[HN Gopher] Linux Lite: Easy to Use Free Linux Operating System
___________________________________________________________________
Linux Lite: Easy to Use Free Linux Operating System
Author : janandonly
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-07-09 07:44 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.linuxliteos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.linuxliteos.com)
| leke wrote:
| I recently found a really lite distro called Alpine Linux. It's
| flies on my old netbook from 2013.
| syntaxing wrote:
| FWIW, it's used in a lot of container images. For instance, the
| Python official Docker images use Alpine as their base OS.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Wow, it's free? So no more super expensive Linux distributions?
|
| /s
| debo_ wrote:
| Zorin also works really well as an option for folks trying to
| transition from Windows or MacOS. Swap in xanmod and you've got a
| snappy desktop that just works. My 75-year old mother found her
| way around it in very short order.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Linux Mint is serving that niche really well IMO. Wonder why
| would anyone use Lite and not Mint?
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I had a hard time installing Mint on a computer a few years
| ago.
|
| I ended up blaming it on my motherboard because I couldn't get
| anything to boot and I probably read a thread about it.
| Meanwhile any other linux distro seemed to work fine.
|
| No idea though.
|
| But since then, I haven't bothered with Linux Mint. Trying to
| stay closer to Debian and further away from Conical.
| qskousen wrote:
| https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php they have that
| covered :)
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Wow thank you!
|
| That seems super robust.
|
| I suppose now I need to decide if I should go with a trendy
| new distro or the classic.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| What desktop does it use? Can't easily see from the website. But
| from the choice of Thunar as file manager, seems like it is XFCE?
| Also default browser seems to be Chrome instead of Firefox which
| is an odd choice for a Linux distro, but probably to make
| onboarding easier. Also this is yet another distro that builds on
| top of Ubuntu, which is rather concerning if tomorrow Ubuntu
| should do a RHEL, a vast swathe of Linux distros would
| immediately run into trouble. And finally I'd like to know if
| there's any significant advantage over Linux Mint whose niche
| this seems to target as well.
|
| Edit: Is there _any_ distro out there _other_ than Ubuntu and
| Fedora that can play well with Secure boot enabled?
| msla wrote:
| > What desktop does it use?
|
| If the answer isn't "any one I choose" the distro is broken.
| korean-pixel_13 wrote:
| Its xfce with:
|
| Window Theme: Materia
|
| Icon Theme: Papirus
|
| Font: Roboto Regular
| tmtvl wrote:
| It's Xfce, yeah. And as much as Ubuntu going RHEL would hurt
| many distros, Debian doing so would be even bigger.
|
| As for Secure Boot, OpenSUSE should work.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| True but in Debian's case I believe their 'social contract'
| forbids such a move, plus there is no central for-profit
| entity controlling the source code.
| bionsystem wrote:
| Debian is community maintained. Funny to recommend OpenSUSE
| but pretend debian could do the same as RHEL.
| distrowatcher wrote:
| > Edit: Is there any distro out there other than Ubuntu and
| Fedora that can play well with Secure boot enabled?
|
| See this distro watch page:
|
| https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?pkg=shim&relation=...
|
| I haven't checked which ones are derivatives of Ubuntu or red
| hat, but you may observe that some bsd systems are available.
| [deleted]
| Propelloni wrote:
| It would be shorter to answer the question which Linux
| distribution does not play well with Secure Boot. Debian was
| the last big one to get onboard and they sorted it out in 2019.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Would it? Because the answer is probably "most of them".
| There's _hundreds_ of distros. I _very much_ doubt they care
| about Secure Boot, or, even if they do, have the resources to
| support it. Some are even outright opposed to Secure Boot for
| a variety of reasons.
|
| Can you enable it anyway on any distro? Yes, but it may
| require non-trivial steps to do so.
| Propelloni wrote:
| You are right. I was thinking of distros in the same league
| as Fedora or Ubuntu. Debian, Suse, RHEL all play nice with
| Secure Boot. Of the big ones only Arch does not work with
| Secure Boot out of the box.
|
| I guess many minor distributions don't bother at all.
| Thanks for pointing it out.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Debian will work fine with secure boot. MX Linux can as well,
| as long as it's using a Kernel from Debian.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Never pay for software again.
|
| vs Give What You Can (USD/EUR) - Support Linux
| Lite
|
| I am getting mixed messages here.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Donating isn't really the same as paying
| not_your_vase wrote:
| If you throw some money at the project so the dev team can
| drink a couple of beers on you, that's donation.
|
| If you throw some money at the project because they imply
| that otherwise development and software availability stops,
| that's paying for software.
|
| Not saying that either one is bad, or worse than the other.
| But this doesn't look like the first case.
| its-summertime wrote:
| If a charity stops receiving donations, it also stops.
|
| The project can stop regardless of your donation, in turn,
| there is no return consideration. Which is what makes it a
| donation.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| How is it different from any other paid software, that
| come with an agreement stating that the software comes
| without any promises and warranties (including having the
| software working and existing in the
| past/present/future)?
|
| They say it costs money to develop and maintain software.
| Which is fine, because it does. But from that moment the
| statement "Never pay for software again" becomes quite
| disingenuous, if you ask me.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The distrowatch page provides more information than their
| website, https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lite
|
| While trying to find info on their website, they seem to
| highlight some text in a sentence by making it blue, but it's not
| a link. Quite annoying.
|
| And while not a major thing, calling the distro "lite" then
| shipping with 2100 packages so you won't have to install anything
| else is a misnomer
| alrlroipsp wrote:
| > they seem to highlight some text in a sentence by making it
| blue, but it's not a link. Quite annoying.
|
| This is a blast from the past, indeed!
|
| Blue links is the ancient default when you don't use css.
|
| It was news for me that any websites still would not override
| the default css, though.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Blue text color and underline are two things that universally
| help people recognize links - so no matter how custom your
| CSS is, using any of these traits for other purposes is a bad
| idea.
|
| Of course, nowadays links can be any color and without
| underline, and we're getting used to it too. This only means
| that using _any color_ to emphasise words in a text is a bad
| idea, as more and more people would see that as a link and
| get confused.
|
| _Just stick to the good old italics._
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I suspect this is why many modern websites use the blue
| links with underline. People instantly see them as links.
|
| Examples:
|
| Azure Blog:
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-
| blog/...
|
| If you look at the CSS, they actually went out of their way
| to add that underline back in, it's intentional.
|
| A more common pattern seems to be blue text that gets
| underlined on hover. * AWS Docs:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/index.html * GCP
| Docs: https://cloud.google.com/docs/
|
| Web applications likely prefer buttons as links, which
| probably makes sense. They aren't "web pages" they are
| "applications". Text web pages stick to traditional HTML
| metaphors.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Too many animations everywhere make it very unpleasant to
| navigate the site... I just gave up.
| butterfi wrote:
| As opposed to non-free Linux distributions?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Red Hat sends its regards, yes.
| seedie wrote:
| With all the ads on the page it looks more like a scam then a
| Linux distro to me. On mobile half the page size is filled with
| ads. Ad, some content, donation links, some content, ad, some
| content...
|
| I just can't take it seriously
| montroser wrote:
| Yeah...but the adverts do kinda make it on brand. It's catering
| to Windows refugees, so maybe for those folks it just feels
| like home!
|
| In all seriousness, if you're actually looking for a Linux
| distro for a less-techincal audience, check out ElementaryOS.
| uwagar wrote:
| mx linux is fast!
| sheepscreek wrote:
| After being a GNOME fanboy for decades, v3.0 and beyond left
| me disillusioned. I took to ElementaryOS and Mate, which was
| alright. Then I discovered KDE Plasma (thanks to Steam Deck)
| and absolutely fell in love with it. Well, well, well...how
| the turn tables[1].
|
| 1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=How%20the%
| 20...
| Infernal wrote:
| So you use ElemantaryOS with the KDE Plasma desktop? Or
| Plasma on a different distro now?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Obligatory reminder that elementaryOS, "the easiest to use
| Linux distro" made as a knockoff of macOS, expects users to
| format and reinstall every year when a new version is
| released.
|
| I can't recommend it.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| This is the case for _most_ Linux distributions, except for
| LTS and rolling release, and the latter isn 't newbie
| friendly, which leaves the only good experience newcomers
| have with Linux are the LTS releases with increasingly
| outdated userspace apps. I hope immutable distributions
| take off, which will make major upgrades easier and
| pristine rollback easy. The Linux space really needs a
| newbie friendly, immutable distro. I know of Vanilla OS,
| OpenSUSE Aeon & Fedora Silverblue... hope we get more
| competition.
| EvanDotPro wrote:
| As an anecdote, I've been upgrading a single install of
| Fedora stable for years without any issues.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Same here. I love that aspect of Fedora. My main desktop
| has been upgraded-in-place for 8 or so years now.
| still_grokking wrote:
| > ElementaryOS
|
| One person project...
|
| Of course no security team...
| jll29 wrote:
| I thought ElementaryOS was dead due to infighting between the
| two cofounders, but it still seems to be going:
| https://elementary.io/
|
| (I had installed it on one box a few years ago and liked it,
| but moved back to Ubuntu once I learned about its conflict in
| the team.)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Well, that's illogical. Lots of serious things have ads.
| Youtube, the Wall Street Journal, Highway 1. Take your pick.
| seedie wrote:
| It's not about having ads or not. As I explained elsewhere it
| is the ad to content ratio.
|
| There are so many ads and they sometimes blend with the
| content that it's hard to find information. That was my
| experience. YMMV
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Not illogical at all. It gives you information about the
| creators and is atypical for open source folks to
| commercialize in user-hostile ways. It's like a moral version
| of code smell.
|
| The examples aren't very good analogies.
| lockhouse wrote:
| So how are they supposed to commercialize given that most
| Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?
|
| Donations seldom amount to enough to pay for hosting costs
| and supporting the developers and their families.
|
| Nobody buys physical discs anymore.
|
| Selling swag can have some limited success if you can come
| up with a really cool design, mascot, and/or logo
|
| A few companies have had success selling hardware, but
| that's a pretty small market overall with quite a bit of
| competition already.
|
| Subscriptions generally only work if you're providing
| commercial support contracts.
|
| Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think of
| that are making any significant amount of money selling
| closed source software to Linux users.
|
| I'm not surprised at all that they are using ads to
| monetize their distro, as it's one of the few ways they
| can.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think
| of that are making any significant amount of money
| selling closed source software to Linux users.
|
| Honestly, JetBrains have some of the better IDEs out
| there, that have all of the features I need, pretty good
| code completion and suggestions, some of the best
| refactoring out there, good debugging capabilities and
| framework integrations as well as language specific
| functionality (e.g. dependency management integration).
| Well worth the money. Even Fleet, their text editor
| alternative to VSC will probably be mature enough to be a
| serious contender in a few years, though not yet.
|
| Another piece of software that I pay for is GitKraken, a
| really nice Git client with a GUI, which makes switching
| between different accounts a breeze (for example,
| different GitHub accounts, each with a separate SSH key)
| and makes using Git actually pleasant with all of the
| visual features. It feels like a more polished SourceTree
| or a more featureful Git Cola and makes me feel like you
| don't need to use the CLI all the time anymore.
|
| On Windows, there's maybe MobaXTerm, perhaps one of the
| best SSH clients with things like multi-exec, support for
| a variety of protocols and other quality of life features
| that mRemoteNG and other options don't quite have. Pretty
| good.
|
| > So how are they supposed to commercialize given that
| most Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?
|
| Other than that, most of the software I use is free and
| good enough (the cheapskate argument, I guess):
| everything from LibreOffice, to things like GIMP, OBS,
| Audacity and Kdenlive. I guess what I'm saying is that if
| you make a really good product that doesn't have
| alternatives that are close enough in your niche, then
| you can indeed do decently selling it.
|
| As for how that would look for a distro, I'm not sure,
| given how many other mature ones are out there. Maybe
| selling support, though obviously that is hard to do.
| hordehamhill wrote:
| I wouldn't trust any of those things you list with my data,
| so I think it in fact seems logical.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Give these guys a break. If I'm being honest, why the hell are
| you surfing internet without ubo?
|
| I guess you said mobile so its most likely chrome so guess
| what? Firefox mobile has ubo and heck even Firefox focus has
| decent ad blocker. Even on iOS you have some content blockers
| so you really don't have any reason to use chrome on phones.
|
| If they are making money regardless of my using ubo, that's
| good for them.
| [deleted]
| gabereiser wrote:
| Sure, blame the user... This is why we have distros with ads
| like the OP. It's our fault for seeing the propaganda you
| shove down our throats. Give me a break.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| There's no such thing as a free beer. Someone is paying for
| it. As long as it's not some kind of spyware, I'll take the
| ads and donation prompts.
|
| If we're discussing annoyance, Wikipedia's campaigns are a
| great deal more annoying (but it works).
| SahAssar wrote:
| > There's no such thing as a free beer.
|
| Except there is. Many linux distros are exactly free as
| in beer besides being free as in speech.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| A better analogy might be there's no such thing as a free
| lunch.
|
| All those distros you mention either have commercial
| support (eg: Red Hat, Ubuntu) or substantial recurring
| donations. Someone somewhere is paying even if you
| specifically aren't.
| uwagar wrote:
| im yet to pay a dime for mx linux and its freaking fast
| and awesome.
| lockhouse wrote:
| Cool, but as has been already mentioned in this thread
| someone is footing the bill. Even if the developers are
| fine with donating their time to develop and maintain it
| for free it still costs very real money to run servers.
| SahAssar wrote:
| And there are many people donating their time and
| servers. Most mirrors for for example arch are either
| universities or organizations that derive value from
| arch. Many contributors for OSS either use it as part of
| their work or find it fulfilling to work on it or do
| research with it.
|
| That's not to say that all OSS is like this, or that all
| software should be ran like this but there clearly is
| "free beer" and "free speech" in certain places.
|
| You might say that I pay for the universities with my
| taxes or the other organizations by increased prices on
| goods, but it clearly is offered as a free service for
| all, even people not paying taxes or buying their goods.
| scrps wrote:
| I'd suggest perhaps donating if it is awesome.
|
| If you can't donate there are lots of ways to help: add a
| feature, host a pkg repo mirror, clean up docs, fix bugs,
| add/manage a package, donate older hardware for compat
| testing, help out with community support, github issues.
| Telling people it is awesome also helps but maybe a more
| detailed why would go a bit further to promote it.
|
| Would be more helpful though if corp OSS users who have
| their entire operations underpinned by financially
| undersupported OSS projects stepped up to help.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I understand what you mean but it's just the world we live
| in. These surveillance capitalism and attention economy
| corporations are actively hostile to us and there's no
| proper legal solution in sight. Therefore we must actively
| take measures to defend ourselves against their
| exploitation. Software like uBlock Origin is digital self-
| defense.
| seedie wrote:
| Yes, using an adblocker would be a way for me to not see ads.
|
| But I'm not using one because I usually don't mind seeing ads
| as it's the main income for most sites.
|
| In this case the ad to content ratio is just too much for my
| taste. Too many ads and not enough distinction between ads
| and content.
|
| BTW I tried to add more constructive criticism in another
| reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653500 as the
| parent is flagged dead by now it might not be easily visible
| still_grokking wrote:
| > But I'm not using one because I usually don't mind seeing
| ads
|
| The ads aren't the problem.
|
| The problem is the spy industry behind.
|
| Surfing without content blocker is like selling your soul
| _and_ your first born to the devil, to get _nothing_ in
| return.
| [deleted]
| alrlroipsp wrote:
| [flagged]
| Takennickname wrote:
| I dare you to visit the site without an ad blocker and say
| the same thing. It's worse than gizmodo
| seedie wrote:
| If open source makes money thats great. But if your site
| contains more ads than content I don't spend my time finding
| out how you differ from other linux distros. Being "Free" is
| definitely not enough.
|
| But I get it, that was no constructive criticism so I try to
| do better.
|
| - the ad/content ratio is way to high
|
| - too many unnecessary animations and the choice of colors
| make me think its bad design. And i transfer this opinion on
| the main product.
|
| - its not clear at all to me why I should choose this distro
| over all the other free, easy to use linux distributions
|
| - all of the above points drive me away from spending more
| time on the site to find out more about the project
|
| This is highly subjective, but it seems like I'm not the only
| one struggling to find the information I want in a time I'm
| willing to spend.
|
| (Edited to fix formatting and typos)
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| That reminds me of that "Windows 12" OS someone made by
| basically slapping a theme onto Linux lite and trying to sell
| it (Michael MJD made a YouTube video about it)
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| Are you old enough to remember Lindows? in like 2000/2001 it
| was a straight Windows ripoff, even used the old Win 9x/2k
| theme iirc, and had WINE built in, preconfigured and would
| intercept windows programs automatically and run them via
| that. It was blatant enough MS actually took them to court,
| ended up settling by buying the Lindows trademark from them
| for 20 million and getting a pinky promise they wouldn't be
| so confusing to consumers by trying to pass it off as a
| Windows equivalent. The product was eventually renamed
| Linspire and continued as a noob-friendly distro with less
| 'Hey, we're actually Windows!'.
| anthk wrote:
| Lycoris Desktop->Lindows->Linspire.
|
| Yes, we remember.
|
| You could bypass the instalation prompt by setting up the
| APT repos by hand.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| Lycoris didn't become Lindows, those were two separate
| products from two different companies. Lycoris/Redmond
| Linux was bought out by Mandrake/Mandriva, Lindows went
| on to be bought by Ximian. Same end goal though, make a
| blatant Windows ripoff lol.
| anthk wrote:
| Ah, sorry then. I always tought Lycoris became Linspire.
| housemusicfan wrote:
| Wasn't Lindows the MP3.com guy? Another company that got
| sued out of existence, only to be "reinvented" by Apple a
| decade later as iTunes Match.
| gardnr wrote:
| Size: 2.3GB
|
| From https://www.linuxliteos.com/download.php#current
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Yeah, it's not particularly "lite", certainly not by comparison
| with e.g. Void, Q4OS Trinity, Bodhi, antiX, Slitaz etc.
| jokoon wrote:
| It's pretty great, as long as the support they provide has some
| quality to it and can satisfy professionals.
|
| There are not many ways to make money with open source.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-09 23:02 UTC)