I was actually quite happy... until... GRRRRRR!

Post#31 by **francois** » 18 Mar 2021, 11:30

@minions:
Maybe you could have a look at a porteus lover thread:
Donated after day two of honeymoon
Porteus might simply be not for you.

Though I am usually very nice with newcomers on this forum, I really don't feel like it when I read your comments. Read the reviews on distrowatch, you might reconsider your opinion minion:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/best/best-linux-distros
https://distrocrunch.com/porteus-linux-a-quick-review/

And if you are able to find your way on the the distrowatch site, you will find a lot more. Most are very positive.

There are guys like you that do not appreciate great wines. And here I do not write highly priced wines. Porteus is really a very good quality/price wine. You have a great lot for your money.

When you do not like the taste of the wine there is a very good option:
just spit it out.

Post#32 by **nanZor** » 19 Mar 2021, 09:35

Hmm... I sense the ops frustration, and no need to take it out on Porteus. It's not for everyone.

How about this - and I'm serious - I've recommended it to those who get a tad flustered these days, and is often overlooked:

Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC / Mac

Currently 32-bit. 64-bit *maybe* in the future.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/ra ... i-desktop/

If burned to a usb stick with Etcher for instance, when you first boot it up, it will auto-expand the filesystem to whatever size your stick is automatically. If that works for you, rather than using gparted to do the same, then bingo!

The overall desktop is very simple, and the devs take great pains coming from the Mac side of the design house to try and make it all self-explanatory and easy to use. Well, as much as they can.

Like instead of going into window managers or desktop environments and making 3 different changes to get the look you need, it will invoke Xrandr to emulate a "small / normal / big" resolutions across the board which one can tweak if they want from there. Or yeah, use the 3 different classical menu options to do the same if you have those memorized.

Handy, but sometimes will break child-windows, like the option menus in VLC. Means you have to go back to the standard res to set options for vlc. But still, they are attempting to make it as super easy as possible for many things. Stuff like that.

P.S. If you seek support, DO NOT call it "Raspbian", which is for the actual raspberry-pi hardware. Identify your issue with the Raspberry Pi Desktop. Note that you are buying into the Debian / Systemd thing, which may not matter to you. For some it does.

Give it a shot. Then come back to Porteus when you are ready for a different and slightly more hands-on approach.

Post#33 by **Ed_P** » 19 Mar 2021, 14:24

Any connection to the Raspberry Pi PIXEL system? I tried it a few years ago, had problems with my touchpad and wifi and found support was weak.

Post#34 by **nanZor** » 19 Mar 2021, 22:13

Yep - they had to change the name from Pixel to a generic Raspberry Pi Desktop for legal reasons.

Understand that it is mainly a UI desktop tweak to the standard Debian system, with little things smoothed over for more of a consumer-friendly / non linux background. So capabilities usually track what Debian proper is capable of.

So support is mostly for the UI makeover. Hard core support is generic Debian, so they can point users there if they need to dig deeper. I guess they got their hands full supporting the actual Pi itself, so it's not really mean to be an alternative Debian support forum - but people do help out.

Removing a plethora of choices that we're used to is kind of the thing. Ie, auto-resizing filesystems for persistence on first boot. Only a choice of running with persistence, no persistence, and deleting persistence.

And of course the usual hard drive installation option, which is where when things get funky like a user trying to nail down the problems with say a grub bootloader and 15 other distros installed - yeah, that kind of support is usually best handled in Debian forums.

It's really meant for a demographic that could care less about what a filesystem is, like the difference between ext and fat, and just want their data to be saved and recalled - more of a consumer like experience, which is what I think the original op might be best happiest with and come back to Porteus when ready.

Post#35 by **francois** » 20 Mar 2021, 00:53

Some diversion here! Do both of you own raspberry pi linux boxes?

Post#36 by **Ed_P** » 20 Mar 2021, 02:39

Not me.

Post#37 by **nanZor** » 21 Mar 2021, 11:49

I do. Got a few model 2's, model 3's, and Zero's. But I don't run Raspbian.

I've got plenty of desktops, so I don't run DE's on them. I'm not a "maker", so I don't hook stuff up to them.

What does turn me on is an old-school ethic of trying to make the most of what you have, which means running light and speedy - in ram of course - and installing things like PiCore (Tinycore's Pi cousin) which are heavily vested in running with Busybox for init, shells, and userland - although one can add full gnu core/fileutils/bash if they want later.

I'm a huge fan of *recent* Busybox and seems to fit perfectly with my gray-beard unix ethos. Keeps things interesting. But I'm no expert - if I was, I'd make a Porteus re-spin based around it - Pi or X86/64 ...

I've run other development boards, usually with Armbian, but lately my pi's have been sitting idle. Luckily with no moving parts or even bios-batteries to go weak and need replacing, I can pick them back up at anytime.

I mostly just attach a simple environment of Xorg, grab some TTF fonts like DejaVu, get URxvt terminal running, and have fun tweaking config files with vi and some persistence for flavor.

But I'm a strange one.

Post#38 by **francois** » 23 Mar 2021, 10:43

@nanzor:
Very nice to acknowledge that we have a pi connaisseur. This could be quite useful.

Post#39 by **nanZor** » 23 Mar 2021, 23:25

I'm no pi connaisseur really. I don't try to turn them "into" anything specific other than cool little unix workstations. Same with the other boards running Armbian, but dunno' - I just prefer how Porteus works internally.

What blew my mind was the incredible performance increase you get when running from ram with limited resources, ie 900mhz and 512k memory for instance. Of course one has to have reasonable expectations.

Running Porteus in ram is likewise mind-blowing and the design of Porteus makes that easy and convenient. And that's part of it - the way Porteus is designed being so modular appeals to my grandpa-unix mind. It just seems to make as much sense design-wise as the development of pipes in the early ATT days.

I guess I'm waaay OT now, and should be back in the Porteus-Praisers category.