Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2017

Another year has gone. It was a nice year. A year full of new reviews and Linux-related articles. A year when many troubles went away. A year of new life. A year of hope. A year of love.

Let me wish to all of my readers

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!

I wish you all the best in the coming year!

See you all in 2017!

Stay tuned to Linux notes from DarkDuck.

And remember - the Christmas discount for you is still available on BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk.

Top 3 Linux Performance Monitoring Tools

Performance monitoring in Linux system is a MUST and very important process. It is always suggested to get automated performance alerts through monitoring tools. Linux monitoring systems can help you with managing all critical performance tweaks so that critical issues/errors can be resolved well within the timelines.

Here we are going to discuss about top 3 Linux performance monitoring systems that can help you with monitoring Linux system's performance on routine basis.

Zorin 12 Core: unpolished diamond

One of the most anxiously awaited distributions in the Linux world this autumn was Zorin OS.  The anxiety was intense, since the last release of Zorin OS 11 stopped receiving any updates long ago because it was based on the non-LTS version of Ubuntu. Zorin OS 12 was finally released on the 18th of November 2016 with the additional release of an updated ISO image on the 20th of November. There were no reports on the official blog about the reasons for the re-release.

Zorin OS is not a stranger to Linux notes from DarkDuck blog. There were several reviews of this operating system. There was a contest together with Zorin OS team. There was even an interview with Artyom Zorin, the Zorin OS team leader.

As you may be aware, Artyom lives with his family in Ireland. And that was the country I had to visit for my business reasons. Was it a coincidence? Maybe... But then, I had even bigger incentive to write about Zorin OS while being in its motherland.

I downloaded Zorin OS 12 Core 64-bit from the official site and burnt it onto the USB stick using the dd command. The image is 1.6 Gb in size. The USB stick is in the port of my laptop Toshiba L500-19X.

Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5: is it near-perfect?

ROSA is a Linux distribution forked some time ago from Mandriva Linux by a team of Russian developers, Rosa Lab, or officially LLC NTC-IT ROSA.

I reviewed their distributions several times: ROSA KDE R7, ROSA Desktop 2012 and even interviewed the ROSA team.

The most recent release of ROSA is now ROSA Desktop Fresh R8, which is available in several flavours: MATE, GNOME 3, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. I decided to try the Plasma 5 edition of this distribution, especially as my interest to Plasma increased after the good impression Kubuntu 16.10 left on me.

There are links to the ISO images available on the ROSA download page, and I used it to get my own version of this Linux distribution. The size of ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit image is 1.9 Gb. The dd command helped me to "burn" the image to the USB stick.

So, the USB drive is attached to my Toshiba Satellite L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Does Linux community trust Microsoft?

The hype of few past weeks was all about Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation as a platinum member. I purposely don't put any link in here because only a lazy blogger missed that news in his blog. I am a lazy blogger. And I write about different things.

Does actually Linux community like Microsoft? Does actually Linux community trust Microsoft? I cannot answer the first question for sure, but I have a sure answer for the second question.

I published two articles in the last few months about cloud storage offered by two different companies in the world, and about their use with Linux. One of them was about Yandex.Disk and another about Microsoft OneDrive. Each article contains a referral link that allows you to get additional 0.5 Gb storage when you register for the service. And I get additional 0.5 Gb per user too.

Just so you could check yourselves, here are these links: Yandex.Disk and OneDrive.

Each of the services gives me statistics on how many users used my link. And the results pretty much show the trust level:

• Yandex.Disk - 18
• Microsoft OneDrive - 3

Ditto.

Exclusive discount for the blog readers

My dear readers!

You all know that Christmas is just around the corner! This is time where we all buy and receive gifts for and from our friends and family!

What can be better than saving on some of those gifts?

Linux notes from DarkDuck give you a unique opportunity to have 10% off for the whole range of products at BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk site!

This discount is available until the 7th of January 2017 if you use the coupon code Christmas2016 at the checkout.

Happy Shopping!

Debian 8 KDE: good and evil of FOSS

If you ask old Linux users which system is most trusted, stable, solid and supported, Debian of course will be among the leaders of the list.

Linux notes from DarkDuck reviewed Debian Squeeze back in 2011-2012: Xfce, GNOME, KDE and even LXDE versions. But these were Live versions of Debian 6 Squeeze.

Debian 8 Jessie was released in April 2015, and now Debian 8.6 is the most recent update release of this operating system.

Debian exists in various flavours. Since version 7, the "default" desktop environment for Debian is Xfce, but KDE, Cinnamon, GNOME, LXDE versions are released too. There are Live versions of Debian for each of these desktop environments.

I decided to try the KDE flavour of Debian 8.6 Live 64-bit and downloaded the ISO image from the torrent. It is about 1.3 GB in size. The dd command helped me to "burn" the image onto the USB stick.

USB card is in the port of my Toshiba Satellite L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!