[QUESTION] Targeted distros for testing?

[RedBearAK]

@rbreaves

While I'm doing all this testing to improve the compatibility of the installer script, I thought I would ask what your priorities are as far as which distros to focus on for testing and "officially" supporting. This is my list, in order of what I'll try to focus on first.

I know there is no good reference for which distros are actually used more frequently. But I figure a combination of any of the top 30-ish on DistroWatch that are actually desktop-oriented distros, plus whatever gets mentioned most frequently online, is a good start. Manjaro/Arch, Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed get mentioned quite a lot everywhere I go. So I think they are close behind the Ubuntus for number of users.

Ubuntu/Debian: Ubuntu Desktop (stock edition) Linux Mint (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) Ubuntu variant editions (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, etc.) Pop!_OS elementary OS KDE Neon Debian (stock)

Red Hat/RPM-based: Fedora Workstation (has moved to Wayland as default) (To test in live boot without full install, create new user and log in with Xorg.) AlmaLinux (replacing CentOS) openSUSE Tumbleweed / Leap

Arch: Manjaro - official desktop variants (KDE, GNOME, Xfce) Manjaro - (comes in at least a dozen different desktop variants)

Planning on testing the "minimal" desktop variants whenever I get a chance to be sure the installer script pulls all necessary packages for each platform. Or at least is able to tell the user which packages are missing.

[ghost]

Thanks for great work. Please include official support for Linux Mint Cinnamon. Thanks.

[RedBearAK]

@krswin

Kinto is working well on every official desktop environment for Linux Mint. Applying the Xfce tweaks to the kinto.py file allows it to work simultaneously with Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce on the same machine, if desired.

It's one of the most popular distros for new or less technical users so it will always be part of testing for me. I've been using Mint myself quite a lot over the past year.

[ghost]

@RedBearAK Thanks a lot for reply.

[rbreaves]

Lately I've been spending more time in Windows 10 than I'd like, but when I do drive linux on my laptop I boot into Ubuntu Budgie and only test the others in Virtualbox. I do now have a shared partition on my drive that allows me to continue my VM dev testing under macOS, Ubuntu Budgie and Windows without missing a beat. It is limited in size though, 200gb. So I keep some but not all VMs on there.

My primary focus will always be Ubuntu, Debian and Apt packaged based distros. I simply find them to be the most user friendly. Secondarily I see that Arch seems to be very popular and up to date, Fedora, redhat, and opensuse probably all get the least amount of love from me and distros secured by SELinux, such as Fedora, x have not gotten enough attention by me. I am not sure what the solution is to this besides finding the time to setup the CI pipelines to automatically run on commits into dev &/or master if any critical files are updated.

I think the ranking of importance for me goes like this.

Ubuntu Budgie Ubuntu Ubuntu Mate EnsoOS XUbuntu KDE Neon PopOS Manjaro Gnome/KDE (Only Arch coverage) ElementaryOS Fedora OpenSUSE

I am working on adding MX Linux into the mix so that will likely rank just below Ubuntu for me, as it also represents support for sysvinit going forward once it is added. I don't appear to have a Linux Mint vm so I guess I need to add or recreate one.

To really sum things up I rank distros based on it using the apt package manager and a global menu capable DE by default. If it lacks either of those 2 then the global menu DE will still rank high, but I have my preferences.

[RedBearAK]

@rbreaves

My primary focus will always be Ubuntu, Debian and Apt packaged based distros. I simply find them to be the most user friendly.

I'd agree with that, but the dnf command turns out to be very similar, using plain English command names almost mirroring apt, rather than weird cryptic letter options or abbreviations. Fedora has turned out to be a pretty polished and easy to use distro. I was surprised. Well, at least Fedora 34 GNOME, which just came out of beta, BTW. OpenSUSE gave me the most trouble, and Manjaro, as someone new to using them. Still don't care for either of them.

To really sum things up I rank distros based on it using the apt package manager and a global menu capable DE by default. If it lacks either of those 2 then the global menu DE will still rank high, but I have my preferences.

I still like the idea of a global app menu, but with the number of Linux apps that fail to be fully compatible (like Firefox) and the number of DEs that don't have it as an easy option, I am finding it less important than I used to. Nice to have, but not required. My focus is mainly keyboard shortcuts (fixed with Kinto, obviously) and looking for DEs that support application-centric task switching. Turns out I may have very limited options for the latter: Ubuntu (stock) or something like Fedora with largely unmodified GNOME. Which is funny, because I've been avoiding both for years, and I didn't care for what I've seen of Unity.

Budgie developers unfortunately appear to have strayed too far from GNOME and lost the ability that still exists in regular Ubuntu, to enable application-switching in place of window-switching. They seem uninterested in getting it back, or in fixing the completely broken Cmd+Grave functionality (I saw your comment on that issue). My feature request issue for application-switching was closed almost immediately and deemed a duplicate of an issue that barely mentions grouping applications under a single icon in half of one sentence. Needless to say, I disagree.

So I've discovered I'm far less focused on making a DE look exactly like a Mac, as long as the UI looks similarly clean and consistent, and more focused on my keyboard shortcuts and sane task switching. I have an open bug report/feature request for KDE to add application-switching, which surprisingly got some attention from a prominent KDE dev. So maybe Plasma distros will join that short list someday.

[rbreaves]

Ah, well I don't know if I have mentioned Waterfox to you, but it is what I have started to use, they only stick with Firefox ESRs for modifying, but they perfectly restore the global menu capability. It is annoying though to have to compile it sorta from the tar.gz file.. and this repo https://github.com/hawkeye116477/install-waterfox-linux.

As of today I have found some new projects that appear to bring back the global menu feature and even a blur effect for Gnome 40, so I will be testing that out soon. Tbh - if it delivers well then Ubuntu Budgie will be less important to me, particularly if the Gnome team can calm themselves down for 2 seconds and not break the underlying API so badly that it kills Global Menu development again. Regardless this is why my codename project Kairos exists - I plan to build it up and maintain it to the point of solving the Linux Desktop fragmentation issue by taking common sense UI and UX approaches that should exist, imo, and even be defaults or at least a preset layout option.

I may extend Kairos though into 4 camps though, Cupertino style just like Ubuntu Budgie but w/ more tweaks, Redmond style, Mountain View and maybe something like Paradise (there's an actual place btwn Redmond & Cupertino called that lol). Paradise would be a mix of all styles. Of course the ability to customize to the exact preferences the user wants will be there, even with preset yaml config I want to give the option to selective turn anything on or off. I am also wondering if I can setup Google Drive integration even so that you can store your settings up in the cloud and bring them with you to any OS.

I have many ideas atm and not enough time lol, but if I write them all down maybe I will actually knock a good many of them out.

[RedBearAK]

Ah, interesting. But if they only use ESR versions I'm not sure I'm too interested. Firefox has been adding a number of new features in each version recently, especially related to Linux, and I like to stay current.

But thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. Looks like it's easy to run the AppImage version.

[rbreaves]

Yea, I'd prefer to stay current as well, but overall I'd rather have the global menu still lol. Also I added some details to the above comment about changes/updates I plan to make to Kairos. Really do want to try and address the feeling of Desktop fragmentation btwn the popular distros and even some that are designed to work well on older hardware. Desktop fragmentation is a clear frustration of Linus Torvalds, and a lot of us I imagine and I can't see it getting resolved any time soon by expecting distro maintainers and developers to care enough about UX that they don't all go in different directions or limit or expand themselves or their distro or default configurations for the sake of the user.

It would be nice - but in lieu of that I think it is a better approach is to just accept that they all will and want to do their own thing until the end of time and the better approach to take with them is just ask what's the fewest modifications can I make to any number of them to get things to align in a more sensible manner.

[RedBearAK]

I plan to build it up and maintain it to the point of solving the Linux Desktop fragmentation issue by taking common sense UI and UX approaches that should exist, imo, and even be defaults or at least a preset layout option.

LOL. Well, you know what they say, "Reach for the stars and you'll hit the Moon." It would be pretty nice to be able to sit down at any common distro and run a script and wind up with some sane, clean UI defaults and such (like Kinto).

I'll note really quick that installing something like Nemo on a system like stock Ubuntu that already has Nautilus can wind up being pretty confusing to the user, since (and this is a problem with many of the forks of GNOME apps) they both call themselves "Files" and have similar appearance. Kairos should probably be asking for more user confirmation for several of the things it's installing.

Given what I was saying about application-switching vs window-switching, I would love to see Kairos asking for the user's preference and automatically setting the keyboard shortcuts accordingly to enable one or the other on GNOME-based distros.