Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://www.linuxliteos.com/index.html
Price: Free
Blurb: “Linux Lite is a 'gateway operating system'. Your first simple, fast and free stop in the world of Linux. Our ongoing mission is to make the transition from Windows to Linux Lite, as smooth as possible. Linux Lite is a free operating system based on the Ubuntu LTS (Long term Support) series of releases.“
Linux Lite is one of the few distributions that do not ship with Snaps. For people with older laptops or those with limited hard drive space or memory, this is the one I would recommend. This is easy for Windows converts to pick up. That said, the 6-series was plagued by bugs galore. I was an early adopter of version 6, so I feel your pain if you grabbed that. Version 6.2 fixed a lot of the “weird” and version 6.4 addressed paper-cuts. Up to this point, I would not have told anyone to install it. I am currently on 6.4 and it still will not open the Vivaldi browser on start-up, yet it will open all the other programs that were open when I shut it down…
I’m glad to report that version 6.6 is on the ball. Things that did not work for me in prior releases are all OK now, meaning they have been hard at work fixing bugs. I suppose I’ll buy some merchandise to show support as they are not taking donations. I do have LinuxLiteOS on metal as well as Virtualbox and it is good enough for a daily driver. That does not mean there aren't things that can be improved – for instance, in the 6.6 edition, installing Firefox still wants to install snaps. Why? New users who want Firefox will get saddled with what they came to avoid. That needs to change, but it is easy to add a PPA and get the deb version of Firefox.
The release boasts a big update on supported languages, but my local vernacular version is like listening to a drunk telling you his life’s story. It’s VERY hard to follow! (I leave it on English by default.) It is so bad, using archaic versions of words not spoken in a hundred years and using full descriptions, like instead of just saying “manual”, it will be “users help manual” and then there are direct translations where things are reversed, slapping an -ing on the end of the verb, very sloppy. You can see it is crusty old professors ruling the roost. I tried helping out with translations before, but it is like a Mexican guy telling a Greek guy how to speak his own language using Google translate as reference. (This actually happens in the translation community!!) I don’t care – Google is wrong. Though the language change changes quite a bit, my menu categories were still in English. It was nice to see that they are trying to be more inclusive with a broader selection of language options, even if it was flawed.
Let’s quickly talk about the other thing that was amiss, I recall reading on one of the Linux blogs that 6.6 would include a free AI chatbot – not that I care, I do not care to talk to machines, but some people will. I do not see this feature, there is nothing on the welcome screen and typing “ai” or “chat” in the menu gets you no results.
The defaults are actually quite sane on LinuxLiteOS, and that has not changed in version 6.6. I think I added Pulsar and Geany and removed 3 apps. I will still remove catfish and replace it with Fsearch, but that is just me. When I say sane, I mean there will be programs like hardinfo for GUI users and a whole slew of terminal options, for terminal jockeys. It does not ship with Krita and half of KDE installed. (this is actually where I like Snaps, Appimages and Flatpaks, when you need other desktop environment’s guts to be installed) Here’s looking at YOU Linspire!
What I like about Linux Lite are their applications. Lite Auto logins, Lite Desktop, Lite Info, Lite Network Shares, Lite Software, Lite Sounds, Lite Sources, Lite Sysinfo, Lite Tweaks, Lite Upgrade, Lite User Manager, Lite Welcome and Lite Widgets. All of the applications have that “liteness” and simplicity. My only wish would be that they are all together in one place, like the welcome application, to make it easier to navigate the “Lite apps”. (Or their own category in the menu?) This covers basically all your bases and you do not need to install something like Gnome-extensions. I found their HiDPi application very handy with my 4K screen, as the scaling is in percentages, as opposed to the standard display setting giving me 1x and 2x where 2x actually scales you down. Should that not be 0.5 then?
They also have you covered in the little things, like inxi, etc are all installed by default and your terminal is pimped out with powerline and so forth. These small touches make the distribution feel like it has a personal touch and not just re-skinned. Ubuntu did not have a boot-up sound for a long time and even here LinuxLiteOS has you covered.
Linux Lite focusses more on stability, so things like Thunar will still be on 4.16, even though the current version is 4.18. The reason I bring this up is that there is little difference between Thunar 4.16 and 4.18, but there was an issue with a memory leak that was fixed in 4.18. Though this did not affect me, (I think?) but I’d rather be safe than sorry when it comes to things like memory leaks.
That Linux Lite is based on Ubuntu is a good thing – meaning more software support, and even though there is no AUR, the stuff that do not go into the AUR – i.e. proprietary programs & games, will be better supported. I can see from our download statistics on some of our applications that no matter how much the haters hate, Ubuntu is still the most widely used Linux OS. (For example – a lottery program has 300k downloads for the Ubuntu version and 4k downloads for rpm distro’s, despite being originally developed as a SUSE application. This trend seems to follow most applications).
Speed-wise Linux Lite is in the same camp as other Ubuntu disto’s, not feeling “fast” regardless of being installed on a SSD. Systemd-analyze blame puts the blame on networking at over 2minutes and apt-daily service at a minute and logrotate at 2 min and so forth. We are living in 2023 not 2013! Grrr… I mitigated some by disabling nmbd, etc, but your mileage may vary. Though this is an Ubuntu issue and not Linux Lite – I think if they put their efforts there for the next release, this distribution may shine like a diamond.
As I said before Linux Lite 6.6 is now my daily driver, and I am happy with it.
For those TL;DR people here is a quick summary:
Pro’s:
• Hardware database – you can quickly see if your machine is supported. • Lite applications – This makes using Linux and XFCE much simpler.
• Simple UI – The UI is similar to Windows and nice for converts to Linux. This is great for older people too. Easy to use and customize. • Sane applications – With the inclusion of useful programs such as LibreOffice and Paint, this distro is suited for home users as well as business users.
• Low resource use: Without Snaps eating all your memory & disk space, it performs reasonably well on older hardware.
Con’s:
• Lack of a proper editor – There is no “Development” category, I added Geany and Pulsar, but even Notepadqq would have been nice. • Translations are not on track – it is there, but flawed.(From my perspective anyway) • No font manager – Only a font viewer. Never saw the point in a font viewer.