Neon: the naked KDE

KDE is the desktop environment I have liked for a long time. One of the first distributions installed on my computer was Kubuntu 10.04, and one of the first articles on Linux notes from DarkDuck blog back in 2011 was a comparison of KDE and GNOME.

I come back to KDE-based distributions every now and again, and Kubuntu 16.04 currently runs on my personal laptop. I received several emails and comments under various articles asking me to review KDE Neon. The time has now come.

KDE Neon is a distribution created by the KDE team featuring the most recent version of KDE (Plasma) desktop environment on top of Ubuntu core. Effectively, you have something similar to Kubuntu, but with bleeding edge KDE technology, a few versions higher than Kubuntu.

There are 4 versions of KDE Neon available for download on their web site: User current, User long-term support (LTS), Developer stable and Developer unstable. Only 64-bit images are available. Even the LTS versions have new images updated frequently. The most current non-LTS verion had the date 20170907 (the 7th of September 2017) in the filename at the moment when I downloaded it. The ISO image is 1.7 Gb in size and available to download only from the KDE Neon site.

I downloaded the image and "burnt" it onto the USB stick using the usual method: command dd.

The USB drive is in the port of my Dell Inspirion 17. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Do you want to see 4 000 000?

Back in August 2012 I ran a very simple contest: you had to fix the moment when the visitors' counter on this blog showed the 1,000,000.
It's time when the counter is close to another large and round value, and it is time to announce yet another similar contest.
The rules are the same as they were last time, except for the value you need to show on the screenshot: 4,000,000.

Porteus: portability for pros

Linux notes from DarkDuck started back in 2010 as a blog about portable or pocket Linux distributions. Obviously, the blog has grown a lot since then, but nevertheless portable Linux is always interesting.

Porteus is one of the most famous portable Linux distributions. You can read some reviews of this operating system and even an interview with the Porteus team.

The newest version, Porteus Linux 3.2.2, saw the light at the end of 2016. You can download it from several mirrors that are listed in the flat file available on the original web site. As a side note, this is quite an unusual way to distribute the Linux distribution. Porteus 3.2.2 is available in several flavours, and my choice was the 64-bit Xfce edition. The ISO image is about 240 Mb in size.

The official guide says that the recommended way to boot Porteus is to burn it to a CD. Although booting from USB is also possible, it is a very complicated method. That's why I burnt the image onto a CD-RW disk. That disk is in the tray of my Dell Inspirion 17 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from CD. Let's go!

To Linux Mint KDE 18.2… and back

Linux Mint KDE is just one of several flavours of Linux Mint, and obviously not the flagship of this distribution.

However, I liked that distribution in my test of the Live version of Linux Mint KDE 18.2. I liked it so much that I decided to give it a go in installed mode.

How was that? Let’s check.