My experience using Trisquel so far

16 respuestas [Último envío]
commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

First, I want to say my hardware specs aren't optimal, I just really wanted to get going and my tube of thermal paste is spent after putting the cooler on to test it. My CPU us a Pentium 2.7ghz with 2MB of L2 Cache and can only support SSE3 and I only have 2GB of RAM installed. That is because while I actually have the fastest Core2 Quad this board supports at 3Ghz, 6MB of L2 per dual core cluster (It's kinda like a precursor to Zen) and it supports SSE4.1 and I actually have 8GB of DDR2, the really rare and expensive kind that can get me 2x4GB and still be non-ecc intel compatible, but I'm kinda worried if something goes wrong flashing my bios chips, I might fry my RAM with it, so I figure if I do fry it, I might as well fry the cheap stuff and I'm out of thermal paste for my CPU, but I do have a graphite pad and I think those damned push pin coolers with the circular block might snage the graphite pad, so I'll save that for a bigger and better cooler that probably won't snag the graphite pad.

So that's why I'm not using the most optimal config, I think I'll flash coreboot without blobs tomorrow because it's more up to date. Speaking of which, a good side ramble would be I'm curious of what I could do with a libre bios instead of disabling IME, I just use it for something else. Maybe since it's intel 8088 based maybe have it be for a hyervisor for a z80 console with libre homebrew roms or maybe an IME architecture based fantasy console. "Either the user controls the hardware or the hardware controls the user". I just want to do it out of spite. Lemons into lemonade I suppose.

But anyway, after installing it, I tried upgrading to 9.0 twice following instructions found on this forum and I rather not mess with it and one of the times installing Trisquel, I was frustrated that it wouldn't install and I looked carefully at the error message and it said my optical drive was dirty, so instead of cleaning it, I threw it away because the one that came with that computer didn't even burn DVDs and I put in another one I had lying around. I also tried installing sysvinit, was a bad time, I'm lucky I knew how to chroot. I also tried installing other free distros, but Parabola and the Parabola installation on top of Manjaro didn't work for me. I'm not sure how people feel about this but I was able to get pidgin working with plugins (all GPL licensed) that hook into centralized trash "services" like discord and Skype. Yeah, I know the national spying agency looks at those logs, but if I want to talk to boomers, it's better than running their applications that could be doing heave knows what. I also installed the latest mumble.

But I have to say, so far, I am quite pleasantly surprised. When I was messing with Manjaro on this machine, it used way more ram (even on xfce) and it took forever to compress a compiled package. Having midori, mumble and pidgin up with all of the plugins and chatrooms, the whole system runs on 1GB of RAM and the gaming performance really surprised me. on my Sandy Bridge Machine, Quake3 in the latest build of IOQuake3 was dogshit slow, but I cranked up everything on Openarena at 1920x1440 and got 20fps and on Sandy, I got lower numbers on lower settings in Quake3. I can see why people donate so much, you can see the care the maintainers have taken in picking optimized experience for thees experiences. The distro is a work of craftsmanship. (I use that as a gender-neutral term)

My experience of installing Trisquel brought me back to the days when I first discovered GNU/Linux Distros. Having a couple issues, but figuring it out and those days when I searched the Ubuntu Repo for games and I discovered OpenArena. I think I'm satisfied with this level of computing and I feel free software is a good part of a technology diet. What makes a diet work is the lifestyle and it seems like most people's technology diet is just pop-tarts and cinnamon toast crunch. I'm going to be more analog.

strypey
Desconectado/a
se unió: 05/14/2015

Hi commodore256, thanks for sharing your experiences, and particularly the fine detail on the hardware. You obviously go to much greater lengths on this score than I do. I just do the absolute minimum with the hardware that allows the OS to boot without crashing and hope for the best ;)

I'm glad that Trisquel is serving you well. I've been running it for years now on whatever old hardware I can scrape together, starting with 6.0 (or was it 5.0?). FYI When my 1GB RAM netbook was running 7.0 (which used GNOME Fallback, not Mate), upgrading to an SSD made more difference to the performance than doubling the RAM. To be honest though, the single biggest improvement in performance came when I started using NoScript (no more freezes and crashes!). The modern web really is an hellscape of lazily engineering and often user-abusing Javascript.

A few things:

Given your knowledge of hardware, I assume you know about Libreboot. Is this what you mean by "flash" Coreboot without blobs?

You mention Trisquel 9.0. AFAIK this is still in the testing phase, and 8.0 was the last stable release. Did you get it to work in this end? Or did you go back to 8.0?

Pidgin. Convincing your family and friends to switch to a free code chat service like Wire or Signal is better for *their* software freedom and privacy, but we all know what a struggle that is ;) Pidgin is 100% free code on your end and is a reasonable compromise. In fact, up until recently, Pidgin was the default IM app on Trisquel.

From memory, in the 8.0 release IceDove replaced both the Evolution email client and Pidgin, as IceDove has an Jabber chat client built in. One downside of Pidgin though, is that development hasn't been as active for about 5 years and it's falling a bit behind on features (see their entry on OpenHub, but use a script blocker! My goodness ...). Just something to keep a weather eye on.

Welcome to the free world!

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

>The modern web really is an hellscape of lazily engineering and often user-abusing Javascript.

Oh, yes, I can't stand the modern web. Funny enough you can run some modern websites without Javascript like old.reddit.com or m.facebook.com.

>Given your knowledge of hardware, I assume you know about Libreboot. Is this what you mean by "flash" Coreboot without blobs?

Well, libreboot is like a pre-compiled coreboot without binary blobs. Instead of using libreboot directly, I plan on compiling coreboot without blobs because coreboot is more up to date. I think you can compile coreboot without any voodoo magic black boxes.

>Pidgin. Convincing your family and friends to switch to a free code chat service like Wire or Signal is better for *their* software freedom and privacy, but we all know what a struggle that is

Yeah though if they play fallout, they might like Finch. Just run that in Cool Retro Term and it looks like they're using a fallout terminal. I also think mumble might be convincing because it performs very well with shiternet like people throttled down to ISDN speeds on their phones. Discord only got big because open feint (Discord at that time) bribed youtubers saying it's immune to DDOS of which open feint's founder got in trouble with his previous business venture for privacy violations. But the only issue in setting up a mumble server today is boomers come in and say "hey, can you join my discord server" and I'd be like "It's not 'your' server, if it was your server, the server would be located in your house"

>One downside of Pidgin though, is that development hasn't been as active for about 5 years

What features does it really need? It has plugins and libpurple.

>Welcome to the free world!

Thanks, I feel liberated in more ways than one.

strypey
Desconectado/a
se unió: 05/14/2015

> "It's not 'your' server, if it was your server, the server would be located in your house"

I agree that a Discord community is not a "server". But it sounds like you don't count a VPS as "your server" either? What about a box they own, sitting in leased space in a datacentre? Or a colo? Does it really have to be in your house, or are you just exaggerating to hammer home the point about Discord?

> What features does it really need? It has plugins and libpurple.

Ongoing development isn't just about new features (although OMEMO support would be nice), it's also about fixing bugs - including bugs introduced through changes in dependencies as they develop - refactoring for performance, tweaking UX, and so on. I haven't used Pidgin since I upgraded to Trisquel 8.0 but from what I remember, it could use work in many of these areas.

EDIT: I believe Pidgin are also the main developers of libpurple, a library that needs constant updates to keep it working and secure.

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

>Does it really have to be in your house, or are you just exaggerating to hammer home the point about Discord?

I suppose it's part exaggeration to make a point, but on the same token, you are trusting somebody else and there's no real way to see if they hold your values to heart like the fiasco with Nord VPN or they might get their asses raided like lavabit. Also how many servers run only free software and there's a lot of "cloud" providers that claim they're powered by solar, but it's either fossil fuels or nuclear. Here's what a real solar powered website looks like. And if the website is down, that's because the battery died ;) https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html

As for pidgin, I can see your concerns, but the beauty of free software is it's fixable.

calher

I am a member!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 06/19/2015

On 10/29/2019 11:06 AM, name at domain wrote:
> To be honest though, the single biggest improvement in performance came
> when I started using NoScript (no more freezes and crashes!).

I thought I was the only one whose laptop crashed! One time I got lazy
and didn't feel like figuring out how to watch Twitch with mpv again, so
I decided to open Twitch in my browser. My PC started overheating and I
got a kernel panic!

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

That made me think if there was a cartoon short about a Trisquel User watching Twitch in mpv and as soon as they turn on Javascript, their PC bursts into flames. Oh that would be funny.

Reminds me of this short made in the 90's on an Amiga. https://invidio.us/watch?v=Sj9Lxu-pO6g

calher

I am a member!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 06/19/2015

On 10/29/2019 07:55 PM, name at domain wrote:
> Reminds me of this short made in the 90's on an Amiga.
> https://invidio.us/watch?v=Sj9Lxu-pO6g

Wow, that's really impressive! Thanks for sharing this.

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

Yeah if Eric Swartz can do that in 1995 with 4MB of RAM, trisquel could do this no problem. Hell, the best animation was all done analog and the best animators today have a very analog mindset even though they're using digital tools.

nadebula.1984
Desconectado/a
se unió: 05/01/2018

Trisquel is great except that the packages are outdated. If there were a Debian-testing-based, semi-rolling edition, that would be perfect.

Narcis Garcia
Desconectado/a
se unió: 04/15/2019

You talk about something like gNewSense.

El 29/10/19 a les 17:13, name at domain ha escrit:
> Trisquel is great except that the packages are outdated. If there were a
> Debian-testing-based, semi-rolling edition, that would be perfect.

nadebula.1984
Desconectado/a
se unió: 05/01/2018

Old gNewSense has been discontinued for a few years, and new gNewSense hasn't come yet. The new project leader seems ambitious. Let's look forward to its first release.

Hopefully, the "developer" edition would be based on testing or sid. If gNewSense could maintain certain important packages that have been abandoned by Debian (e.g. scidavis, codeblocks, etc.), all the better.

chaosmonk

I am a member!

I am a translator!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 07/07/2017

> new gNewSense hasn't come yet. The new project leader seems ambitious.
> Let's look forward to its first release.

Since making that initial announcement and migrating gNewSense's old
code to a Gitlab instance, there appears to have been no activity.[1]

[1] https://git.gnu.io/gnewsense

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

and maybe with musl too. Alpine Linux uses musl and it's pretty fast. eglibc hasn't been updated in 5 years, so since then debian moved to glibc. So I think it would be cool if Trisquel used musl, it would use less RAM and it would remove temptations to install non-free software like installing a Deb of Skype or Discord. The only problem would be I couldn't scrape pre-compiled debs of free packages made for distros that half-ass freedom and I hear getting Rust to work is a pain in the ass. Contemporary GlibC has a 8m thread stack size and using my system as an example I have 140 threads open so that would just be 1.08gigs and musl has an 80k thread stack size, so 140 threads would be 11megs.

strypey
Desconectado/a
se unió: 05/14/2015

You do have the option of adding the repos for Trisquel 9.0 to your source.list for a "testing experience". If you'd like to help with backporting newer versions of packages into Trisquel repos, Chaosmonk gave some detailed instructions here:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/jami-version-trisquel-8-repos-still-called-ring

Keep in mind that the rationale of Trisquel, as a distro, is to provide the same newbie-friendly experience as Ubuntu, but without the nonfree bits. If you have the skills to cope with Debian testing, you could try Parabola/ Hyperbola for the Arch experience, or try out GuixSD for a Nix style experience. You also have the option of just using Debian Testing with the nonfree repos disabled, which AFAIK makes it a fully free distro.

commodore256
Desconectado/a
se unió: 01/10/2013

I tried parabola and it wouldn't even install.

ChukkIsASnail

I am a member!

Desconectado/a
se unió: 10/25/2019

I just did an installation of parabola yesterday. The install.sh didn't work, but otherwise it was fine. And now I am back to Trisquel again.