not all change is progress
December 6, 2015
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0:00:58 RPi Ubuntu MATE
0:21:12 Feedback
0:44:09 BunsenLabs Linux
With over a thousand downloads every day, Ubuntu MATE continues to be a strong performer on the Raspberry Pi. Joe and Jesse span up 15.10 to report on what’s new in the recent release. After your feedback we looked at BunsenLabs, the anointed successor to the sadly missed CrunchBang.
0:00:58 RPi Ubuntu MATEWith Raspbian increasingly suffering from middle-aged spread, Joe and Jesse took at a look at a distro which ekes out more life from all those 4GB SD Cards you have laying around.
0:21:12 Feedback
Our huge thanks go out to John Hanks, who became a new Monthly Supporter. Without advertising, it’s all of you guys that keep our heads above water, and the show on the road. Thanks again to our regular donors.
0xf10e, Joel Wooten and Steve Brusell all chipped in with thoughts on menus and searching for software. And whilst it’s probably already familiar to anybody who also has to use Windows in addition to Linux, here’s a link to Classic Shell which includes the sanity-saving Classic Start Menu.
On funding, 0xf10e thought that crowd-funding might be useful for helping projects get over that tricky initial release. Rob Landley pointed out how few people really do actively contribute to, as opposed to merely consume, free software projects. But Rob also noted that even with these small numbers, nowadays somebody like Linus Torvalds could probably be supported purely via this means of public funding.
Nathan D. Smith got in touch to sing the praises of Tarsnap, whose strapline is “Online backups for the truly paranoid”. And staying with paranoia — or is it realism? — the Manchester Open Rights Group suggested that the reason services like Tor weren’t explicitly mentioned in the UK Government’s Draft Investigatory Powers Bill is because useful attack surfaces already exist.
Our recent interview with Lukas F. Hartmann garnered thoughtful praise from Charles Stell; whilst Twisted Lucidity got in touch not to praise Microsoft, but to bury them ;)
We wrapped up with a couple of thoughts from Henry Sprog and Russell Dickenson on the topic of hosting Open Conferences.
0:44:09 BunsenLabs Linux
With the demise of CrunchBang, several projects span into life that attempted to keep the ethos of that distro alive. But BunsenLabs was the one that got the nod of approval from corenominal — the developer behind CrunchBang — who has gone so far as redirecting traffic from his old site to theirs.
Speaking about lubuntu, mate and openbox. Actually on lubuntu you can tinker in an openbox session with defualt if you want to tinker and just login to Lubuntu session if say you need to be productive. I remember comments a long time ago about saying unity could basically be accomplished by openbox and a dock. I found that semplice 7 has a less inutitve useability than say openbox with plank and dmenu_run. Which if you put the dock on the left will get you a keyboard launcher launcher if you keybound it that doens’t take up the entire screen which is part of why I don’t like the dash and not be heavy. Granted it would not have scopes for specific things but honestly I would rather use the !bang commands in duck duck go to search for specific sites. Hearing joe talk about new user being able to use Lubuntu reminded me about how numix icons may look pretty but don’t mean anything. I quite like both the ubuntu-mate and lubuntu themes. One thing I am not sure many people know is you can install say ubuntu-mate-artwork in lubuntu if you don’t like the defualt.
Love your review of Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu Mate. You encouraged me to give it a whirl. I use ubuntu mate and run it on my main rig. I had used CrunchBang linux for years. I had it installed on some old laptops and I enjoyed tinkering with openbox menus, etc. Great Show! Hey, is it possible to order from your store, even though I am here in the States?
Glad you enjoyed the review Enrique, and yes, you can have our merchandise delivered to anywhere in the world!!
Awesome!
Thanks for reviewing Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for the Raspberry Pi 2, valuable feedback as always. We’ll try to address the issues you’ve identified, such as no simple way to resize the partitions and erroneously exposing x86 software when toggling the Proprietary Software setting.
For the record, we did make Ubuntu MATE Welcome super fancy to wind up Joe. To prove how serious we are about this, Ubuntu MATE Welcome will feature even more super fantastic animations and transitions in 16.04 :-)
We’ve also been working on a 15.10.1 release which should soon be available for download.
The review of the Raspberry Pi 2 version of Ubuntu Mate was good. Though Raspberry Pi’s are not intended to be “desktop substitutes” per se, it’s good to hear the desktop analysis nonetheless.
On the Bunsen Labs release, I’ve always thought the the
“audience” for #! was users who were neither newbies nor
so advanced that they build distros from scratch. I
thought that its user base was folks who want something
Debian-stable, lightweight for old gear, and yet want to
be able to tinker a bit
I like things that “just work” out of the box, and I use
Peppermint OS for its Lubuntu-like simplicity.
When I want to run a box based directly on Debian rather
than based on Debian-by-way-of-Ubuntu,
I run Q4OS, where I get a lightweight experience,
rock-solid Debian, out-of-the-box codecs, great Mate-like
start menu at installation, easy program installation,
and the amusing Trinity Desktop GUI. As the #! founder
noted, I think it is advances in Debian [rather than, I
add, the advent of Lubuntu] that raise a question about
the need for BunsenLabs
Since I posted my original comment a few weeks ago, I’ve done the same as you and installed bunsen on my laptop. Joe, I agree with you that bunsen (crunchbang) requires some perusing of different scripts, but I think what I like about it more than other lightweight distros is how much control I can have over the system. On my old (2008) macbook, it seems to be faster than lubuntu. I also like conky and the shortcut keys bunsen provides out of the box too :)
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