Linux for ordinary people through the eyes of an ordinary person
Hello, bright inhabitants of Habrahabr. Remember, in November last year in the blog “Linux for all” we were told about the release of the first version of the distribution kit simply Linux ? The creators of this little one are positioning it as a distribution kit for ordinary inhabitants of the planet Earth: managers, office workers, students, designers, a kind of open for the most part tool for unpretentious people who are not familiar with the world of Unix. Since the release of this assembly on the basis of ALTLinux, some time has passed, and the reputation of the system, thanks to some sources, has become overgrown with negative feedback from people who would like to appear competent in the eyes of others.
It turned out that I urgently needed to change the GNU / Linux distribution on my home machine. For several years of communicating with Linux, I happened to use different distributions: fedora, crux, gentoo, ubuntu. The latter took its place of honor on the desktop for a year and a half, and possibly two years. And, usually, on the desktop I have MonoDevelop development packages, NetBeans with a bunch of plug-ins, the latest version JDK, LAMP and some others. Conclusion: I am not the most unassuming user (more on that below).
')
So back to the beginning of the story. The other day, the faithful Xubuntu on the home machine ordered to live long, it could still be reanimated, but once again did not want to strain the convolutions. All necessary data was saved, and the computer was ready for resurrection, but in a slightly different incarnation. Long could not decide what to replace the old distribution. I wanted something not very heavy, preferably on xfce, Russified, as far as possible, modern, capable of supporting a set of devices built into the motherboard. But one desire was of the highest priority: we didn’t want another Debian, especially another Ubuntu. Of course, you never want to dig your hands in what the system can do for you. Whatever you are a guru (and by definition I am not), there are things that you can always spend some of your free time, and with great pleasure, and this is far from configuring the system. And in this the successor must be like his predecessor. In addition, parents use a computer, even if not as intensively as I did, it required a simple system that looked nice and did not require additional knowledge.
For some reason, the options immediately disappeared: Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Gentoo, (the reasons are different everywhere, but mainly because of their gigantism and super-universal orientation). After close examination, Zenwalk, which warmed the soul with unrealistic hopes, disappeared from view.
The thought came to look at domestic distributions: I didn’t even want to remember ASP, ALT looked at it with interest, especially after the flattering reviews about him, Leonid Kaganov, but he was scared that the distribution based on the fourth platform might be somewhat irrelevant (perhaps he simply did not understand , or did not want to do this).
And then in his search came across Simply. Frightening reviews, novelty frightened, frightening that this is not exactly the official product of the company ALT Linux, but a third-party development, even if the guys from the ALT Linux Team do it. But I wanted to risk something and see if I could use this system for my own purposes.
After burning the image with cdrecord and rebooting, I was pleasantly surprised: the default installer works with a fairly low resolution, which allowed the installation to proceed without any difficulty. Usually, the system unsuccessfully tries to set the widescreen resolution that is native to my monitor, and the video adapter, which is not yet functioning properly, without a proprietary driver, displays only part of the image. Here, no problems, and so far I have not changed anything. A few clicks "Next", the layout of the disk, a few checkboxes in the dialog box for selecting the set of packages for installation, a slight wait. Is it really? The installer without delay and additional connections to the network (in my opinion), offers to install the native driver on the video card from nvidia, great. Well, it can not be so smooth. Reboot.
Simply meets gdm with a nice login form, I enter the cherished login-password pair, the download is fast.
From the very first second of using the system: native monitor resolution, working sound, network, a very good selection of applications. Everything you need for happiness to the ordinary user.
After a small check of everything and everything, it turns out that the sound is not being written, although the necessary device is indicated in the mixer, and the microphone volume is turned down 100%. It does not matter, we start alsamixer with keys "-V Capture", we raise levels and we feel real pleasure from work of audacity in the regular mode.
A minute to enable ALTLinux repositories in Synaptic, add users, a few minutes to install additional development libraries, emacs, gcc, make, kernel-headers to build their modules, Java SDK 1.6, LAMP ...
No problem. Very nice distribution. Simple and fast. I hope that this will continue. The new environment was liking and home. Oh yeah, the wallpapers, which were so actively promoted in the release on Habrahabr, are pleasing to the eye.
Thanks to the developers. Huge and human. From the common man. User distribution for ordinary people.
PS The OpenSource community has a slightly different value system. Question to the developers if they read this article. How can I help the project? Say, documentation, packages, university promotion, among friends, localization?
A small addition for screenshots:
Minimum changes in design compared to default settings (firefox, acc, bb):
Naked desktop and cheerful wallpaper:
It turned out that I urgently needed to change the GNU / Linux distribution on my home machine. For several years of communicating with Linux, I happened to use different distributions: fedora, crux, gentoo, ubuntu. The latter took its place of honor on the desktop for a year and a half, and possibly two years. And, usually, on the desktop I have MonoDevelop development packages, NetBeans with a bunch of plug-ins, the latest version JDK, LAMP and some others. Conclusion: I am not the most unassuming user (more on that below).
')
So back to the beginning of the story. The other day, the faithful Xubuntu on the home machine ordered to live long, it could still be reanimated, but once again did not want to strain the convolutions. All necessary data was saved, and the computer was ready for resurrection, but in a slightly different incarnation. Long could not decide what to replace the old distribution. I wanted something not very heavy, preferably on xfce, Russified, as far as possible, modern, capable of supporting a set of devices built into the motherboard. But one desire was of the highest priority: we didn’t want another Debian, especially another Ubuntu. Of course, you never want to dig your hands in what the system can do for you. Whatever you are a guru (and by definition I am not), there are things that you can always spend some of your free time, and with great pleasure, and this is far from configuring the system. And in this the successor must be like his predecessor. In addition, parents use a computer, even if not as intensively as I did, it required a simple system that looked nice and did not require additional knowledge.
For some reason, the options immediately disappeared: Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Gentoo, (the reasons are different everywhere, but mainly because of their gigantism and super-universal orientation). After close examination, Zenwalk, which warmed the soul with unrealistic hopes, disappeared from view.
The thought came to look at domestic distributions: I didn’t even want to remember ASP, ALT looked at it with interest, especially after the flattering reviews about him, Leonid Kaganov, but he was scared that the distribution based on the fourth platform might be somewhat irrelevant (perhaps he simply did not understand , or did not want to do this).
And then in his search came across Simply. Frightening reviews, novelty frightened, frightening that this is not exactly the official product of the company ALT Linux, but a third-party development, even if the guys from the ALT Linux Team do it. But I wanted to risk something and see if I could use this system for my own purposes.
After burning the image with cdrecord and rebooting, I was pleasantly surprised: the default installer works with a fairly low resolution, which allowed the installation to proceed without any difficulty. Usually, the system unsuccessfully tries to set the widescreen resolution that is native to my monitor, and the video adapter, which is not yet functioning properly, without a proprietary driver, displays only part of the image. Here, no problems, and so far I have not changed anything. A few clicks "Next", the layout of the disk, a few checkboxes in the dialog box for selecting the set of packages for installation, a slight wait. Is it really? The installer without delay and additional connections to the network (in my opinion), offers to install the native driver on the video card from nvidia, great. Well, it can not be so smooth. Reboot.
Simply meets gdm with a nice login form, I enter the cherished login-password pair, the download is fast.
From the very first second of using the system: native monitor resolution, working sound, network, a very good selection of applications. Everything you need for happiness to the ordinary user.
After a small check of everything and everything, it turns out that the sound is not being written, although the necessary device is indicated in the mixer, and the microphone volume is turned down 100%. It does not matter, we start alsamixer with keys "-V Capture", we raise levels and we feel real pleasure from work of audacity in the regular mode.
A minute to enable ALTLinux repositories in Synaptic, add users, a few minutes to install additional development libraries, emacs, gcc, make, kernel-headers to build their modules, Java SDK 1.6, LAMP ...
No problem. Very nice distribution. Simple and fast. I hope that this will continue. The new environment was liking and home. Oh yeah, the wallpapers, which were so actively promoted in the release on Habrahabr, are pleasing to the eye.
Thanks to the developers. Huge and human. From the common man. User distribution for ordinary people.
PS The OpenSource community has a slightly different value system. Question to the developers if they read this article. How can I help the project? Say, documentation, packages, university promotion, among friends, localization?
A small addition for screenshots:
Minimum changes in design compared to default settings (firefox, acc, bb):
Naked desktop and cheerful wallpaper:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/87161/
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