KDE and Debian aren’t exactly my cup of tea; or should they?
I’m disillusioned although not dispassionate about everything that’s software; but when one sees the catastrophic crap that is Win10, whatever might be wrong in Linuxland becomes almost acceptable. Why are we still using Windows?
Five weeks ago I started poking around in the quest for a keeper Linux distro. I was insisting on the fact that recent versions of ALSA and PulseAudio started to stop detecting when headphones are inserted into my fairly recent (by my standards) and decent laptop, but that fixes seem to exist. In the meantime I found a German article–Ubuntu 20.04 : Kein Sound nach Update von 19.10–where the same fix is applied with a minor modification, and that summarizes the patching succinctly this way:
sudo echo "options snd-hda-intel model=auto index=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
sudo echo "blacklist snd_soc_skl" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
Well, the author didn’t actually try the above commands, or else he would have noticed that the effect of sudo
disappears once the redirection is made through the non-privileged >>,
so the correct version should be:
sudo bash -c "echo \"options snd-hda-intel model=auto index=1\" >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf"
sudo bash -c "echo \"blacklist snd_soc_skl\" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf"
Being lazy, I usually issue administrative commands in a sudo bash
shell.
It’s worth noting that restarting PulseAudio (after killing it with pulseaudio -k
) would fail on some distros if attempted with pulseaudio -D
, but will succeed with pulseaudio --start
or (even better), just use systemctl --user restart pulseaudio
.
This being said, at the time I was tempted by Peppermint OS 10, a snappy distro based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS–the then latest LTS, now obsoleted by 20.04 LTS, although still supported for enough time.
Version 11 of Peppermint OS, based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, is going to be ready when it’s ready, which is totally uninformative. I’d rather avoid an upgrade from 10 to 11 (i.e. from 18.04 to 20.04), and I’d also not stay with Peppermint OS 10, no matter how fast and nice, because some packages are older than in Debian stable! Too bad they don’t release Alpha or Beta versions of Peppermint OS 11, nor do they report much in their forums. I understand that their leader passed away last January, but the only way they’d show things are really moving on is communication, and this is exactly what isn’t happening these days. That’s disappointing.
One week ago, after some other comments, I added one about how Clem has deleted a comment of mine’s on his Linux Mint blog. Well, I wasn’t going to go back to Mint anyway, being it 19.3 or 20, MATE or Cinnamon, or Xfce. Clem took some questionable decisions in the past, he’s going to take some more (it’s his distro after all), and I’m quite bored with the look and feel of Mint.
In the meantime, Dedoimedo has just reviewed on July 8 Linux Mint 20 Ulyana Xfce (based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS), to find it “Not quite there“. He’s one of the few people who test a distro “on metal” (as opposed to in a virtual machine), and this is one of the reasons I usually trust his reviews (the other one being that he has a sort of an OCD when it comes to details, and I share with him the same condition). I’m not surprised by the poor choices made by Clem, but this one is preposterous:
Mint ships with #303030 gray fonts rather than pure black, and this made me eyes water right away.
Plenty of small bugs and annoyances, final grade 6/10. OK, moving on.
Linux Lite 5.0 (also based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) feels much better than version 4.8 (based on 18.04 LTS and somewhat ugly): very nice looking, very friendly, and snappy.


It includes some useful tweaks:


And they had the common sense to configure the full hinting for the fonts, and without subpixel coloring (for the grace of God, I never understood why on Earth would one to smooth a black-on-white text not with shades of gray, but with colors!?):

Alas, no matter what I tried, the inserted headphones were still undetected: after pulseaudio
is restarted, nothing changes, no matter how I patch it.

xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
doesn’t see the inserted headphones, and neither does pavucontrol
, but if I manually change the output from speakers to headphones, the sound goes correctly to the headphones. Doing it every time I plug the headphones is a no-go for me, which disqualifies this distro for the time being.
I can confirm this another bug reported on their forums: “When you use the brightness keys, a bell is showed, instead of the usual sun.” Yeah, it displays the same notification as per changing the sound volume with the function keys.
Maybe it’s time to try something totally different for a change (no, MX Linux was not on my shortlist!). The Debian-based SolydXK 10.4 tempted me because they recommend NordVPN, and they even have their own applet for it: nordvpn-indicator. Of course, this one might work in other distros too, and similar GUIs should exist in the wild, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless.
I first tried the Xfce edition, which looks like this (screenshot stolen from Distrowatch, because I forgot to take one, but it really looks like this):

A unusual thing: their XFCE (SolydX) looks exactly like their KDE (SolydK), which means they themed XFCE to look like KDE. I tried them both and, frankly, if it has to look like Plasma, then let it be Plasma!
Their Debian stable inheritance and their subpar wallpapers are not exactly attractive (I love orange, but not the text on the wallpaper), but the distro is quite solid, even with KDE. One of their selling points is privacy: Firefox with HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, uBlock and stricter privacy settings (firefox-solydxk-adjustments
).
Dedoimedo only reviewed SolydK in 2013, when KDE4 wasn’t exactly great (it’s only since Plasma 5.8 that KDE could be considered “usable again”), and yet the distro received a 9/10 grade back then. Huh.
But here’s one of the gazillion idiocies that still exist in KDE: “Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.” Dedoimedo complained about it 2 years ago. At some point, Plasma allowed again Dolphin to run as root, but apparently this is not the case anymore.
Now, in both SolydK/SolydX, alsa-base.conf
already contains a line
options snd-hda-intel model=auto
but even after adding to alsa-base-blacklist.conf
(note the specific blacklist file!)
blacklist snd_soc_skl
…the headphones bug was still there… up to a point. In SolydK, KDE’s Audio Volume applet plasma-pa
still couldn’t see the headphones; pavucontrol
however did, and the sound goes to the headphones. Confusing behavior. This distro requires further thinking, especially as I’m a NordVPN user.
Further of Debian extraction and with KDE, Neptune 6.5, recently released. German, but this doesn’t mean anything when it comes to software. Heck, they don’t even have a decent website: the English version of their website gives a broken link to their forum; the proper link is only in the German version of the site! [EDIT: they fixed the link in the meantime.] The OCD version of me would have dismissed this distro entirely, as a matter of principle (the second charge: their logo is oval, with width:height of about 9:8; third charge: their forum software, Flarum, is a pathetic choice because of the “More…” and “Load more” design instead of a page-based one); but I was curious, so I decided to give it a go. [LATE EDIT: Oh my, their About page, both in EN and in DE, still says Neptune is based on Debian 9! Of course they switched to Debian 10 in August 2019, when they released Neptune 6.0. Oh well, finally they changed the text to say Neptune is based on Debian Buster.]
Funny thing, Neptune originated as a spin-off Debian-based version of the Ubuntu-based ZevenOS, now defunct. But if ZevenOS had a BeOS look and feel, Neptune is just a better looking KDE that still looks very much the same as it looked like two years ago, at version 5, when it was based on Debian 9. Highly praised by a few, completely ignored by the rest of the world, maybe it deserves more love! The screenshots suggested a polished distro, so I had to try it.
Right after the boot (LiveUSB), I found the text too small. As I’m not interested in fractional scaling (I tried 125% in Linux Lite 5.0 and everything was too big), nor in changing the DPI, increasing the relevant fonts was the way I went:

The first hiccup: the Muon Package Manager seems totally broken: the search simply doesn’t work, even if the package is shown prior to searching by scrolling down the list! Discover (plasma-discover
) works flawlessly, but as Muon was supposed to be the Synaptic replacement, this is hugely disappointing. Here’s a report about Muon’s search not working in 2016 in Kubuntu’s forums. And it’s still not working, in version 4:5.8.0-1, which is the latest! For Ubuntu, here’s a bug report from 2020-03-03: 1865925.
2020-03-29: Status changed to ‘Confirmed’ because the bug affects multiple users.
And yet… After a very long while (say, 30 minutes after the latest apt-get update
), Muon started to display search results! (In the above bug report, a similar “out of the blue it works” behavior is reported towards the end.) There must be a serious problem with the search index rebuilding.
Remember the “Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.” idiocy? Here’s another one: “Executing Kate with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.” Fuck the KDE fucktards!
But at least ReText is preinstalled–nice choice. And Back in Time is too. Aaaaaand… it detects the insertion and removal of the headphones without the need of a fix!


That’s amazing, really the greatest thing about this distro. I suppose the upstream Debian would behave the same, right? Well, Neptune looks good after all, but what’s the fucking issue with kdesudo
, libkdesu
or wherever the “unfixable security vulnerabilities” lie? Also, as I’m not a huge fan of neither Excalibur nor Kicker: if only there were such a thing as a Whisker menu (xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin
, see Linux Lite above) for KDE! Arc-Menu for GNOME looks interesting too.
Neptune 6.5 doesn’t add that much to Debian. The features page summarizes everything, including the “Neptune Specialties”–but I decided to check out for myself. Unpleasantly, the Neptune repos not only still have “5” in their name, but most of the packages are ancient indeed, as they were made for version 5. Filtering by origin in Synaptic reveals that Neptune 6.5 only adds to Debian: VirtualBox, Amarok, its own “look and feel” packages, drivers for Brother printers, Calamares, remaster-kit
, snapshot-manager
, Enlightenment, chromium-windevine-plugin
, Encode (ffmpeg
GUI), knetworkmounter
, plasma-discover
, quickusbformatter
, Rage Video Player, Yet Another Video Tube Downloader. Not bad, but this is still “Debian” with additional packages. In the past, it seems that Neptune used to offer many packages in newer versions than in Debian stable (Distrowatch claims it offers “a newer kernel, some drivers and newer versions of popular applications, such as LibreOffice,” but this is not entirely true).
So basically, it’s Debian 10.4 who’s to praise for what works in Neptune! And, of course, the three guys from Neptune who managed to customize and add without breaking anything 🙂
But let’s go even further. Who said PPAs are only made for Ubuntu? I needed mkusb
, I added the repo for Ubuntu Focal as described here, and it worked! (This wouldn’t be the case with most PPAs though.)
The NordVPN aficionado in me wanted to try with adding SolydXK’s repos (NOTE: modified to match the current keyring after the server move):
echo "deb http://repository.solydxk.com/ solydxk-10 main import rpi" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/solydxk.list ; sudo wget -P /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d https://downloads.solydxk.com/solydxk-archive-keyring.gpg
Now nordvpn
and nordvpn-indicator
could be installed. And they work even on the LiveCD! (BTW, user/pass are user/live; might need to logout and login for nordvpn-indicator
to show up. Note that there is a one-time need to launch nordvpn login
at the CLI to tell it your credentials.)



Let’s recap: Debian stable; customizations and extra packages from Neptune 6.5, which also has a better installer than Debian’s LiveCD; further packages from SolydXK, which is based on the same Debian stable; on occasions, a PPA made for Ubuntu; and, soon to be needed, WINE’s repos for Debian.
Before someone else tells me: yes, I know Neptune’s memory usage seems quite high. The distros I tried using LiveUSB (with persistence when possible) generally used ~550 MB to ~700 MB of RAM, but Neptune was more like 1.2 GB* (EDIT: see this comment). But it was a “LiveCD” session, where the RAM could also be used for /tmp
and more, so I don’t think this is relevant. Either way, what matters to me is the general responsiveness and a low CPU load.
I hope this to be a keeper, as I’m too old for distro-hopping all the time. In the end, it should be able to solve my eternal irresolution (à la Buridan’s Ass) between Xfce, MATE and Cinnamon. GTK-based apps can be run in KDE, and with a proper theme (which is the case in Neptune) they’re indistinguishable from the Qt-based ones. Either way, if this is the way, it started with Neptune65-Plasma5-20200707.iso.
You’ve got some serious patience reserves. I’d rather deal with Windows 10 occasionally bugs than trouble myself again with Linux and its never ending shortcomings (ugly fonts, spotty Bluetooth, games not working, shitty xls. in Libre Office, and so on).
Quite the contrary.
The fonts… are a thing, but some distros get them better. (Is there still a patent regarding sub-pixel antialiasing?) It also helps to choose a typeface that renders better at small sizes. But even on Windows, since they started to ask you to adjust ClearType, more often than not I find the fonts uglier than it was in the times of Win3.1.
Bluetooth? Horrendous under Windows, by my experience.
Games? I don’t give a fuck on games, in the modern meaning of the term of games.
I have yet to try SoftMaker’s FreeOffice for Linux, but this office suite is fabulous! Have you tried its Windows version?
I’m no gamer but I do like to play Total War, Crusader Kings or Civ from time to time.
Nope, had no idea FreeOffice even exists, I’ve got an old subscription to Office 365.
Piei, Satană!
Of course, whoever wants Debian with KDE for home/multimedia usage (well, most people would choose Kubuntu instead) should probably try debian-live-10.4.0-amd64-kde+nonfree.iso, but I’m told it’s rather bloated (3 GB).
Windows Games?
Manjaro KDE is a worse choice. I tried manjaro-kde-20.0.3-200606-linux56.iso, and, obviously, it failed to detect that I inserted the headphones!
I didn’t try any fix because, what the heck, HDA-Intel with Realtek ALC282 should be quite popular or, by all means, at least not exotic. Lots of laptops manufactured in 2014-2017 must have it. And yet…
As for the RAM usage, it’s worse than in Neptune 6.5, but I have to clarify something: the distros (Xfce or KDE) where
htop
reported a 550-750 MB RAM usage were LiveCD with persistence, whereas Neptune and Manjaro were actually “LiveUSB used as LiveCD” (ISO copied with Rufus as if they were copied withdd
) without persistence, which means not only/tmp
was in RAM, but also theneofetch
utility, installed over the live session, was in the RAM!So in Neptune
neofetch
reported 1265 MiB, whereas in Manjaro KDEhtop
reported 1300 MiB. I wasn’t able to installneofetch
in Manjaro, because the moronic package manager didn’t allow me to install a tiny utility without applying the entire set of available updates.I’ve also checked the chaotic availability of the packages in Manjaro/Arch, AUR, Snaps, Flatpaks, and it’s sort of a mess. Even only adding AUR risks making Manjaro less stable than Ubuntu, and not adding anything limits the available packages to about 11k (vs 89k in Debian stable and 87k in Ubuntu 20.04).
Manjaro? Nyet.
Ah, Manjaro… And yet, you tried the KDE version. With Cinnamon, it is even more greedy.
For the rest, this is correct, but for someone who does not have a big need, no utility of AUR etc., a simple user, this distro can be quite suitable. If updates go smoothly…
For the record, I tried endeavouros-2020.07.15-x86_64.iso and the headphones are not detected, not even after applying the fix and restarting PulseAudio. Of course, manually changing the output source to the “unplugged” headphones makes them work, but this doesn’t mean anything. So Arch and its derivatives are broken too.
alsactl restore
suggests that ALSA doesn’t really know what to do with the hardware:A tiny idiocy is the claim that
asound.lock
cannot be locked because it exists; it doesn’t!That Dolphin run as root security non-sense is absent in open SUSE, I guess it all depends on the distro developers to implement an “open File Manager as root” option !
Indeed. In dolphin-20.04.3-lp151.218.1.src.rpm I found
0001-Revert-Disallow-executing-Dolphin-as-root-on-Linux.patch
.So basically openSUSE disables a stupid piece of code wrote by KDE. Unfixable security vulnerabilities my ass.
Neptune 6.5-related: I just noticed in their changelog, among a few customizations (e.g. Backports repository activated by default; KWin set longDuration to 50 for better Plasma 5 speed; etc.), 16 firmware packages (non-free), including
firmware-intel-sound all 20190717-2~bpo10+1
. Is this package responsible for the fact that the Intel-HDA support is much better (out-of-the-box) in this distro than in any other recent distro?Either way, those binary firmware packages only exist in Debian, but not in Ubuntu, which is really strange.
firmware-intel-sound
in Debian; in pkgs.org.NeptuneOS’s icons looks like it came from an XFCE distro. Faenza?
Indeed. But I believe Faenza was originally meant for GNOME3. It looks great anyway.
Hum, semble assez joli.
Some poor souls are debating on Distrowatch whether paying for LibreOffice would be a reasonable option. Opinions range from “Paying for LibreOffice – yes!” to “Sorry but LibreOffice is bloat; one of the first preinstalled things I uninstall.” In other news, Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is ‘beyond utterly broken’.
The morons are unaware of SoftMaker’s FreeOffice 2018 and commercial Office 2018 and 2021.
> paying for LibreOffice would be a reasonable option
What ??? Never Life !
> Never Life !
You mean “Not in a million years.” (Jamais de la vie !)
Heu, yes. Thanks 🙂
I just got an idea wrt the initial empty search results for Muon Package Manager. It might be something similar to this known issue in OpenMandriva Lx 4.1, although there it concerns Discover:
Manjaro 20.1 KDE properly detects when the headphones are inserted, and generally seems reasonably bug-free, but I really hate Pamac, hence I won’t be using Manjaro.
I only tried manjaro-kde-20.1-minimal-200911-linux58, not manjaro-kde-20.1-200911-linux58, but I hope the more bloated edition doesn’t add such a bug.
Hum, with a rolling distro you never know when something will break. Because it always happens at some point. And moving from one version to another is always a very delicate moment. It is necessary to read well on the site for possible problems, also wait before making the updates, and have a minimum of knowledge to be able to try to fix them… admitting that everything is not broken, which can happen.