LINUX Unplugged - 357: The Little Distro That Could

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

The lightweight distro that stole our hearts, the four of us each try out a different contender and come away with what we think will be the leanest and meanest distribution for your PC. Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Jill Bryant Ryniker.

All right, Wes Payne, I want you to take a guess. What is the average miles per hour in which you exhale air? So the speed at which it leaves your hot bod. 14? 14. What do you say, Cheese? Is it sneeze or is that just regular exhale? I think a sneeze is probably like pedal to the metal.

So I say regular. That's a special case. Okay. So I'm going to say 27 miles an hour. Whoa. Okay. All right. What about you, Drew? I'm going to go way lower. I'm going to say 27 miles an hour. Whoa. Okay. All right. What about you, Drew?

I'm going to go way lower. I'm going to say like three miles per hour. He's a real slow breather. He's a smoker, maybe. Anybody in the Mumble Room have a guess? 15. Jill says 15. All right.

Are you ready for the big reveal? Are you ready? Are you ready? I've never wanted anything more. It is 15 miles per hour. Woo! Hello, friends, and welcome into a very special edition of 357. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. I don't know how we got into this, Wes, but we are here on a Sunday with our virtual recording a special edition of the show while I am on the road. It's a bake-off, which we don't tend to get into. But on this episode, we each went off and took a lightweight Linux distribution with us. And we're going to come back and A, tell you what we thought about it, but B, we created a point system, which I'll tell you about here in a moment, in which to score them, and we'll see who walks away with the ultimate lightweight distribution. So to help Wes and I do that, of course, is our two Robins. It's Drew and Cheese. Hello, gentlemen.

Hello. Hello. I like that, Drew, you went for the more retro Robin, and Cheese went for the more modern movie Robin. Skimpy, that's for sure. Yeah. Cheese, I'm not sure. I think that was a Robin costume for ladies. Hey, you don't be dissing my cute-ass Robin costume.

It looks good. It looks good, you know? I just got to say, it looks good. And then, of course, all-wearing costume is our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Time appropriate. Greetings. Hello.

Happy Linux Tuesday recorded on a Sunday. Happy Sunday. Yeah, this is a special one. We just took over the virtual lug today with no heads up because this is the last minute idea we had. Sorry, Minnie. Sorry, guys. But we wanted to get you in on this as well. We thought, why not?

Let's have some fun talking about lightweight distributions. I think lightweight distributions hold a special part in all of our hearts. I think the first one that I really took seriously was probably back in the Lubuntu 10.10 days, which back then included LXDE and was really nice for systems that were single-core processors before the domination of multi-core and tons and tons of RAM. I ran it on a system with 128 megabytes of RAM, and I think it was a Pentium 3. It was a really old system at the time. I mean, it just brings back some of that magic of, yeah, you can make Linux work on that when whatever proprietary OS came on it is no longer supported.

There's that. It's like bringing life into a system, which feels incredible. But it's also a special challenge that not every distribution decides to take on, because it's not necessarily an easy goal to fit within these tiny constraints. Mind those dependencies. Especially when you want yourself a modern desktop. So we set off to define a few rules around the game and award some points. Now, because this is a special edition, gentlemen, the floor is open for you to ask any questions

about the rules or make any suggestions because we're doing this as we go. But we had some minimum requirements that will earn your distribution a point. So you need to be responsible for tracking your points here. Do you guys have like something? I got paper right here. What are you asking us to tally our own points? Because I'm going to give myself a winning number. So bring your own.

The audience will be keeping count and they will hold you accountable. So you'll get one point if you can run it on a single CPU core. If you can run it with one gig of RAM, you get a point for each of these, I think. What do you think? You like doing it that way? Or do you think you should just get one point for all of them?

No, I like splitting them up. Alright, so these are one pointers. One CPU, one gigabyte of RAM, within a gigabyte of hard drive space, easy dark mode, and easy to install. And you must be able to run a web browser that can play any episode of LUP in the browser. So that is for one point. You get one point for each of those. All right. Now, the bonus round, where each one of

these is awarded five points, if you can get a modern GTK or cute theme on there, and I define that in here as Arc, Yaru, Pop, or Breeze, if you can install software that is not in the distribution's repos, so somehow get software from outside the repos running on the box. That is also worth five points. Another five points if you can play YouTube or Netflix

in your browser, and if you can boot to the desktop within 20 seconds, another five points. And if any video game at all plays, five points. All right. Not a lot of points, but some of these are slightly challenging. Some of these distros, it may be harder to get ARK or Yaru or Pop on there. Sure. The modern GTK theme, is that out of the box or is that something that you can install after? I think it's fair if you can get it after. I think that's fair. Do you guys agree with that? Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Okay. All right. Cause I mean, honestly, at this level, you know, you're the type of user that's okay doing that. All right. Then we have the elimination

round, which is 10 points for each one of these. You get 10 points of what you can get it to run visual studio code. Just thought that'd be a fun one. And 10 points if you can get it to run Visual Studio Code. Just thought that'd be a fun one. And 10 points if you can get it to install a different kernel than the one that it shipped with, and it still boots. So 10 points for that. And then we have the Will of the People round. An additional 10 points will be awarded just for one thing. If you convince a co-host, each co-host you convince that your distro is the best, you can be awarded 10 points. Yeah, okay. Y'all turncoats.

I mean, this is, I think, a chance where if your distribution can't meet some of these other minimums, you could make it up in the will of the people round. It's the personality factor. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So we hit the randomize button, and we're each distributed a distribution, which I now am, of course, a main advocate for. Drew was distributed Bunsen Labs, Cheese, Pubby Linux, Wes, FreeBSD, and what was the other one, Wes? Well, this was a late contender I added to the race because it was just too fun. Okay, so FreeBSD is going to be my main contender.

All right. But Calibria OS is written in pure assembly and needs only something like eight megs of RAM. So I thought, why not go super tiny? Now, it's not going to score very well, but I thought it deserved a mention. I'm really looking forward to hearing about that and FreeBSD. And then I was assigned Sparky Linux, which I'm looking forward to telling you about because obviously it is the best Linux out of all of these and should clearly be the winner. And by the end of this, you'll all want to run it. So we'll talk about that. These are the ground rules. It's a little complicated,

but it's essentially there is a one point category, a five point category and a 10 point category. And then there is that final will of the people category that's also 10 points, just one item. And that is convince a co-host. So what do you say we start with Bunsen Labs? Drew, I'm curious to know about Bunsen Labs and why we should all be using it. First of all, it is so Debian that you can switch to it from a base Debian system. Oh, wow. Okay. Bunsen Labs Helium, you can get as a PPA and convert your current Debian system into Bunsen Labs. So what does that mean?

First of all, you have the full power of Debian behind you. So this is going to score very, very, very highly on this test. Talks a big game. Oh, I do. And rightly so. I ran it on one core and one gig of RAM. No problem whatsoever. Yeah, but this thing's based on Debian 9.

Snore. Wah, wah, wah. Oh, well. If I'm deploying systems all over left and right, I want something modern. You know, I want like Debian 10. Yeah, but I can still get backports through PPAs. Okay, all right. I was not really able to get it to install with one gigabyte of disk.

Just to get it to properly install and be able to run updates afterwards, I had to go to five gigabytes, but I would recommend going to 10 gig for a fully functional system. So losing a point there, but... Okay, did anybody else get in within the one gig? Did anybody get the one gig point? Not quite. Not with the GUI, although Calibri OS totally does.

Yeah. I got to admit, I did not quite get there either. I got really close, and none of us got the one gig point. But Drew, did you get the one CPU core? Oh, absolutely. All right. So mark yourself a point down for that. What about how much RAM? One gig. All right. So you get a point for that. How was the install to disk? Install to disk was fine as soon as I had a big enough disk. Right.

Okay. Tell us about that. Super easy. So it has an install to disk option in the Grub menu, and it launches into a nice, easy installer. It explains everything as you're going and tells you exactly what it's doing and asks you simple questions that you can decide on how to proceed. It is fine with just the default options. I didn't change a single thing and had zero problems going through the entire installation. Okay. I got to admit in the early on, I'm feeling a little concerned. Are you feeling

competitive right now, Cheese? Julian, I'm feeling a little concerned. Are you feeling competitive right now, Cheese? No. Yeah, okay. All right. All right, okay. Damn it, Debian.

So what about easy dark mode? No, there was no dark mode out of the box. I'm not going to give myself a point for that. All right. I could get a dark mode going to the repos and downloading something, but I feel like the easy dark mode should be out of the box. So I'm going to say no. Okay. I think you, we all agree on that. I am curious. Is there any like special sauce you really liked about it to make, keep things light? You know, I mean, if you've got the full power of Debian, are they doing anything different about how they set up

defaults or just tune things to keep it small? Aside from just using open box as the window manager, I don't know what special things they're doing on the back end to make it run so light. But the default install is literally it's just Openbox on a Debian based system with kernel 4.9 and it has Firefox ESR instead of the latest stable. Aside from that, it doesn't appear that there's any specific kernel tuning or anything like that that is really making it so light. I think it's just the fact that Debian doesn't need much to begin with. And neither does Openbox. Really, it doesn't. Yeah. So did you get a rough idea of what your just sort of sitting idle RAM usage was? Very, very low. I

didn't specifically calculate it, but it wasn't even really showing up in my virtual machine manager. I know. That's what's so funny about this, huh? These things are so lightweight, you don't even really notice them. All right, well, let's get into the bonus round here. So did it have a modern theme? Not out of the box, but it's Debian. So. So anything you, okay, I think you get five points for that then. I do. Were you able to install any software that wasn't in the repos? I installed software from PPAs and I also compiled from source. Oh, snap. All right. Total five points. Were you able to play YouTube or Netflix? I was able to play YouTube on the live CD version, and I was able to get into Netflix after installing the DRM in Firefox, but unfortunately, it crashed while I was trying to play Netflix. However,

after I installed it to disk, no problems whatsoever. Netflix worked without even skipping a beat. Now, I'm betting because it is Debian-based, you probably didn't get to the desktop in under 20 seconds. Actually, on the very first boot, I got to the desktop in 26.8 seconds. However, after that, on any subsequent boot, seven seconds on the dot. Whoa. Really? All right.

I think you get five points for that. Any video games? Yeah. I loaded up a few simple games because I was running in a virtual machine and I didn't have any kind of real DRM or any kind of access to the video card. I wasn't going to try anything like super snazzy, but I was playing Extron, Isle Riot, Xboard, stuff's in Debian. So you got every category. You got every one of those in the five points category. Mm-hmm. All right.

Now to the elimination round. Each one of these is 10 points. Does it run Visual Studio Code? I'm assuming yes. Yes. I did have to pull Flatpak from the Squeeze Backports PPA, but as soon as I did that, no problems whatsoever. Came right up installing a different kernel did you go for that one i installed the licorix kernel oh no guys kernel 5.6 and that booted in 8.67 okay wow okay so i think we'll hold the convinced

to the end which will be the extra but i you're really, you're doing really well there. Bunsen Lab sounds like a serious contender, and... What was the final disk size? Yeah, good question. I went with 10 gig, because you know, Flatpak is a little heavier as far as disk space. And that was the only way I was able to really get

VS Code going. Okay, alright, fair enough. Alright, well, stand by, Drew, I'll have a few more questions, but we gotta go to Cheese now on on puppy and see how puppy stacks up and how many points. Drew, do you have a rough back of the napkin calculation so far of how many points you got there? Oh, let's take a look here. One, two. So let's see. I got five for that. 10, 15, 20, 15 20 25 35 45 so 47 ouch okay so cheesy let's see if we can beat uh 47 how was puppy linux uh puppy linux is great it's real great convince me now you're not really convincing me yeah i'm definitely not going to win that portion of the 10 points.

You know, so I did run it on a single cord with a single gig of RAM, as you would expect. Normally, puppies meant to just boot and load into RAM. I'm using boxes here for this. So I ran into an issue with boxes where I could only go down to 10 gigs in size. Final install size, though, was 1.4 gigabyte. I definitely hit all of those marks. That's impressive. I guess except for the hard drive, it was 1.4 gigabyte.

I was able to run a browser, their Pale Moon browser, and play an episode of Love. There is an easy dark mode, kind of so how do you figure what do you mean yeah let's get into that it's jwm and there are different themes for jwm uh gtk2 based themes so i was able to install out of the box um nox the nox theme which is their version of a dark theme. While maybe not extremely pretty, it is a dark mode. So I was able to get a dark mode out of the box. Easy to install to disk. I mean, it is. It's stupid simple to install to disk.

You sound a little, I don't know, not confident? Well, the way the puppy is kind of set up, right, is that it's the root user. Like everything defaults as root. Now you can go through settings to kind of adjust that to, I think there's three different levels, Fido being basically a guest user type of thing. So it's really a different kind of Linux. It's not really your typical install. The prompts are ridiculous. You're not convincing me at all. I'm putting it all out there on the table, right? It's one of those things where there's just a ton of these prompts that are just lengthy and

don't make a ton of sense. There are three different networking applications to choose from by default. How do you want to connect to your network sort of thing? Like if this one doesn't work, try this one. If that one doesn't work, try this one. If you need an NDIS wrapper or something, try this one. And so it's kind of silly, right? But you see, this is where you have an advantage

because for this, we're scoring it by the rules of the game. So if you got this is where you have an advantage because for this we're just we're scoring it by the rules of the game so if you got if you got this thing to play youtube or any video game at all you're getting five points for either one of those things i think maybe at the end we should consider too like who you know which one has the least space since it sounds like we're all kind of going over a little bit and i would mention too bite bitten points out in the mumble room that this is available for some other platforms where the minimal size really matters. Right, like the Pi. If you wanted to run it on the Pi, it'd be great for that.

I don't like running stuff as root, so it's kind of weird for me. But yeah. So what about things like VS Code or getting a different kernel on there? How did that go? So I kind of combined the two in one. I installed software, which wasn't in the repos. I installed VS Code or VS Codium via an app image. All right.

Okay. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. We got to have a quorum on this. See, I was thinking specifically it needs to be VS Code, not VS Codium, because VS Codium is easier. not VS Codium because VS Codium is easier.

And I was thinking VS Code makes it actually a little harder because it's the quote-unquote, you know, official version, which is slightly hard to get your hands on. But I'm open to what Drew and Wes think on this issue. Half credit. All right. I'll agree with that. Cheese, are you okay with that compromise? Yes. All right. All right.

Because there is that element of, like, you have to use proprietary X, can't you? Yes. That's what that was going for there. Okay. Okay. Because obviously in this situation, you would just use VS Codium. I Yes, that's what that was going for there. Okay, okay. Because obviously in this situation, you would just use VS Codeium. I agree. That's the right way to go. But okay, we'll do five points. Continue on.

I'm sorry. I just wanted to clarify that. I was able to install that app image. It doesn't have a modern GTK theme, so no five there. I was able to play YouTube, so five point there. Okay, good. It booted in 12 seconds consistently. So not bad. As far as any video game, they have a section in Puppy called Fun, and I was able to play a Sudoku clone. Did you have fun? Yes. Good. I am glad you had fun.

Yes. Good. I am glad you had fun. Have you tallied up your score yet? Not quite. I was not able to install a different kernel by the default install. And to be honest, I just didn't go down that route. You can easily switch kernels if you're booting it off of a flash drive or something like that. You're not actually installing it to disk.

So, yeah, not really on that. But if I tallied it up, that would be, what is it, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. So I'm looking at 30 points. All right, 30 points. All right, 30 points. All right, 30 points for cheese. I'm going to write that down. That's not bad cheese, especially because Poppy Linux is a longtime contender. All right, Mr. Payne, we move on to you.

And let's start with your FreeBSD. What do you say? Let's try to score FreeBSD against the board, and then you just tell us a little bit about your side fling there. Yeah, all right. Because I really, that's kind of what I'm most interested in. But I am interested also in how FreeBSD is stacked up. What was the experience? You know, honestly, nice.

I always enjoy FreeBSD, but it'd been a little bit since I really tried to shape it into something. And I thought, how lean is it? I mean, I've always found it to be just well organized, not necessarily aimed towards being lean, but why not give it a shot? It has some very good base requirements, minimum hardware requirements, 96 megs of RAM. So that was a no-brainer at passing a whole gig of RAM. Yeah, there's a point.

I think when I just installed base, it was under a gig, but with everything necessary, it was about 2.5. That was to get XFCE on the desktop. Fair enough. I think we all went over the one gig disk limit. When we were sitting around dreaming up these requirements, I think maybe we were being a little over nostalgic. It's interesting to see. And I mean, Colibri definitely gets there, but you're right. At some point, the applications that we want to use these days, regardless of even just the OS part of it, there's a lot of dependencies because we have a lot of expectations about

richly featured software. You know, it's just funny because I don't know. Does anybody remember making like special DOS or even Mac boot disk to play video games where you'd have just a minimal OS and the game all on one disk? Oh, absolutely. Yep. What a time. A simpler time. FreeBS game all on one disk. Oh, absolutely. Yep. What a time. A simpler time.

The FreeBSD handbook is, of course, excellent. So, you know, walked me basically through, like, all right, how do I get X up and going? How do I install XFCE? And then from there, I added on Firefox. So listening back to an episode of Linux Unplugged, that was also pretty easy to do. See, you really took the build it up from the ground approach,

and that means things like dark mode and whatnot are themes that you just install from the package manager or whatever. And so in a way, it's sort of easy to get these points because you built the system towards it. However, I don't, and I'm totally open to Drew and Cheese's interpretation to this. I think it still qualifies because our listeners could do that if they were so interested. And it was all very, you know, I the install the installer was very helpful to get me started with what did i want to get set up with and then the handbook gave you lots of options i didn't say you had to but you know just like if you want to go down the route to a graphical interface here you go so is the the initial install it's all still in curses yeah wow but it's very efficient

you know it was a pleasant experience yeah no it All right, so I think you're probably going to qualify for the one points except for the one gigabyte hard drive, but I don't think any of us are getting that. So you might take that off your list if you have it, but would you classify that as a pretty easy-to-install OS if you were just generally fairly comfortable using computers and whatnot? Yeah, I think so. You know what it also had that most operating systems don't?

Just an easy automatic ZFS installer option. Oh, really? So I went with UFS for this little test, but I mean, it works really nicely. Okay, I was going to say, I think our buddy Alan Jude had a hand in that. Right. Okay, so let's get to the five-point bonus round, which is modern GTK

theme, installing something that's not in the repos, which I'm really interested in that one, and then obviously playing YouTube or Netflix, booting to the desktop in 20 seconds, or any video game at all. Did you have challenges with any of those? Okay, so GTK theme, that was fine.

The Arc theme is in the ports tree, so that was easy to get, which the ports tree is awesome. Maybe second only to the AUR. You know, honestly, configuring VBSD up and getting it all running, it does, Arch and FreeBSD seem like they are sort of two sides of the same coin in some respects. Obviously, there's a ton of philosophical differences between them, but just from my end user experience of them, and I like both of them.

I absolutely have felt that way too. I am interested that you have had that same observation. I think what happened is free BSD users just, you know what, I'm going to go do this on Linux. Right, right, exactly. I really liked what I had, but I want this random piece of hardware that Linux has support for to work, so I guess I'll use their bastard

kernel. Okay, so what went less well, I did get YouTube to work in Firefox, no Netflix. Yeah, that's okay. If you get one of them, you still get the point. Oh, okay. Really? Yeah, I'm not going to let DRM hold us back.

I like it. I feel like, you know, and Firefox is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, I suppose. Feel free to push back. But I mean, I think to make that work, we should have made Netflix its own point item. That's fair. There's a slash in there. Yeah. All right. How about that desktop boot time? Just under the wire at 18 seconds.

Spoiler alert. That's what mine was too. About any video game at all? Super Tux Cart was in the ports tree, so I gave that an install. Classic. Okay. Now we get to the 10 points. Can you get VS Code going on FreeBSD? VS Codium, yes. I believe that's what's to the 10 points. Can you get VS Code going on FreeBSD? VS Codium, yes. That is, I believe that's what's in the ports tree. That's what I gave an install that seemed to work.

I didn't edit anything really in it, but it's the open source version. So five points, I think, to you for that. So adjust your accounting. Oh, I did install some software not in the repos because I didn't even check. I don't know why, but I just downloaded RipGrep, that handy, super fast, Rust-implemented grip alternative. And so it gave the Rust stuff and the install on FreeBSD so I could compile it.

Huh. Okay. That counts. Does the kernel... So we have for... This is a tough one. I was going to... For 10 points, we have install a different kernel, but you kind of could choose your own kernel in a way, right? I mean, I'm not super familiar with the way FreeBSD works,

but I assume you had some governance. Well, and I mean, should I at least get half points just because I'm using a non-Linux kernel for this one? Yeah, I think maybe you could get five. You guys okay with that? What do you think? Yeah, sure. Giving him points now?

Come on. Well, no, I mean, we don't have to, but it seems like... He's bringing BSD to a Linux challenge. I mean, we could not. I think cheese is just butthurt because he scored so low. Hey, don't you be hating on the woof woof. Hey, you brought the jalopy, bro. I'm sorry.

Okay, so Wes, you're looking pretty good there. Do you have a grand total for free BSD on our Linux podcast? Oh, no, what have we done? 40. Well, he beat Puppy. That wasn't surprising. That was going to happen. So far, though, we got Drew in the lead at 47.

Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll see. I'm hoping to convince you all. I didn't even bother doing the kernel because I think I'm going to win the convince your co-host round here because Sparky Linux was something special that I came across. I wasn't expecting to fall in love, but I definitely have. It's a Linux distribution that's on top of Debian. And boy, do I now appreciate what that means. When you're looking for a minimal Linux distro, having a Debian base means you have access to everything. And Sparky is a fast, lightweight, fully customizable OS that has a couple of different versions that I'll get into here in a moment. But something else that I think as somebody who has used a distribution

on and off a couple of times, as a guy who has used a distribution on and off a couple of times, as a guy who has used Linux every now and then for a couple of years, one of the things I have learned is a active community makes the difference between a living distribution and a dead one. Ain't that the truth. Sparky Linux has a very healthy Linux community around it and also very active developers who are laying out near-term and long-term roadmaps. This month, I mean, it's not a huge goal, but this month they are 210% funded by their community. That's great. Yeah. Wow. This is something special here. Sparky Linux is something really special. And I think it's targeted at those of us who have been around for a little while, tried a couple of desktops, and we know what we like.

The main features of Sparky, obviously, is that it's Debian, but it has two branches, stable and semi-rolling, which is awesome. And, of course, I obviously went with semi-rolling. Lightweight, fast, simple. semi-rolling. Lightweight, fast, simple. It has lots of desktops to choose from, and it has a command line edition that has no X, where you can just build up from the ground up. Oh, fancy that. This is the free VSD guy. And I really like their three special editions that they focus on. So they have a game over edition, which is great. I'll talk more about that in a minute. They have a game over edition, which is great. I'll talk more about that in a minute.

They have a multimedia edition for audio and video. They have a rescue edition for going in and fixing broken Linux systems. Oh, I called right out. That's handy. Yeah. And a minimal command line edition, which is really nice. But I chose to go with the rolling LX cute version of their distribution. They also offer XFCE and Mate.

But I went LX Cute. And they also have a, I should add, a minimal GUI version, which is open box. Oh, nice. Which I also checked out because I was really enjoying this distribution. So I just kind of, I ate it all up. I just tried out all the different spins because it was so great. But for my main testing, I focused on the LXQ version. Now let's go down the points because I got an issue with the starting line and I got to ask you guys about this. So it technically, technically fits within a system

within one gigabyte of RAM. Okay. With a major caveat. How much swap are we talking? Actually, by default, it does not have the swap enabled. And when you only have one gig of RAM on a system with no swap, let me tell you about the careful dance you learned to take. Yeah. I mean, I turned swap off on the systems I installed. I did not have swap. And it was something. Firefox was really great until it wasn't, let me tell you. But anyway. You just got to treat it as a single tab browser. Yes, very much. So the installer, I think it's a bug.

And that's why I think maybe we should allow this. So it technically runs on systems with one gigabyte of free RAM. But when you boot a live environment. Well, that takes some RAM. And then you technically do not have a gigabyte of free RAM. The installer does a check. Is one gigabyte free? Yes or no.

And when it's no, it puts up an error message and does not allow you to continue. However, if you go with the minimal GUI or the minimal CLI version, and you do it on the same box, and it doesn't do that check, or it does the check and you're using so little RAM, it's okay, it continues. And then you can use the system just fine. Right. So if you, right, you can even boost the RAM, install, and then shrink it down. And it would work fine. I did exactly that test for the gaming edition. Yeah, I think you should get that point then. So what did it idle around on RAM usage? So good question.

I did take a note of that. Let me pull up my notes here, cheese. You know, honestly, that just feels like experiences I've had installing operating systems on Mac hardware after they said, no, it won't support this. But if you edit that P list. Yes. Yeah. I don't know.

I kind of take issue with this. Okay. If there's a bug in the installer that causes you not to be able to install on one gig of RAM, that is problematic. However, there is a case to be said for the fact that you were able to do it on another edition. So I don't know, I could go either way. That does seem like a savior right there. Yeah, it's sort of a tricky one because you could just do the CLI and then app get installed the desktop and you'd be fine. Sounds like a half point to me. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Half point.

But then I'm in like a point five situation because this is only a one pointer. Yeah. Half point round up to one, give it to you. All right, all right, okay. So half a point? I'll take half a point if you guys are okay with that. I think that's fair because there is that issue. So you'd have to, yeah, all right. It's fair.

So, yeah, so, Cheese, you asked what was the base run rate. Just with the LXQ version, which I checked the most, with it just running and everything kind of like sitting there for 10 minutes, I was using 398 megabytes of RAM. Okay. Not bad. So, I mean, you're still within that threshold of one gig, right? Here's what surprised me. I mean, this is kind of horrible, but also is not the end of the world.

I, spoiler alert, was able to install third-party apps because it's Debian-based. Chrome, watching the SpaceX livestream, 750 megabytes of RAM usage. Not horrible. I mean, really close to my limit, right? So I was able to launch a terminal and do HTOP. So that was in that mix. But I don't have much room for anything else, like another Chrome tab. What was interesting about this is Firefox ran really, really well in this one core limited memory environment until it didn't. And then it just drug my whole system down where Chrome was just consistently slow. Yeah.

I just thought that was one thing. But just an aside here, guys, as somebody who has been around and using the Linux desktop since single core computers were a common thing, holy crap is single core Linux painfully slow. my Linux desktop has taken advantage of multi-core progress because it just was like the boiling frog thing. It just sort of happened slowly as the technology built out, so did the desktop, and the developers took advantage of it. I know it sounds silly to say this, but back in my day, there was a real push to try to convince developers that multi-core development was worth their time. I even attended an Intel event where they tried to make a pitch to open source developers that it was worth their effort to support multi-core processors. And they said that the days of CPU megahertz increasing year after year were over. This is an Intel event. They fed us, they brought us in, they put up this video,

the whole thing about Moore's law and all that, and they showed like a progression of the Pentium line from the 286 to the 386 to the 486 to the Pentium to the Pentium 2 to the Pentium 3 to the Pentium 4 this was just the law of computing, that this megahertz increase was just going to continue at infinitum until we were piling starships. And Intel sat us all down and said, no, no, no, no. We're kind of done with that. The megahertz race is over. We're going to have some gradual increasements. But what it's all about now is cores. We're going to have some gradual increasements, but what it's all about now is cores. We're going to have multiple cores.

This is before they did the core series and all of that. There was a line of Intel processors that I actually have in the machine here that was before the core series, but still multi-core. And it was right around this time. And they were trying to make the case to developers to go with multi-processing and multi-core development. Yeah, right. I mean, it is extra work. You've got to sell them. If you want to take advantage of the hardware that's going to be out there in your customers' hands, this is what you have to do. Yeah, and so, you know, now from an end user's perspective, I just didn't really appreciate how well the Linux desktop had adapted to the multi-core CPU world because it just sort of happened organically over time. to the multi-core CPU world because it just sort of happened organically over time.

But by doing this challenge and going back in time and limiting myself to one gigabyte of RAM and one CPU core, even if it was like a 2.3 gigahertz CPU core or whatever, is painfully slow. It's striking how better it is now. Right. We really have it good.

Well, and I wonder how much of that is due to you using LXQt because I did not have the same experience under Openbox. Everything was snappy and fast for me, even with one core and one gig of RAM. You know, I wouldn't say that the desktop was necessarily slow. It was just if I was installing software and I was trying to watch the SpaceX video stream, I definitely was waiting on stuff like I would click on a new tab and it would be a few beats before. I mean, I was definitely, I felt like I was pushing it. There's also a question of what your backing store was. I was running on an NVMe. It's a WD Blue NVMe M.2 drive. And that could play a big part of it too also i did have swap so uh yeah i don't know

cheater i honestly i felt like the one thing that sparky linux was missing for me after all the spins that they have was this would be so perfect on the raspberry pi it would have been like the ideal desktop environment because everything else in this list i had i had uh easy access to dark mode they just have it right there built in uh that was that was absolutely no problem vs code chrome fine that all worked easy installation yeah the installer the gui installer it felt like maybe i'd done it a thousand times it's obviously some installer i've used before i just don't know what it's called all that worked fine um i played extreme tax cart racer flawlessly it worked just great and if you use uh their game mode which is really cool it comes loaded with games but it also has steam

installed um they call it steam install yeah it's or or it's that uh you know i actually didn't i didn't run it i just saw in the menu so it's possible it is that that uh script that just downloads a little place older sure but it's right there in the menu already set to go they call it the game over edition and uh it loads xfce and it's great. It is really fun, and gaming on it is just basically one click to get things started. I was really impressed with Sparky. Their open box edition, also really well done. But I think ultimately, what I really liked about it was the way the developers were communicating with the community. They have forum posts, which are, I mean, they're even active today. I checked it before the show and there's topics that are going today, but they have forum

posts about their next milestones for the distribution and where they see it going. They're very transparent about the development. That's really neat. They're basing it on Debian, which means you have access to any dev file. So Chrome or VS Code were just a dev download away. A bunch of really smart defaults, so things that I like to use out of the box, like GDEBI, were already installed and ready to go. It was simple to install Chrome. The base installation is tiny.

It's not one gig, but it's just around just a little bit over two gigs. Yeah, okay. And I like that it's a modern Debian, too. Their quote-unquote rolling is essentially Debian testing or whatever. Or SID, is that what it's called in Debian? And because I'm old, I don't remember anymore. It's called Bullseye. And I think it's totally usable as a desktop.

Everything was simple. Everything worked. And the community had a lot of interesting discussions going on about future directions. And I felt like at the end of it, this is a distribution. And I don't often say this. This is something I'm going to keep using. This is now my go-to clean Debian environment in a VM. It does sound very minimal and just...

And because of their semi-rolling, it's an apt update, apt get update, whatever. Follow along with Debian. And I'm essentially current. And because it's so minimal, there's not a lot that's going to break. So I can leave this in a VM, park it for months at a time, fire it back up, do an update upgrade, and I'm good to go. You know, really, the only thing I didn't do was bother installing a different kernel because everything was working really great. I think, really, when you look at it, Sparky Linux is that thing we didn't really know was possible anymore. It's a new community based around a Debian distro cropping up that really actually kind of fills a few niches and isn't just barking into the wind. fills a few niches and isn't just barking into the wind. A community has actually shown up and is funding this thing at the tune that is, I'm very happy to say, 210% of a monthly goal, right?

Like there's a real response here. Barking into the wind. Was that a stab at puppy? Also, what kind of boot time did you get? 18 seconds. I got 18 seconds on that there boot time, which just barely under it. And I felt like maybe could have been a little better. I'll tell you, there's that. I felt like the boot time could have been slightly faster, although I'll take it. I would have loved to have seen the Arc theme installed by default, obviously, in the repo. Why not have it by default? And boy, howdy, would I love an ARM version.

This would be such a solid candidate for a Pi 4 desktop. Well, you know, Chris, I just looked, and there actually is on, if you go to sparkylinux.org slash tag slash raspberry pi, they actually do have builds ready to go. Well, there you go. I think Chris should be minus points for not finding that. Well, I think, guys, I mean, I don't want to speak here for all of you, but clearly this is a contender now because the active community, the Debbie and Rowling base or stable, whichever you prefer,

the several additions that scratch different itches and an arm addition. How are you going to beat this in a lightweight distro, guys? How are you going to beat that? So, I mean, that's why I'm going for that additional 10 points of convincing your co-host. I didn't even bother with the kernel because I think if you just look at the facts here, you add it all up, I have 39.5 points base. But if you add that 10- point convince a co-host, if any one of you agree with me that this is a solid lightweight distro with a great community available for multiple platforms

and different types of uses, then I get 10 additional points. And that puts me at 49.5, which is ahead of Drew at 47. I'm just putting that out there. I think that your whole display there was the convincing the co-host. I think you started with convincing your co-host and then you went into the specs. And let's not forget that Chris added the convincing the co-host 10-point round today.

Today. Hours ago. Moments before the show. Yes, that's true. However, he, hours ago. Moments before the show. Yes, that's true. However, he looked at it. He saw what I was posting in Slack and said, oh, my God, I'm going to lose this thing. I need something.

Yeah. No, I just feel like I just thought, you know what? At the end of the day, you got to have an inclusive understanding of a distribution. It can't just be a by-the-numbers thing. It's got to be about the community, too. And we needed a way to factor that. And I thought if one of us could truly advocate because we love something, we fell in love with it, that should be worth something. Well, let me just tell you, Calibri OS, I added up the points for it. Oh, shoot.

And it got 19. Hold on, hold on. I forgot all about that. Three of us vote that it's our favorite. I got so obsessed with Winnie, and I completely forgot to talk about that. If three of us vote that it's our favorite. I got so obsessed with Winnie and I completely forgot to talk about that. So give us your thoughts on Calibre OS. Well, it's a small open source x86 only. Someone's losing out there,

but hey, FreeBSD runs on all kinds of stuff. It's forked off a menu at OS, if you remember that, and it's just coded completely in assembly. And all right, if you thought what you were using was a throwback, this thing is amazing. Not only does it have primo floppy support,

it's got read-only NTFS, it can do EXT 2, 3, and 4, but it comes with a whole bunch of games, including Doom, let me just say, and a ton of just handy, you know, from all this compile chain, a lot of nice tools for doing development in assembly, and then, you know, an IRC client that you can use to connect up to. Some other chat stuff. Its own web browser. Now, I wasn't able to play the MP3. It does include an audio player and sound does work. But the web browser didn't want to. I tried to download it, but our MP3s are hosted on HTTPS.

And I think that's where things went wrong. I didn't verify. It did load the page. So, like, LinuxUnplugged.com loaded and it got to the download link but I tried to use the built-in. Yeah, HTTPS is hard. I think if I had done it and pulled up a terminal, downloaded it that way

and I could have played it back on the operating system. Using like WGIT or something? Curl or something? It does have a bunch of Unix built-ins and it comes with a compiler toolchain so you can install stuff from an outside operating system and it boots wicked fast so it should get extra points there i love this because this is one of those os's that you didn't even know existed and now you just want to go check it out

i just searched for this online and one of the things that came up was my mom tries it out but wikipedia says west that they haven't had a release for a year. For a year. But hey, we were talking about XFCE. So we all know that that's OK sometimes. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough.

You only need an i586 compatible CPU. All right. So I think what we have here is a bit of a standstill. And we need to bring in our virtual lug to help us sort this out a little bit. I know some of you have been listening along and have your own considerations. Jill, you've heard the arrangement. I know that you've been around. You've seen these distros. What do you think is the winner here? Who should get the Convince the Co-host 10 points? Definitely Sparky Linux. I love it too. And it's just so flexible.

Hey, really? That was not planned. That was not planned. Okay, Jill, please go into detail. Checks in the mail, Jill. It's a beautiful looking desktop and minimal, and you can run Steam games on it. So for me, that's huge. And this is a really, really great challenge. There's another distro that's kind of similar to Sparky called Antiex or Antix. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so that one was based on originally Meepis with my group, the Linux Chicks of Los Angeles.

We used that to install on old Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 laptops that went to third world countries. Oh, that's great. And it's still running great on those machines and they're still actively updating it. And it's a wonderful Debian, little Debian distro that does all the things. That is a bit of what we're talking about here. And we get so caught up in like vulnerabilities

about Intel CPUs and old machines that are just discarded now. But the reality is you can put a distribution on these things. And if it's the right one, that machine could run until the components fail, which is a surprisingly long time. At this rate, it seems to be long after the world ends. Yeah, definitely. And another suggestion I had, and it's one of my favorite distros of all time, is Tiny Core Linux, which was a spinoff of Damn Small Linux.

And it actually runs on my thin clients, my four megabytes of RAM thin clients. Wow. And it'll run in a DOS loopback on ARM, you know, on all the things. Holy smokes. Wow. Yeah. This wasn't an extensive list of tiny distributions or like lightweight, but that's what we got. And you can basically do whatever you want. You can have a full-fledged system. You can strict them down to the basics. But you're really flexible

with Flatpak, Steam, everything you want. I think that's the takeaway from this episode, is when you do a lightweight, if you can afford it, it does require a little bit more disk space. But go Debian-based if you can, because that just opens up so, so much more software. It comes down now, I think, in my estimation to Bunsen Labs and Sparky, if we go by the points and nobody assigns the convince a co-host, then I think Drew has it at 47 and I'm coming in at 39.5. Cheese, you got 30 points. Wes, you got 40. I'm quite compelled, especially by Jill's testimony here today about Sparky Linux. I'll admit, as much as I really have had fun with FreeBSD. Okay, I like what you're saying.

But I think you've had the pulpit for a while, and Drew should get to go to bat maybe for some of the community or other aspects around his. Yeah, I would like to hear more about the community around Bunsen. That's actually the thing that's going to make me say that my vote actually will go to Sparky. No way! What? How dare you? As much as I love Bunsen Labs

and really enjoyed my time with Helium, the pitch that you gave for the community around Sparky Linux really makes me appreciate it. It's not a distro that I had really checked out. I'm not familiar with Sparky at all, but I am curious, especially if the community is that driven. Community is such an important part to me, especially after everything that I went through with all of the investigations that I did for Choose Linux. Community is huge. And if the Sparky community

is that involved, then it deserves my attention, just hands down. Now, I will say that between the two, Bunsen Labs and Sparky do seem like they're on a fairly even playing field. I think you would have clinched it without any of the co-host points if you had installed the kernel. Yeah. Because running Debian, you could have gotten Licrix installed in five minutes. You could have done it.

No, you're right. I should have. I just, I thought going into it, I was so impressed by how, because skeptical Chris, I went into it thinking, this must be one of those ego projects where nobody's paying attention. And boy, did I have that opinion corrected.

And so I was so impressed by that because you just don't see it anymore. And I really thought to myself, this seems like something that will stick around for a while. Okay. Now, with that all said, does anyone in the mumble room want to chime in for puppy? Because I know we have some advocates in there. Maybe we could do some convincing. Cheese could use a solid 10 points because right now he's at the bottom at 30. That would bring him up at least to tie with Wes.

That depends on what kernel of the spark he'd come with. Puppy comes with 4-7 out of the box on the bionic pup version. 4-7? You know what you can say about that? It's not 3. I can't even get that to boot on my system, man. But, you know, I mean, something that we need to

consider too, right, is portability. So if you wanted to just throw this on a flash drive, and say you had an old netbook kicking around, it would be a great distro for that. Dude, it doesn't matter if you can't boot it! Okay, it's really coming down to it. So Drew has thrown in behind Sparky Linux.

That adds 10 points to me. Here's our current point lineup. I'm in the lead at 49.5 points. Drew has 47 points. Cheese has 30. Wes has 40. Mr. Cheese Bacon, which distribution would you like to

consolidate behind? I'm definitely going to go with Bunsen. And a lot of the reason behind that is because I was a huge CrunchBang fan, and the community around CrunchBang was awesome back in the day, and

evolved into Bunsen. And I'm a huge fan of Openbox because, look, you got Openbox. You are so fired, man. You are so fired. You got Openbox. You got Trayer. You got Tint2. Everything is configurable by just a comp file.

So just restart X and you're back. You know, it's super, super easy, super extensible, modifiable. But I think in the future that we need to add to this points list, we need to add community and we also need to add documentation. Oh. Because there's a lot to be said

about both of those things and how well distros implement those. Very true. Okay. All right. I think that is, I think that is completely fair for future versions. If we do this again, if we do the great bake-off. I think that is completely fair for future versions. If we do this again, if we do the great bake-off.

I think we have to bring pies for the next bake-off also. I like that. I'll just talk about it. All right. Okay. I need to brace myself. Westpain, you currently sit at 40 points. You're not going to beat this thing.

So you got to, I think, you just got to throw in. Behind a distribution. Drew currently sits at 57 points in the lead. I'm coming in the rear at 49.5. I thought maybe you were making a good case for getting behind the old Sparky, but I got to admit, there's a good case for Bunsen too. Wes Payne, where are you throwing your host endorsement? Well, what I want to do

is give it to CalibriOS to get it to 29 points, so it's a little more respectable. But, I mean, I think having listened to Jill and just a ton of stuff I see over there on the IRC, yeah, alright. I have to go with Sparky. Oh my

goodness, are you serious right now? Are you serious? Is that your final answer? That is my final support. That barely puts me in the lead at 59.5. I take the win there. Just barely for Sparky Linux. Not for me, but for the developers of Sparky Linux who have worked so hard to make a great distribution with a strong community following. It is that community, not me, that put it over the edge here. And I also want to

thank my mom and my kids. You know, I saw you booting it up a little really suddenly because it had a nice looking boot animation. I saw that across the room and I was like, that's going to have to be. Also, the dark mode is slick looking, isn't it? Isn't that nice? Yeah. Yeah. They really nailed it. Now, the only thing that kept us from being a blowout was that you had a gambit to not do the alternate kernel and instead rely solely on your last minute addition of a points entry for convincing your co-host.

Right. You know, the thing is, I am a natural salesman, so I thought that could be a strength. But also, I knew you guys, because you all are long-term Linux users, you know that a strong community is vital to make a distribution successful. And I knew I'd get you on that point. Damn it. distribution successful. And I knew I'd get you on that point. Damn it. If I was a co-host, I would have actually thrown it towards Bunsen because of it,

because it's actually outlasted a distribution now. That's fair. You know, longevity does count. And Cheese did, I think to Cheese's credit, he did throw in his 10 points. Drew, you really almost got it at 57. And I think what the takeaway there is Bunsen or Sparky is actually really great. They're both worth giving a try after you listen to this episode. And they both have great names. There's that. And the really thing to take away from it is that they're Debian-based. And that really seems to be the winning recipe.

And what a rich ecosystem has spawned from Debian, you know? I mean, like, it itself is great. And then you've just got this whole world of other creative, interesting options that are useful. Well, let's begin to wrap it up right here. If you've got any show ideas or feedback or concerns, considerations, or anything else, go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. For links to the distributions we talked about and whatnot today, you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash 357. The show is at Linux Unplugged on Twitter. The network is at Jupiter Signal.

Mr. Payne, where can they find you? At West Main. How about that? That's easy. Easy to remember. Drew, Cheese, where can they find you guys? I'm at DrewDoom on Twitter. At CheeseBacon. God, I can't believe that.

CheeseBacon, that's so good. You know what? You could build an empire around that name. All right, we are live on Tuesdays, except for when I'm on the road. That's so good. You know what? You could build an empire around that name. All right. We are live on Tuesdays except for when I'm on the road. That calendar is jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We appreciate you joining us live. Thanks so much for tuning in this week's episode of the Unplugged program.

And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. So this whole challenge was flawed because there was no Arch involved in this conversation. And there was no Fedora either. Arch is the smallest. Well, you know, we just kind of, we had a list of distributions, and we just tumbled them all up and assigned them. It wasn't like a comprehensive, but you're right. Something Arch-based would probably

do very well, and I could see something Fedora-based. I don't think that is so much as an oversight as it is an opportunity for future content. More backups!