Enlightenment Desktop
This desktop is finicky.
It fiddles with your monitor from which you cannot recover or log out.
I had to manually configure the monitor to my liking , several times.
It is Light Weight and do not use it.
No Termil or Console to give a kill all command.
Blackbox Desktop
Bundled within Blackbox are number of other Light Weight Desktops.
They are;
1. Awesome
2. Fluxbox
3. IceWarm three editions
Plasma Desktop
I have stopped using Plasma for some time.
It has pleasing front end but the back end uses over 2000MB.
KDE is much simpler and has Falkon browser which is pretty good if you do not like Chrome or Firefox.
I have some good things to talk about KDE Plasma.
I would not have discovered them If I did not test each desktop.
It has both Joplin and Paperwork included as application which is pretty good effort.
Thank You Guys and Girls of Plasma Development Team.
I have to talk about blackbox next since I am into small or light weight desktops.
Note;
One should not forget SWAP Partition and I have one Swap Partition after every distribution, three in number.
I delete (I have two more in reserve) the Swap partition stationed as the last partition in the Partition Table, and install, the latest distribution there, that I am testing to see how much hardware (GB) it needs as it is often claimed by the developers.
I hate Virtual Installations, even though, I have the BOX utility to test the small distributions.
Blend OS is one one should NOT TRY, it is resource hungry and I cannot write it on a 64GB USB.
There is a small caveat here.
If one is using a spinning hard disk the order matters and the scanning needle has to spin a lot, if the order /boot (EFI), /Root,/Usr/Home etc are not sequential.
In an SSD it does not matter unless one uses (I have three distributions in a SSD of 320GB with 40GB reserved for NTFS for storing Iso Images which I test and delete) many Linux distributions, in one disk.
In that scenario for effective booting EFI has to be the first.
As an old habit I use /boot partition first before /root but I do not think at booting, it recurses to boot partition at all.
One can see this order by running system utility, I believe.
In the good old days, it had to be only 4 Primary partitions or 3 Primary and one Logical.
Those day I was dual booting with Windows and for over 20 years NO WINDOWS in my systems.
I am referring to EXT4 partitions and EXT3 were used in the past.
EXT4 has a good Journelling Methodology and there is no limit to the number of partitions.
One should use Gparted for partitioning
I used Debian method now because I am confident with my partitioning.
1. Leave half of the disk empty.
2. Let the next distribution takes over the empty part of the hard disk.
3. See how it partitions, the disk.
4. Note the amount of GB needed for /root.
5. Most of the left over is dedicated to the home partition.
6. Resize the home partition to free the disk space.
7. Follow the same routine for the 3rd distribution.
I have been doing this for two decades for testing new editions of distributions, to write a piece in my blog site.
All of the blog pieces are still here.Half of the disk is left for Ubuntu, since it has the best EFI configuring ability.
Even, Debian especially Debian based Emmabantus 5 version cannot configure the EFI properly.
I have stopped using Emmabantus.
I use minimal Ubuntu installation and pad up the necessary (just because of the limitation of my small SSD) utilities later.
I have discussed this in detail elsewhere.
I am Gnome addict and that can become bulky due to Cinnamon and Mate desktops.
Btrs (butter partitioning) type of partitions of Redhat and Fedora are in a mess and tend to become pretty slow.
Debian and Ubuntu does a good check of the hard disk at booting, using recursive partition as in Fedora is redundant.
AbiWord, Open Office and LibreOffice
AbiWord
I have done all my books on AbiWord and it has all the formats including latex format to save a files.
Coming from a command line utility, it is no wonder.
Bluefish was my command line utility, from which I started my Linux World.
I never did command line work on AbiWord.
Open Office
Open office was the predecessor for LibreOffice.
It had more formats including .sxw format which I used instead of .dot files of Microsoft.
LibreOffice
LibreOffice is bulky and it has more of Microsoft formats and .odt is its format base.
That is why I never use it.
I published ONLY one book using LibreOffice.
That is of course, original text was on .abw format and just before publishing I converted ti to .dot or .odt (I cannot remember).
It took more than a week (to correct book format errors made in converting to doc file) for me to get the page format in order (which was in pristine form in .abw file).
I will never use LibreOffice in spite of its glossy appearance.
Rather, better use Microsoft Office with bulky Macros.
Linux Fundamentals
1. Boat Loader
Systemd
System 5 Init
2. Kernel to deal with hardware
3. Dbus that integrate and share resources with application and probably daemons.
4. Desktop
5. Application on top of the Desktop (Graphic interface)
Xmonard, I think is not a desktop but a terminal emulator padded up.
xmonad has been released. Check out our download page for instructions on where to get it. (2023-04-02)XMonad is..
Window Maker is another Lihght Weight Desktop.
Please DO NOT use the Generic term Window Manager.
What is this awesome window manager?
Awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.
It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on their graphical environment.
A window manager is probably one of the most used software applications in your day-to-day tasks, along with your web browser, mail reader and text editor. Power users and programmers have a big range of choice between several tools for these day-to-day tasks. Some are heavily extensible and configurable.
awesome tries to complete these tools with what we miss: an extensible, highly configurable window manager.
To achieve this goal, awesome has been designed as a framework window manager. It's extremely fast, small, dynamic and heavily extensible using the Lua programming language.
We provide a documented API to configure and define the behavior of your window manager.
IceWarm is beat out of the lot with everything in one place.
I am going to use on Regular Basis.
IceWM
IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System.
The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system. Application windows can be managed by keyboard and mouse. Windows can be iconified to the taskbar, to the tray, to the desktop or be made hidden. They are controllable by a quick switch window (Alt+Tab) and in a window list. A handful of configurable focus models are menu-selectable. Setups with multiple monitors are supported by RandR and Xinerama. IceWM is very configurable, themeable and well documented. It includes an optional external background wallpaper manager with transparency support, a simple session manager and a system tray.
IceWM is available on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, antiX, NixOS and on most *BSDs.
Software
IceWM was coded from scratch in C++ by Marko Maček since 1997. It is now maintained at Github.
Releases
The latest released version is 3.5.0 (2024-05-20).
Features
Easy to use, simple and fast
Standards compliant
Fully usable with keyboard
Alt+Tab window switching
Efficient resource usage
Task bar (optional)
Multiple work spaces
Fully documented
A large number of themes
Usable with GNOME and KDE environments
Regenerates menus when configuration changes
Support for sound effects
Multiple focus modes
Manual placement of windows option
Auto raising of windows option
Tool tips
Configurable keybinding
Supports Dock Apps in a container
Tabbed windows
GNU guys has given a wrong impression on all the Widow mangers.
Window Manager is generally used as a collective terms.
JWM is the lightest but has no Internet or Office (AbiWord) packages and I think the developers should include those two applications.
GNUstep "this is cut paste piece".
GNUstep is development environment, not a window manager
Many people have confused GNUstep with WindowMaker. GNUstep, however, is not a window manager. WindowMaker is the most often-used NeXT-looking application on a non-NeXT system. WindowMaker also uses a derivation of the GNUstep logo. WindowMaker is the preferred GNUstep window manager, but GNUstep applications also work with any window manager, although you're most likely, currently, to have a more cohesive desktop experience if you use the two in conjunction.
What GNUstep is
GNUstep is an advanced, cross-platform, object oriented environment composed of frameworks, tools and servers (daemons). It is very close to the Cocoa frameworks from Apple and tries to maintain compatibility with Cocoa wherever it is desired and possible. The roots of the GNUstep application interface are same as the roots of Cocoa: NeXT and OpenStep.
Relation to WindowMaker
WindowMaker is a window manager, not a workspace manager nor a file browser. It is nothing more. WindowMaker and GNUstep share almost no libraries or functionality. WindowMaker is written in C, and GNUstep is written in Objective-C. WindowMaker does make certain things easier for GNUstep, but it is not GNUstep itself, although it is a part of the project.
The Importance of this difference
In many people's minds the environment and the frameworks used to create programs merges. WindowMaker can be used with Qt or GNOME apps, just as easily as it can be used with GNUstep. Similarly GNUstep applications can run using KDE (Qt's preferred Window Manager) or Enlightenment (GNOME's preferred Window Manager). This misconception can make one loose sight of the powerful programming frameworks underneath.
Please note
WindowMaker is an excellent window manager and none of the preceeding should be construed to imply otherwise.
Blackbox
Blackbox which is a X11 implementation has both Blackbox and Fluxbox in one place.
It has panel on the right side.
Fluxbox
Fluxbox(1) is a window manager. As such it provides configurable window decorations, a root menu to launch applications and a toolbar that shows the current workspace name, a set of application names and the current time. There is also a workspace menu to add or remove workspaces.
Fluxbox can iconify (or minimize) windows to the toolbar One click and they reappear. A double-click on the titlebar of the window will shade it; i.e. the window will disappear, and only the titlebar will remain visible.
There are also two areas commonly used by small applets: the ‘slit’ can be used to dock small applications; e.g. most of the “bbtools” and “Window Maker dockapps” can use the slit, and the ‘systray’ which lives in the toolbar supports standard system tray icons provided by some applications.
Fluxbox uses its own graphics class to render its images on the fly. By using style files, you can determine in great detail how your desktop looks. fluxbox styles are compatible with those of Blackbox 0.65 or earlier versions, so users migrating can still use their current favourite themes.
Most of the default keyboard and mouse button actions mentioned in this manual can be changed and configured in the ‘keys’ file. This powerful configuration file can also be used to automate almost any action you may want to perform, from launching applications to moving windows around the screen. See fluxbox-keys(5) for details.
Fluxbox can also remember certain attributes of individual application windows and restore these settings the next time the window opens. See the fluxbox-apps(5) for details.
Fluxbox supports the majority of the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH) specification, as well as numerous other Window Hinting standards. This allows all compliant window managers to provide a common interface to standard features used by applications and desktop utilities.
Open Box Desktop
Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.
The *box visual style is well known for its minimalistic appearance. Openbox uses the *box visual style, while providing a greater number of options for theme developers than previous *box implementations. The theme documentation describes the full range of options found in Openbox themes.
Openbox lets you bring the latest applications outside of a full desktop environment. Most modern applications have been written with GNOME and KDE in mind. With support for the latest freedesktop.org standards, as well as careful adherence to previous standards, Openbox provides an environment where applications work the way they were designed to.
Openbox is a highly configurable window manager. It allows you to change almost every aspect of how you interact with your desktop and invent completely new ways to use and control it. It can be like a video game for controlling windows. But Openbox can also be kept extremely simple, as it is in the default setup, meaning that it can suit just about anybody. Openbox gives you control without making you do everything.
Openbox makes desktop environments better. By running Openbox inside the GNOME or K desktop environments, you can combine their ease and functionality with the power of Openbox. Your desktop becomes cleaner and faster, and is in your control, when you use Openbox.Take a look at the getting started guide and change how you manage your desktop.
It has support for Gnome and KDE.
Use Synaptic Package Manager to Install it.
It is not an application but a desktop environment with many apllications bound to it.
More importantly it consumes (dark background) very little RAM and by right clicking the mouse, I can get to my favourite AbiWord and I am editing this piece using AbiWord.
Importantly, it has Falkon Browser which has integrated with our WiFi automatically ( I think WiFi is bundled into the browser).
I have this bundle insalled in Ubuntu 24.04.
Thank YOU to Everybody!
JWM is the lightest but has no Internet or Office (AbiWord) packages and I think the developers should include those to applications.
I am going to Flushbox next.
Blackbox is X11 Desktop.
Text Editors in Linux and Word Processors
Brain Train Dream
This is one of my dreams published in book form.
This is reproduced as the last chapter of my book Meditation Business
This dream was short but I think it is appropriate,I should reproduce it here since it is relevant to Metta Meditation and Heavenly Aboard.
I was in trouble in my dream.
I was trying to find a toilet for number one job and not number two. I was on a holiday of some sort, in an unfriendly remote corner of the earth.
Place looked like Alaska.
It would have been in Alberta or on Alaska looking for tar sand or rare metal deposits. Trouble was I could not find a self contained cubicle to do that job out of sight and out of open view.
Finally, I found a place without the roof with the squatting plate made of marble.
A posh site without bystanders and also without a roof in open air.
It got to be Alaska not Alberta.
Then I sat down but its size and proportions made me to realize it was not made for a man of my size but probably for an elephant. The second problem was to find a little plastic container to fetch some water to do the final bottom clean up. Unlike, the guys and girls of the West who use paper toilet, we still prefer the wet toiletry and getting wet in the process.
Finally, I found a thrash can, in actual fact three in number placed one on top of the other.
It looked like a vessel left by a pre-historic man and it was almost fossilized.
I dug it up from the snow.
I was finally ready armed to the teeth as it were, now ready for the plunge or the big drop.
I was figuring out how to make a simple do and make a quick exit before somebody click an ireport on my exploits on a hitherto barren land and send it to CNN for a quick Flash of News.
But I was rudely interrupted by a guy who looked to me like 5 star janitor wearing something which looked like a spacesuit which I had never seen before.
It was bright and in golden colour.
Other strange thing was he looked like he never touched the ground as if he was levitating.
He splashed a golden creamy stuff which looked like egg shampoo to me on the marble floor and then splashed double that amount of the stuff on the bath tub / tiny water pool and turned round in a flash towards me, telling me, that I should position my feet on the correct alignment marked by what looked like to me an elephant footprint and to my amazement he was trying to positioned my feet (not my bottoms on the correct trajectory).
It was a strange feeling.
I was trying my bottoms in correct alignment, in this massive cesspit but he was trying to get my feet aligned and he was about to hold one of my feet and I felt ticklish and embarrassed.
Next thing I knew was I was holding my right foot with one hand and the other hand on my bottoms to see whether I had some accidental runs in my sleep.
Neither.
Woke up but not in need for any voids.
In any case in my half dreamy state I walked to the toilet and tried the big one.
No void.
Tried the number two, a tiny dribble.
I soon realized I was only dreaming and quickly went back to my bed for the second round of my sleep without any interruption by dreams or mosquitoes.
I was hard pressed for a good dream and Maha Brahma would be equally pleased to interpret this in any case, decided to email it when I am up and in correct senses.
True to his character he answered the dream in kind.
I asked him was there a second part.
NO he said.
Is it futuristic?
Yes he said.
Was it Alaska?
NO.
Where was it?
Can't you guess?
It got to be heaven!
It got to be me going to heaven?
I am not suppose to tell that to you in advance.
It was a very dull dream, I reflected on it.
No son, it is a very good one.
In case if you want to come here it good for you to know the heaven protocol, Isn't it?
Yes Sir.
Are there marble toilets in heaven?
We really like marble floors on toilets.
Eve on our final resting places on earth are marble floored and lined, I told him.
The last thing you see before you leave earth and you say good bye to toilets.
We do not have toilets in heaven.
But we have a small area designated for earthlings just before one enters heaven.
What you saw in your dream is the quarantine in practice.
Who was that guy doing the quarantine?
He was a guy working in the parliament in Ceylon.
He was the one who used to remove all the offensive language before entering, in the hanzard.
Is that enough to enter heaven.
Yes.
In that case no parliament MP enters the heaven.
Yes.
Thank god for telling that truth.
Shall I tell you the protocol before entering the heaven.
Yes, SIR.
We have 10 steps to proper quarantine at the gate of heave.
I will gave that in a list form.
OK, Sir.
Protocol before entering heaven for earthling.
1. First we give Bowel Wash.
2. Hand Wash and Body Wash
3. All Food in your bowel washed out during stage one are incinerated.
4. Then Head Wash
Most of these items are done by the funeral directors, aren't they?
Yes but still we prefer a follow up clean.
5. Then the Brain Wash, washing the brain of rubbish that are put on you by the psychologists.
Under hypnosis a psychologist on earth will tell you that one swallows 3 to 10 spiders a night on an average.
This type of false propaganda has to be washed out completely.
6. Brain Drain is a technique to get all redundant information like
Positive thinking
Creative brain
Logical brain
Lateral brain
One uses 10% of the Brain and the lot.
Then we drain all the psychological theories put on your brain by management trainers on earth.
They are all rubbish and has no validity on heaven.
This is the most difficult part of the clean up process.
Then I told him we spend enormous amount of money for these trainer training programs.
That is not my problem.
But if you can avoid these American programs, it is so much the better if you consider entering heaven.
You mean to say lot of Americans will never sight the heaven.
TRUE my dear.
What about their M.B.As and Emotional Intelligent Training, they teach in Harvard.
They are useless in heaven.
7. Brain Train
Then we train them to think.
After the above seven we start on Moment Meditation.
I was very good at present moment meditation training and since I was very short of memory, especially the past.
But I am very bad at Metta Meditation since, I do not have any enemies in heaven.
In my past lives I have had only a few friends and that was a long period ago.
That is why I am very bad at Metta Meditation.
That is why I asked you to tell me how to practice Metta to enemies.
8. Present Moment Meditation
I do it myself.
9. Metta Meditation.
I actually delegate this part to earthlings who come here.
But when I saw the nice aura around your vertex, I was naturally inquisitive.
10. Train “Brain Train” for other earthly beings.
Then when we get those Trained Brained Guys (T.B.G) from earth come here and asked me for a big favours,
I put them in a Train and put one of their guys to the control room and I take a break.
These clever guys on earth must get to very good places in heaven, won't they?
NO.
What?
They drive themselves to HELL.
HELL!
Yes.
Don't you realize that one needs very little brain to enter heaven.
You only need a big brain to hoodwink another big brain.
That is necessary only on earth.
Not in heaven.
Don't be too brainy and he disappeared.
Why I switched to LMDE?
This is the View of the Mint Developers.
As the name suggests, LMDE is Linux Mint based on Debian instead of Ubuntu.
Mainline Linux Mint is one of the most popular Ubuntu based distribution.
The Mint team goes to great lengths to mitigate some of Ubuntu’s more controversial decisions, such as removing snaps in favor of flatpaks.
Mint also defaults to the project’s own Cinnamon desktop environment (DE), which is often praised as one of the easiest DEs for Windows users to switch to.
Ultimately, Mint manages to build on Ubuntu’s ease of use and surpass it in many areas.
If mainline Mint is so successful, why create an alternative version of Mint that is based on Debian, the same distribution that Ubuntu is based on?
In short, LMDE is an insurance policy for the Mint team in the event that something happens to Ubuntu or, more likely, if Ubuntu becomes too difficult to work with.
Canonical’s (Ubuntu’s parent company) continued embrace of snaps could eventually be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Firefox and Chromium are already only available in the Ubuntu App Center as snaps, meaning the Linux Mint team has to bundle a non-snap version of both apps.
With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 release, Canonical is taking snaps further with plans to ship the CUPS printing service as a snap rather than a DEB package.
As a result, the Mint team will need to package the DEB version of CUPS themselves, like they do with Firefox and Chromium.
My own reasons are;
1. Debian is stable.
2. Its installer is the NEW Calamara Installer.
3. Its Window/s management is smoother.
4. I am a Debian User for a long time I do not want to fiddle with my programs and I am comfortable with Debian.
5. SNAP is in Containers and very bulky.
6. Debian still has Synaptic Package Manager.
7. I think Flatpa(c)k is still based on libraries and dependencies.
8. Box utility lets me test drive (Virtual Machine) Live distributions.
9. OBS let me play music and videos.
10. I do not like daily updates.
I can schedule and configure them on weekly or monthly basis.
11. The is integration of SNAP and Synaptic and same application is not installed twice (one with connection to libraries and other in a separate container) in Debian (I just tested it).
12. Ubuntu let you install two packages (one in a separate SNAP container).
13. Of course, I have Ubuntu as a separate distribution installed in my NUC, it is not difficult to see the differences.
14. What is different in different distributions is the desktops type. Debian has a Live DVD for most of the desktops and one can pick and choose the distribution one needs.
15. Different Distributions have different plans and some of them are heavily involved in commercial activities which include Redhat, Fedora, Zorin and Suse Linux.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu is also involved in commercial activities lately.
16. They either pay or entice the YouTube Presenters to (bend the Free Software Protocol) twist or encourage certain distributions. Tuxedo and Pop Os come to my mind.
There is nothing wrong in this approach for corporate guys with business ventures but an average user buying these product except a USB or a DVD (Windows guys who cannot download an image and write into a USB) is simply exploitation.
There is another caveat here.
Lots of guys and girls don not want to expose their ignorance.
Nobody, in my long exposure to Linux has asked me for an image (I won't dish out my USBs free) of Linux.
I do not ridicule them but if they say their problem is either Windows or Apple, I bluntly say I have not heard of them and I only use Linux.
That save me lot of time.
Besides, I have couple of Tiny books at Amazon Books, how to "Write a Book" without copyright infringements using only Linux Utilities.
My Ranking of Linux Distributions
Let me be honest to begin with.
I was a busy doctor and if it was only ARCH Linux I would not have never used Linux.
I despise all all the Arch Based distributions including Majaro.
It makes the user agitated by its rigid and rigmarole military attitude to Linux!
I think even average developer hates its approach.
I just tested Garuda Linux Live and I going to erase with Rosa Linux which is a Russian Distribution which I have never tested before.
For a brief period I used ArcoLinux for testing purposes.
1. Number one is Debian it has assortment of Live and DVDs.
Currently I use Live Gnome DVD simply because I can add and delete packages as and when I want them. It supports both Synaptic and SNAP (hub).
DVD wont let one update software but let you have variety od desktop to play with.
2. Ubuntu is my second choice.
It has the most versatile GRUB Boot loader ans go easy with ESP.
3. Linux Mint
4. Linux Cinnamon
5. Emmabantus with support for African countries.
6. Puppy Linux
7. Knoppix
8. Perhaps Astra Linux
9. ALT for its Mate Desktop
10. Slackware Linux
Suse Linux and Fedora Linux I have not used for ages.
I see FOSS is at a loss of $500 for the month of April, 2024.
Please Donate!
Debian does not say anything about it losses. Please help them,too.
They are not corporate entities but crowd funded projects.
Freedom Concept of FOSS
Free and open-source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is available under a license that grants the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge. The public availability of the source code is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Richard Stallman's Definition of Free Software
Richard Stallman's Free Software Definition, adopted by the FSF, defines free software as a matter of liberty, not price, and that which upholds the Four Essential Freedoms. The earliest known publication of this definition of his free software definition was in the February 1986 edition of the FSF's now-discontinued GNU's Bulletin publication. The canonical source for the document is in the philosophy section of the GNU Project website. As of August 2017, it is published in 40 languages.
Four essential freedoms of Free Software
To meet the definition of "free software", the FSF requires the software's licensing respect the civil liberties / human rights of what the FSF calls the software user's "Four Essential Freedoms".
1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).
3. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.