks but nah, the argument for Debian is and always has been that Debian
*is* Linux. I've seen lots of distros come and go, always a flavor of he
month. Debian has been around for 30 years. I'll surely have to confound
some of its decisions; that's why God in His wisdom deputized Miguel to
make mc. (I've spent much of the afternoon confounding Canonical things on
this machine, which has been fun; it would have been more fun if there
were a way to redeploy their spyware to send them false information, even
as I wish there were phone apps to flood Apple and Google and their
minions with phony data, such as moving me 500 miles every 30 seconds or
so.) I expect it to take, probably, a couple of very miserable weeks, but
then it will be done. Making things worse is the alredy very unhappy fact
that my Debian guru, who advised me about Linux since before I ever
installed Linux, got the bug last spring and lasted three days. You can't
imagine how many times I've reached for the phone and then said, "oh,
yeah . . ." (He was the test kitchen for the Que book I wrote about
KDE-1.x)
Nope. Gotta be Debian. Gotta land a taildragger sometime.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
10:47 p.m.
On 3/13/23 3:21 PM, dep via tde-users wrote:
said William Morder via tde-users:
| You might consider giving antiX (especially) a try. There is another
| person on this list who is a big fan of MX Linux and its relative antiX.
Thanks but nah, the argument for Debian is and always has been that Debian
*is* Linux.
I still have a list, last updated 2014, of things I had to do to get an Exe
or (pure) Debian system configured after install: Video, network, wifi,
touchpad, genuine Firefox/Thunderbird, multimedia, etc, etc. It's 91 lines
long.
Here's my list for MX, which as I said before is straight Debian as far as
how it works, but has some neat tools that make some things a lot easier:
1. Install from the ISO.
2. Install TDE.
3. Tweak a few things here & there.
4. Start using it.
Oversimplified just a tiny bit, but really not very much. Point is, if you
want to take a lot of time to get really good at under-the-hood Debian
stuff, by all means go for it. But if you just want a solid, working
Debian-based system with a minimum of time and hassle, save yourself the
time and aggravation and use MX.
--
For PGP key, search on the PGP Global Directory.
10:49 p.m.
Dang it, did it again, sent this to the person instead of the list! :-/
On 3/13/23 3:47 PM, Dan Youngquist wrote:
On 3/13/23 3:21 PM, dep via tde-users wrote:
--
For PGP key, search on the PGP Global Directory.
said William Morder via tde-users:
| You might consider giving antiX (especially) a try. There is another
| person on this list who is a big fan of MX Linux and its relative antiX.
Thanks but nah, the argument for Debian is and always has been that Debian
*is* Linux.
I still have a list, last updated 2014, of things I had to do to get an Exe
or (pure) Debian system configured after install: Video, network, wifi,
touchpad, genuine Firefox/Thunderbird, multimedia, etc, etc. It's 91 lines
long.
Here's my list for MX, which as I said before is straight Debian as far as
how it works, but has some neat tools that make some things a lot easier:
1. Install from the ISO.
2. Install TDE.
3. Tweak a few things here & there.
4. Start using it.
Oversimplified just a tiny bit, but really not very much. Point is, if you
want to take a lot of time to get really good at under-the-hood Debian
stuff, by all means go for it. But if you just want a solid, working
Debian-based system with a minimum of time and hassle, save yourself the
time and aggravation and use MX.
14 Mar
14 Mar
1:31 a.m.
Dan Youngquist composed on 2023-03-13 15:47 (UTC-0700):
MX, which as I said before is straight Debian as far
as
how it works...
But if you just want a solid, working
Debian-based system with a minimum of time and hassle, save yourself the
time and aggravation and use MX.
AntiX turned me off of MX. Does MX use the same interpretation of /usr/local/ as
AntiX? If it does, it's definitely not straight Debian, and why I only installed
AntiX once. My /user/local/s are on separate filesystems heavily used by me, not
compatible with the AntiX way.
--
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata
1:53 a.m.
On 3/13/23 6:31 PM, Felix Miata via tde-users wrote:
AntiX turned me off of MX. Does MX use the same
interpretation of /usr/local/ as
AntiX? If it does, it's definitely not straight Debian, and why I only installed
AntiX once. My /user/local/s are on separate filesystems heavily used by me, not
compatible with the AntiX way.
I have no idea. It doesn't matter for anything I do, and I've never had a
reason to notice. MX is straight Debian in every way relevant to my usage.
I expect that's the case for most users who don't have some kind of special
requirement.
--
For PGP key, search on the PGP Global Directory.
4:43 p.m.
On Mon, 13 Mar 2023 22:21:01 +0000
dep via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
Thanks but nah, the argument for Debian is and always
has been that Debian
*is* Linux. I've seen lots of distros come and go, always a flavor of he
month. Debian has been around for 30 years.
As a Gentoo user with no horse in this race, I've been watching from the
sidelines until now, but this made me wince. Slackware is the oldest
continuously extant distro (a couple of months older than Debian) and
even the younger distro family roots—RHEL, Arch, and Gentoo—are
more than 20 years old now.
If we can say of any distro that it *is* Linux, I'd vote for Linux From
Scratch, since it has the fewest distro-specific additions.
Debian is the root distro of what's currently the largest and most popular
family of distros (excluding ChromeOS and Android), and while I admit
that that's an achievement in its own right, that doesn't mean that it *is*
Linux.
E. Liddell
5:46 p.m.
said E. Liddell via tde-users:
| Debian is the root distro of what's currently the largest and most
| popular family of distros (excluding ChromeOS and Android), and while I
| admit that that's an achievement in its own right, that doesn't mean
| that it *is* Linux.
I meant no offense, rather that distros come and go but Debian chugs along,
neither the most bleeding edge nor Troglodyte Linux, its package format
having withstood the test of time, no trick package systems designed only
to gain commercial advantage. Many distributions have come and gone or
become highly specialized. Debian is always there, always reliable, and
you can get it now secure in the belief that in 10 or 20 years it won't
have turned into something else. Look at what has happened to the other
big distros of 20 years ago: Red Hat got infected by IBM; Caldera employed
the Jim Jones/Jonestown model in an effort to bring about the suicide of
all unices, but succeeded only in killing itself (I was not sad last week
to see that the reprehensible Darl McBride has filed for personal
bankruptcy); SuSE got sold and now basically does a server distro for
businesses. Slack still exists, but that's about all you can say about it.
Admittedly, Debian resembles a potato that has been in the bin under the
sink for too long, and it has sprouted in every direction. But those
things are just sprouts and without the potato itself they'd quickly die.
Now, when I think of Linux I have to think of Debian, because despite the
many come-and-go distributions that we hear of once but never again, it is
the usable constant.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
13 Mar
13 Mar
10:59 p.m.
On Monday 13 March 2023 22.56:20 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
You might consider giving antiX (especially) a try.
There is another person
on this list who is a big fan of MX Linux and its relative antiX.
I run Debian on my desktops and MX Linux on my Laptops.
Some MX tools don't works well with TDE (their update tool for example) but I
setup a second user with their original desktop (xfce) for this purpose.
One thing I like on the laptop is that I can install Gnome wireless display
from as a flatpak and it actually works (something I did not get to work on
pure Debians).
So yes, I'd say it's worth testing (and they have a live ISO too). At work I
am actually running MX on a stick, booting from a Mac Mini (that's what we
have) and even brought Windows users to use Linux!
For the moment, their more or less "rolling distribution" model seems to work
well.
Thierry
11:06 p.m.
On 3/13/23 3:59 PM, Thierry de Coulon via tde-users wrote:
Some MX tools don't works well with TDE (their
update tool for example) but I
setup a second user with their original desktop (xfce) for this purpose.
The MX update tool works fine on TDE, if you use lightdm instead of tdm. I
haven't taken the time to figure out exactly why. I haven't found any other
MX tools that have any problem with TDE.
--
For PGP key, search on the PGP Global Directory.
11:24 p.m.
On Monday 13 March 2023 06:06:09 pm Dan Youngquist via tde-users wrote:
On 3/13/23 3:59 PM, Thierry de Coulon via tde-users
wrote:
Ah, that's good to know. One of the MX dev's and I had made a workaround for
that, but just using lightdm would be vastly easier!
Thanks,
Michael
Some MX tools don't works well with TDE
(their update tool for example)
but I setup a second user with their original desktop (xfce) for this
purpose.
The MX update tool works fine on TDE, if you use lightdm instead of tdm. I
haven't taken the time to figure out exactly why. I haven't found any
other MX tools that have any problem with TDE.
14 Mar
14 Mar
2:25 a.m.
said Thierry de Coulon via tde-users:
| Some MX tools don't works well with TDE (their update tool for example)
| but I setup a second user with their original desktop (xfce) for this
| purpose.
I'd use Synaptic in any event. Useful utility to track down what's
available, dependencies, and so on. Haven't found anything that comes
close. Also very good for editing lines for sources.list.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
13 Mar
13 Mar
10:14 p.m.
On Mon, 13 Mar 2023, dep via tde-users wrote:
I have one question (well, many, but this one just surprised me): of
the many ISOs in the TDE repository, there isn't a Debian one. Is there
some reason for this or simply nobody to make one?
This!!
I've have been dragging along my OLD, highly adapted for me, version
of Ubuntu -- now on ESM 'life support' -- for quite some time now.
I seem to always have frustratingly bad experiences in updating my
systems -- ergo the ESM state of affairs. I would LOVE to see a
Debian+TDE ISO. It would definitely get me moving along.
Over time I've lost my infatuation with Ubuntu for to several reasons.
Many of those reasons have been mentioned here (, but no one has yet
brought up the apt/snap/flatpack chaos...)
Like any good former OS/2 user, ...
Another former OS/2 user here, too.
Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | Marvin | W3DHJ | linux
Pueblo, Colorado | @ | Jonesy | FreeBSD __
38.238N 104.547W | jonz.net | DM78rf | SK
10:22 p.m.
said Marvin Jones via tde-users:
| Another former OS/2 user here, too.
OS/2 to Linux, to TDE. If we didn't know better, we might think we're
contrarians!
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
14 Mar
14 Mar
1:03 a.m.
dep composed on 2023-03-13 22:22 (UTC):
said Marvin Jones:
| Another former OS/2 user here, too.
OS/2 to Linux, to TDE. If we didn't know better,
we might think we're
contrarians!
I've never quit having Warp 4 up 24/7, though basically only for running DOS since
I switched primaries from it to KDE3 on SUSE. OS/2's name has had multiple
changes, first to Warp 3, then 4, then MCP, then eComStation, now ArcaOS[1]. The
M$ bait never got more than an occasional dabble here, primarily for comparing the
Internet Exploder way of doing things to the rest of web world. There's no benefit
in leaving behind what gets the jobs done. :) Long live [K,T]DE[3]!
[1] https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
--
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata
1:46 a.m.
On Mon, 13 Mar 2023, dep via tde-users wrote:
said Marvin Jones via tde-users:
| Another former OS/2 user here, too.
OS/2 to Linux, to TDE. If we didn't know better, we might think we're
contrarians! -- dep
Oh, I am a contrarian!! Never went beyond Win 3.1. Went to OS/2 2.0
from there and gave it up with OS/2 Warp 4 when IBM gave it up.
A fresh (re)start with Red Hat Linux 6.2 in 2000 launched me into my
current state of affairs.
Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | Marvin | W3DHJ | linux
Pueblo, Colorado | @ | Jonesy | FreeBSD __
38.238N 104.547W | jonz.net | DM78rf | SK
2:34 a.m.
said Marvin Jones via tde-users:
| Oh, I am a contrarian!! Never went beyond Win 3.1. Went to OS/2 2.0
| from there and gave it up with OS/2 Warp 4 when IBM gave it up.
| A fresh (re)start with Red Hat Linux 6.2 in 2000 launched me into my
| current state of affairs.
Started with OS/2 in the pre-2.0 days via their support forum on (of all
things) Prodigy. In due course we got kicked off of Prodigy (which soon
collapsed, though maybe there was no connection) and we did GEnie, Delphi,
and finally a mailing list that kept going until a year or two ago. Still
in touch with some of those folks.
And still cranky that James P. Lennane, the publisher of the DeScribe Word
Processor, never turned loose the code for a Linux version. (I've run the
Windows version in a virtual machine; WINE, last time I tried it, was
about as useful as Windows, running Solitaire perfectly but nothing else.)
Lennane was a little nuts -- he actually ran for president in, I think,
1996. I do not believe he won.
--
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
13 Mar
13 Mar
10:27 p.m.
Anno domini 16:14:53 Mon, 13 Mar 2023 -0600 (MDT)
Marvin Jones via tde-users scripsit:
On Mon, 13 Mar 2023, dep via tde-users wrote:
you know exegnulinux?
I have one question (well, many, but this one just surprised me): of
the many ISOs in the TDE repository, there isn't a Debian one. Is there
some reason for this or simply nobody to make one?
This!!
I've have been dragging along my OLD, highly adapted for me, version
of Ubuntu -- now on ESM 'life support' -- for quite some time now.
I seem to always have frustratingly bad experiences in updating my
systems -- ergo the ESM state of affairs. I would LOVE to see a
Debian+TDE ISO. It would definitely get me moving along.
Over time I've lost my infatuation with Ubuntu for to several reasons.
Many of those reasons have been mentioned here (, but no one has yet
brought up the apt/snap/flatpack chaos...)
--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA,
CIA ...
Like any good former OS/2 user, ...
Another former OS/2 user here, too.
Jonesy
14 Mar
14 Mar
1:53 a.m.
On Mon, 13 Mar 2023, Dr. Nikolaus Klepp via tde-users wrote:
No. And I'm not really interested in chasing yaa-daa-yaa-daa distros
all over the Linux prairie. I'll focus on moving (up) to Debian next.
I'm sure there's a VAST WORLD of information on Debian out there to be
discovered and learned via the search engines. That'll be comforting.
Jonesy
--
Marvin L Jones | Marvin | W3DHJ | linux
Pueblo, Colorado | @ | Jonesy | FreeBSD __
38.238N 104.547W | jonz.net | DM78rf | SK
Marvin Jones via tde-users scripsit:
[I think I
got the attributions right...]
I seem to always have frustratingly bad experiences in updating my
systems -- ergo the ESM state of affairs. I would LOVE to see a
Debian+TDE ISO. It would definitely get me moving along.
you know exegnulinux?
416
days inactive
417
days old
20 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
Dan Youngquist -
dep -
Dr. Nikolaus Klepp -
E. Liddell -
Felix Miata -
Marvin Jones -
Michael -
Thierry de Coulon -
William Morder