31 Oct 2017

Ubuntu 17.10 quick screenshot tour

Ubuntu 17.10 is the newest version of this world famous Linux distribution, and this one is especially interesting because Canonical decided to dump its controversial Unity baby and use GNOME desktop environment  instead.
It means that there are no longer separate Ubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME distributions. They are now the same. Linux notes from DarkDuck has reviewed the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 not that long ago.
Let's now have a quick whistle stop tour on Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME desktop environment.

24 Oct 2017

Rough Edges of the ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 LXQt

ROSA is not a leader among the Linux distributions, per the Distrowatch rating.

However, Linux Notes from DarkDuck blog watches this distribution very carefully. There were reviews of ROSA 2012 Marathon, ROSA 7 KDE, ROSA 8 Plasma 5. Even though ROSA 2012 Marathon was far from perfect, the latter versions were much improved. Each time I felt this distribution was greatly undervalued by the Linux community. Maybe because its main development team is based in Russia and there is a stigma against anything Russian made in current Western propaganda?

ROSA R9 was released in April 2017, and an additional release of LXQt version was released in June 2017. I have never seen a distribution with the LXQt desktop, and I could not miss this opportunity to check what it feels like.

The ISO image of ROSA Desktop Frresh R9 LXQt is about 1.4 Gb in size. It is available through several mirrors. I downloaded it and "burnt" onto a USB stick using the most usual way: command dd.

The USB stick is in the port of my laptop Dell Inspirion 17.

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

19 Oct 2017

The most promising linux distributions in 2017

Linux distributions have already gained recognition of its users and with every year new products appear in the market. Many of them focus on the certain tasks, so you can’t create a single list of the best ones. Here we have chosen several fields of Linux use and those distributions that have all chances to take the initial positions in their niche in 2017.

14 Oct 2017

7 years

Congratulations everyone!

Today is the 7th Birthday of the blog
Linux Notes from DarkDuck

7 years ago today the first article was published here in English. There were some Russian article before, but they are now deleted, so don't count.

Excited adventure.

An interesting trip!

And the story must go on!

Congratulations everyone!


5 Oct 2017

The Geezer and the Penguin

This is a personal story - the Penguin, of course, is Linux, and I’m the Geezer, 84 years old. We met at first out of idle interest and got to know each other out of necessity. Here's how it all happened.

26 Sept 2017

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!

19 Sept 2017

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.