SpiralLinux: Anonymous creator of GeckoLinux puts out new Debian remix

Ice Tea · 20 Jun 2022 at 12:56

SpiralLinux: Creator of GeckoLinux emits new Debian remix

Yes, yet another Debian downstream, but a particularly interesting one

www.theregister.com

Rainmaker · 20 Jul 2022 at 12:45

Ha, I recommended this in a thread last night. I've been using it for a few days and so far I'm impressed. I normally daily drive Fedora on desktop, but Spiral mitigates some of Debian's disadvantages and makes for a nice 'off the cuff' live distro when you need to fire something up that just works.

Ice Tea · 20 Jul 2022 at 12:50

It's on my to-do list when i've finished playing with Alpine Linux.

Ice Tea · 30 Jul 2022 at 23:28

VLC?

Who the hell uses VLC with QT5 libraries on a Gnome desktop in 2022, I assume the developer is one of those old clever greybeards that's out of touch?

Ice Tea · 22 Aug 2022 at 12:24

Apparently he has removed AppArmor for no other reason than he doesn't think it's necessary and decided not to mention it.

A great project ruined by some really bizarre choices.

Rainmaker · 22 Aug 2022 at 15:09

Ice Tea said:
Apparently he has removed AppArmor for no other reason than he doesn't think it's necessary and decided not to mention it.

A great project ruined by some really bizarre choices.

That is unfortunate, if that's the case. There are some other similar spinoffs you might check out, including Sparky and Peppermint. Personally I prefer Devuan, which is Debian minus systemd. It likewise comes enabled with non-free stuff out of the box, but does include apparmor and security stuff. It defaults to sysvinit but you get the choice of sysvinit, openrc and runit on install. Practically speaking, that means instead of sudo systemctl (action) (service), you would use sudo service (service) (action), i.e. sudo service unbound restart. Other than that it's just Debian 11.4. The live image uses a light XFCE setup, but again on install you can choose any of the big DEs with tasksel.

Ice Tea · 23 Aug 2022 at 07:52

Rainmaker said:
That is unfortunate, if that's the case.

AppArmor not automatically installed

AppArmor not automatically installed · SpiralLinux · Discussion #77

I found that AppArmor is not automatically installed. What's the reason behind this? I like that you remove some apps on purpose, especially the games on gnome and disabling wayland from the get go...

github.com

geckolinux (spiral Linux Dev)

For the general usage profile of a desktop system behind a NAT firewall using vetted packages from the official Debian and/or Flathub repositories it doesn't seem necessary. Feel free to install it though if desired.

I couldn't find the original reddit post but i found this at the project page, his attitude towards it is even worse than i thought.

Rainmaker said:
Personally I prefer Devuan

Retrying the latest Devuan and Debian non-free are on my todo list as i keep seeing people say that they are now having a much better user experience with them than using Ubuntu or PopOs! though i do plan on giving PopOs! another try. LMDE is nice but cinnamon is showing it's age and they still haven't solved the memory bug other than to have a memory limit before the desktop re-starts itself.

I never planned on changing from Ubuntu and vowed to stop distro hoping but Ubuntu is starting to feel clunky, buggy, bloated and sluggish and a important app like Gnome-Authenticator is broken on Ubuntu yet works perfectly on Debian and the Ubuntu Devs just ignore it.

Don't know what is going on with Ubuntu and i don't know if you noticed that the lead developers Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress buggered off and left the project within a couple of weeks of each other and Popey has now put out a tool called unsnap to remove snaps from Ubuntu and he also put out some tweet that basically said he had concerns with snap but Canonical wasn't prepared to listen, i can't remember if he said it or if it was someone else that Canonical is heading towards corporate dictatorship rather than being a public project.