# Recomended Linux Distros



## TheFinalFrontEar (Mar 7, 2015)

Hey guys, New to TPU and Linux, So can anybody recommend a good all-round distro, many thanks and also how easy is it to install kali-Linux on an asus nexus 7.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Mar 7, 2015)

@TheFinalFrontEar    Hello new member from my part of the planet  
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





      ...welcome to TPU.    

I have found it hard...no worse than that...impossible to install Kali Linux on a Nexus 7,that was wifi.
Google wasnt any real help so hopefully we will both get an answer.
It quickly slipped down my list of priorities so i kind of gave up.

Be patient for replies this is a global community.

Loving the Badger.   Ysbyty Gwynedd.  


i have pmd you


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## Frick (Mar 7, 2015)

I say don't bother, unless you just want to play around with Linux but if you're a newbie I still say don't bother, do it on a PC instead. But anyway Kali should work, and there are mobile variants of Ubuntu and Debian, though I don't know how stable they are.

But if you want it on a PC, Linux Mint is really nice, but you won't really learn anything as everything just works (generally) out of the box. Slackware used to be the distro of choice if you wanted to go deep.


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## yesyesloud (Mar 8, 2015)

Hey there. Welcome.

I love Manjaro and ArchBang for desktop/laptop pcs, both are newbie-friendly, the first one being considerably more.

Mint is also great for beginners as @Frick said, plus it offers cleaner desktop environment options out of the box, more performance-wise too, as official Ubuntu releases have become full of bloatware and... Unity.

Arch itself is fine for ARM devices in general (I installed it on RK3188 oem devices, a tricky process though), you could try to load it on your nexus 7, and then all the extra software you need. Or you could simply go the easier way around, Ubuntu, and then mod the system for your needs. Slightly tricky stuff regardless.

Good luck!


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## Schmuckley (Mar 8, 2015)

I like Lubuntu 
..for PC
I cannot speak for ARM devices.


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## yesyesloud (Mar 8, 2015)

Lubuntu is glorious


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## TheFinalFrontEar (Mar 8, 2015)

Excellent feedback, thanks guys which out of the desktop environments do you consider to be the best? Many thanks.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Mar 8, 2015)

Thought i would at least plug my one in today..............nothing ...not even a glimmer, so its a full diagnostic jobbie for me....shit

!. Cable
2. Battery
bored already,
its all too little for my old calloused hands.


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## jeepdriver (Mar 8, 2015)

Check out Ultimate Edition 4.2


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## yesyesloud (Mar 8, 2015)

TheFinalFrontEar said:


> Excellent feedback, thanks guys which out of the desktop environments do you consider to be the best? Many thanks.


Xfce and lxde are your usual lightweight alternatives.

KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon and Mate have more eyecandy (the first 2 need more system resources averagely, still lighter than Unity though, which can either be nice depending on your system).

You can install/uninstall multiple desktop environments on the same distro and pick your favorite on the login screen.

As we celebrate in the GNU/Linux community, it's all about freedom. _Burn_ different distributions isos to flash drives (using unetbootin, LiLi or rufus for instance), boot them, get experienced and pick favourites.

Exploring new OS's can be a joyful digital adventure overall.


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## Schmuckley (Mar 9, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> Xfce and lxde are your usual lightweight alternatives.
> 
> KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon and Mate have more eyecandy (the first 2 need more system resources averagely, still lighter than Unity though, which can either be nice depending on your system).
> 
> ...




Someday I'm going to install everything 
from DOS to FreeBSD To RedHat Enterprise..
Win95-98...Servers..2008 
I really like that Lubuntu, though..Slitaz has possibilities but..not so newb-friendly.


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## Frick (Mar 9, 2015)

Schmuckley said:


> Slitaz has possibilities but..not so newb-friendly.



Was about to mention that, for some reason I love it even though nothing works without miraculous lay on hands activities.


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## Schmuckley (Mar 9, 2015)

Frick said:


> Was about to mention that, for some reason I love it even though nothing works without miraculous lay on hands activities.


so true..still I like it


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## Blue-Knight (Mar 26, 2015)

TheFinalFrontEar said:


> Hey guys, New to TPU and Linux, So can anybody recommend a good all-round distro


Linux Mint XFCE/*.

I cannot think of something better... Built-in driver support is very good compared to other distros, nice looking theme included, most common applications and codecs already installed, well polished, great community, STABLE!

I'm using it for months, no problems till now.

What more do you need!?


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## Zafar (Apr 2, 2015)

I would recommend Linux Mint or any of the different versions of Ubuntu for beginners.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Apr 2, 2015)

I guess i am "cheating" using WINE


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## Aquinus (Apr 2, 2015)

TheFinalFrontEar said:


> Excellent feedback, thanks guys which out of the desktop environments do you consider to be the best? Many thanks.


When I run Linux (as a software dev,) I use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS + i3wm. i3 has a steep learning curve, but it's incredibly minimal on resources. I used to use this kind of setup on machines with less than 512MB of memory.

I think you should install VirtualBox and play with Ubuntu in a VM before potentially wrecking a computer first.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Apr 2, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> I think you should install VirtualBox and play with Ubuntu in a VM before potentially wrecking a computer first.




@Aquinus  can you clarify please, i am new to Linux and really dont need problems. I am keen to learn more but not the "hard way"


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## T.R. (Apr 2, 2015)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> @Aquinus  can you clarify please, i am new to Linux and really dont need problems. I am keen to learn more but not the "hard way"



You can try Linux distros on VirtualBox.


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## Aquinus (Apr 3, 2015)

CAPSLOCKSTUCK said:


> @Aquinus  can you clarify please, i am new to Linux and really dont need problems. I am keen to learn more but not the "hard way"


VirtualBox is a free virtualization platform. You can "install" linux or most other operating systems into a virtual machine on your PC and use it inside of Windows. This lets you install Linux on a virtual disk image and not burn away a disk to do it.

VirtualBox 4.3.26 for Windows download link


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## Frick (Apr 7, 2015)

@CAPSLOCKSTUCK  Many distros allows you to run it without actually installing it. Virtual systems tends to be sluggish.


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## [Ion] (Apr 7, 2015)

Frick said:


> @CAPSLOCKSTUCK  Many distros allows you to run it without actually installing it. Virtual systems tends to be sluggish.


Not really.  As long as you have a decently fast computer (fast C2D or better + decent HDD) the performance of a VM is pretty solid.  I wouldn't want to run VMs on a 5400RPM HDD or do 3D stuff, but as long as the OP has a reasonably modern computer a VM will be fine.


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## Frick (Apr 7, 2015)

[Ion] said:


> Not really.  As long as you have a decently fast computer (fast C2D or better + decent HDD) the performance of a VM is pretty solid.  I wouldn't want to run VMs on a 5400RPM HDD or do 3D stuff, but as long as the OP has a reasonably modern computer a VM will be fine.



Depends on what you mean by sluggish... They run ok, but if it's an OS with lots of eye candy a live OS will run better. Depending on your hardware configuration obviously.


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## [Ion] (Apr 7, 2015)

Frick said:


> Depends on what you mean by sluggish... They run ok, but if it's an OS with lots of eye candy a live OS will run better. Depending on your hardware configuration obviously.


I suppose that compared to the X61 I use every day, nearly anything feels fast 
And you are right that something like Compiz or other snazzy effects doesn't always work well on a VM.


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## Aquinus (Apr 9, 2015)

If you rule out graphics and 3D, VMs tend to almost have the same amount of compute power as the host, thanks for virtualization extensions that runs VMs directly on hardware (no emulation for CPU instructions.) You run into issues when you emulate things like the hard drive, network adapters, graphics, etc. Doing things like using VT-d (hehe) to do PCI-E passthrough can let you attach real hardware directly to a VM, as a result, a machine outfitted with VT-d and probably if it's not a newer nVidia GPU, you can get desktop-like performance out of a VM with dedicated hardware.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 14, 2015)

Why run Linux on a virtual machine? Unless you must do some major task on another OS at the same time, I don't see the point.

If you don't wanna go through install, just boot your average distro from an usb flash drive or something and you're fine. It will definitely run smoother than a VM.


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## Blue-Knight (Apr 14, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> Why run Linux on a virtual machine? Unless you must do some major task on another OS at the same time, I don't see the point.


New users may make mistakes when setting up partitions and delete/format wrong partition. That is one of the reasons people are recommending installing and learn on a VM first.



yesyesloud said:


> If you don't wanna go through install, just boot your average distro from an usb flash drive or something and you're fine.


Some users do not know how to setup this (e.g. me). And users who are somewhat unfamiliar with Linux may find difficult to follow tutorials on the matter. And this does not simulate a real install, it is just a "demonstration".

And running through optical media is not good because the optical drive will stop several times for reading... And that takes a lot of time.

Just my opinion.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 14, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> New users may make mistakes when setting up partitions and delete/format wrong partition. That is one of the reasons people are recommending installing and learn on a VM first.



There's no need to install, you can boot a full blown Linux system from an iso burnt into an usb flash drive. Look:



yesyesloud said:


> If you don't wanna go through install, just boot your average distro from an usb flash drive or something and you're fine. It will definitely run smoother than a VM.





yesyesloud said:


> As we celebrate in the GNU/Linux community, it's all about freedom. _Burn_ different distributions isos to flash drives (using unetbootin, LiLi or rufus for instance), boot them, get experienced and pick favourites.


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## Kursah (Apr 14, 2015)

Yes the temp Live Trial feature is nice and all for a quick look..but virtualization does it better imho. Live for short-time trial, VM for longer testing and other uses. I have some long term VM's of both Linux and Windows, quite useful...especially if you need a virtual lab for anything, testing networking...honestly there's more reasons than I care to list why a VM is a good idea.


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## Aquinus (Apr 14, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> just boot your average distro from an usb flash drive or something and you're fine. It will definitely run smoother than a VM.


Not entirely. USB flash drives are usually very much slower to read and write than modern 3.5" HDDs and 2.5" SSDs. I have a 500GB constellation ES drive that runs Ubuntu 14.04 (like in my specs.) A VM is going to be smoother in that respect. The only time a VM will be slower is if you're doing graphics or I/O to a device that's not passed through.

All in all, a VM will be a much better representation of what you'll be working with if you were to have the OS installed on the host. Also, by using a LiveCD, you can't install more applications than you have system memory because of how it boots. I would always recommend installing it (even on a VM) if a person wants to experiment with it. Also restoring a snapshot is a lot faster than rebooting from a USB drive.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 14, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> Not entirely. USB flash drives are usually very much slower to read and write than modern 3.5" HDDs and 2.5" SSDs. I have a 500GB constellation ES drive that runs Ubuntu 14.04 (like in my specs.) A VM is going to be smoother in that respect. The only time a VM will be slower is if you're doing graphics or I/O to a device that's not passed through.
> 
> All in all, a VM will be a much better representation of what you'll be working with if you were to have the OS installed on the host. Also, by using a LiveCD, you can't install more applications than you have system memory because of how it boots. I would always recommend installing it (even on a VM) if a person wants to experiment with it. Also restoring a snapshot is a lot faster than rebooting from a USB drive.



Running only one operating system at a time is smoother. You will have _countless_ less threads in use (specially if you'd use Windows for host).

As for installing further software on live mode (Linux), you could also rely on the size of storage persistence optionally set with the tool used to create bootable media.

Unless you plan to run applications demanding heavy storage I/O and dozens of saved gigabytes, I'd say you're better off booting from your average flash stick.

If you have a classy flash drive or an empty external hdd, I'd also favor that. Otherwise, people can definitely end up hating their new OS because of poor virtualization performance, specially if they're beginners (most are).

Regardless, when it comes to VMs, I would run VMware instead of often choppy VirtualBox. I ran both at different times on the same intel machine at college and VMware performed clearly better.

PS.: booting efi-ready distributions (most currently) from usb drives is pretty fast.


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## Aquinus (Apr 15, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> Running only one operating system at a time is smoother. You will have _countless_ less threads in use (specially if you'd use Windows for host).


There are two things wrong with this statement:
A: Running one OS at a time is only smoother when the host is already fully loaded, in which case you have already violated rule #1 of virtualization, don't over-provision resources.
B: Thread count in virtualized environments has very little impact on performance as context switching takes very little time and doesn't make a difference until you start going north of 2,000 threads (which is a very conservative measure I might add).


yesyesloud said:


> As for installing further software on live mode (Linux), you could also rely on the size of storage persistence optionally set with the tool used to create bootable media.


You could, but once again you're limited by the speed of the flash drive which is bound to be much slower than even a virtualized disk.


yesyesloud said:


> Unless you plan to run applications demanding heavy storage I/O and dozens of saved gigabytes, I'd say you're better off booting from your average flash stick.


Clearly you've never booted applications for the first time after booting from USB. It's slow. It's only fast after because the computer does an insane amount of disk caching in Linux until you run out of physical memory. Once again, this isn't about storage space, it's about performance. It also about learning how it works.


yesyesloud said:


> If you have a classy flash drive or an empty external hdd, I'd also favor that. Otherwise, people can definitely end up hating their new OS because of poor virtualization performance, specially if they're beginners (most are).


You obviously didn't read my last post...


Aquinus said:


> If you rule out graphics and 3D, *VMs tend to almost have the same amount of compute power as the host, thanks for virtualization extensions that runs VMs directly on hardware (no emulation for CPU instructions.) You run into issues when you emulate things like the hard drive, network adapters, graphics, etc.* Doing things like using VT-d (hehe) to do PCI-E passthrough can let you attach real hardware directly to a VM, as a result, a machine outfitted with VT-d and probably if it's not a newer nVidia GPU, you can get desktop-like performance out of a VM with dedicated hardware.


...and...


Aquinus said:


> I would always recommend installing it (even on a VM) if a person wants to experiment with it. Also restoring a snapshot is a lot faster than rebooting from a USB drive.


While you can do what you suggest, you would be *installing* Linux to an external hard drive unlike a bootable flash drive which contains the LiveCD which is actually a very different animal thanks to everything needed to keep the OS from trying to write to the drive. All in all, VMs are easier to manage and restore if you screw it up. There is no reason why anyone should not explore Linux in a VM.

Also consider for a minute that big businesses scale out by using cloud servers (VMs). If they're really that slow and useless, companies like Google and Amazon wouldn't offer cloud services the way that they do.



yesyesloud said:


> Regardless, when it comes to VMs, I would run VMware instead of often choppy VirtualBox. I ran both at different times on the same intel machine at college and VMware performed clearly better.


Eye candy. Use PCI-E passthrough using AMD MMU or Intel's VT-d and you can attach a real video card to a VM. The simple fact is that graphics is emulated so it won't be perfect, which goes back to my prior comment about how "VMs have almost the same amount of CPU compute power as the host.


yesyesloud said:


> PS.: booting efi-ready distributions (most currently) from usb drives is pretty fast.


Booting EFI installs regardless of where they are tend to be faster than legacy BIOS boot, but that only has an impact on the first couple seconds of booting.

If all you're doing is playing around with Linux, wouldn't it make more sense to have a VM, so if something goes wrong you can still have a OS with a browser you can Google instructions or ask people questions on the forum while its running without having to bring Windows down. So while you make some good (but also a lot of not so good,) I see there being little advantage to using a LiveCD.

Side note: Your graphics performance will still be relatively crap on a USB drive because to install FGLRX or nVidia restricted drivers requires that you install a kernel module and restart the machine. Therefore, if you want decent 3D anyways, you need to install it.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 16, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> There are two things wrong with this statement:
> A: Running one OS at a time is only smoother when the host is already fully loaded, in which case you have already violated rule #1 of virtualization, don't over-provision resources.
> B: Thread count in virtualized environments has very little impact on performance as context switching takes very little time and doesn't make a difference until you start going north of 2,000 threads (which is a very conservative measure I might add).
> 
> ...


You seem to make some paradoxical points regarding general VM performance on personal computers, involving actual thread management (a little more complex than what you described), horrible video drivers and overall system resources.

Oh, you win on the HDD/SSD i/o performance - your ordinary flash drive can't beat your ordinary hdd on that one, undoubtedly... But storage performance is not all there is to it (as mentioned right above).

Luckily, there are several distributions featuring preloaded proprietary video drivers, SteamOS being one of them. Burn them into your flash drive and you're good to go. Your average VM won't beat that thumb out of the box; you'd need a lot of tweaking in order to - not - achieve full video performance with it, which's kind of a major point for, say, home applications.

Not that Linux open source video drivers running from a Live CD won't do better than VirtualBox default ones, for instance.

Hey, nobody said VMs are useless. Far from that. They're glorious. And servers consist in a completely different subject with regards to VMs. A bit far-fetched for this cozy thread. Different hardware and software (when not extremely custom). Cpu, ram and storage often in vertiginous amounts (big businesses, as you mentioned). Different tasks, goals, latency demands. Not your kitchen build. If you want to migrate a server farm, it's one big thing. If you want to google, access gmail or youtube (services running off VMs right now) from your native OS, you won't die in case something takes a little longer to load than expected. If you want to stream games, on the other hand, it's another completely different thing, you'll need dedicated servers running native operating systems for the actual gameplay...

And if you wanna play offline, don't use a local VM. Even for Tux Racer. Unless you're used to sluggish gameplay. Don't expect to decently run HD videos either.

Well, back home...

Running out of physical memory is much less likely when you're running a single OS (having all ram available), Linux above all.

From your posts, you clearly haven't used live cds for long (I ran "heavy" vanilla Ubuntu from a 16GB flash drive for months after my laptop hdd died) and you didn't boot more than a couple of different distributions, certainly missing Slax and Porteus among many unique others. They behave quite differently from what you seem to think is universal.

Also, I'm not sure whether you're that familiar with Debian/Ubuntu persistence in particular.

And (U)EFI-boot (it can be so very faster, depending on your hardware).

Although I had read your posts, there was actually no need to do it in order to understand how a VM works on home systems that have - some - hardware virtualization capabilities, but thanks for trying and educating me better.


I'll list the general pros and cons of VMs and Live CDs:

Live CD
Pros:
-Burn an ISO with proprietary video drivers into your flash drive and you will have good multimedia performance out of the box.
-Making Live media is much faster than installing/setting up the whole operating system.
-You don't really have to touch your main system/drives to run or when running a Live CD (let alone ruin them).
-There's optional Persistence if you're not satisfied with the software collection built into a given distribution and want to install (and keep) more, also if you want to keep settings, save stuff etc.
Cons:
-You'll have to rely on your flash drive read/write capabilities, or whatever drive you wrote that live cd into.
-If you didn't set up Persistence or any similar feature when building your Live CD, you'll lose settings/files upon reboot.
-Some people are judgemental about Live CDs...

VM
Pros:
-OS-in-OS (do other things on the host OS, including limited troubleshooting etc.)
-No need to reboot.
-Run it from your main storage.
-Pretty cool.
Cons:
-Taking time to install and configure VM software, including each OS "profile".
-Installing the system, pretty slow for an eager tryout (unless you prefer going Live on a VM, go figure haha...)
-A lot of tweaking in order to get decent video drivers not that optimized.


Well, as a "first" resort: pick what fits your needs. It comes down to that anyway.
From experience, I prefer Live CDs for tryouts (not seldom for full blown operating systems).


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## Aquinus (Apr 16, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> Luckily, there are several distributions featuring preloaded proprietary video drivers, SteamOS being one of them. Burn them into your flash drive and you're good to go. Your average VM won't beat that thumb out of the box; you'd need a lot of tweaking in order to - not - achieve full video performance with it, which's kind of a major point for, say, home applications.


I'm not sure where you're getting that information from but most distro's don't come with restricted drivers, it has something to do with copyright and how FGLRX and nVidia's priorietary drivers aren't open source. With respect to open source drivers, they're pretty bad for everything outside of 2D to be completely honest.


yesyesloud said:


> Not that Linux open source video drivers running from a Live CD won't do better than VirtualBox default ones, for instance.


That depends on your hardware and the open source driver, but I would put them on par because at least VirtualBox can accelerate 3D, but once again I wouldn't be using a VM if I was doing 3D.


yesyesloud said:


> And if you wanna play offline, don't use a local VM. Even for Tux Racer. Unless you're used to sluggish gameplay. Don't expect to decently run HD videos either.


Don't expect to play HD video on OpenSource radeon drivers either. A great example is my old Dell laptop with a 2.1Ghz Penryn in it. It has a dedicated Mobility Radeon HD 3650, FGLRX removed support for legacy hardware and when I try to even play 720P it struggles when it used to do hardware decoding 1080p without an issue under proprietary drivers when they worked, so there really is a huge difference between the two, even more so if you want hardware acceleration of any kind (which is very helpful for HD video).


yesyesloud said:


> Running out of physical memory is much less likely when you're running a single OS (having all ram available), Linux above all.


If you have 512MB of memory free, you're probably okay so I don't see how that's an issue. It comes down to rule #1 of virtualization, don't over-provision more resources than the host has.


yesyesloud said:


> From your posts, you clearly haven't used live cds for long (I ran "heavy" vanilla Ubuntu from a 16GB flash drive for months after my laptop hdd died) and you didn't boot more than a couple of different distributions, certainly missing Slax and Porteus among many unique others. They behave quite differently from what you seem to think is universal.


I've worked with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, CentOS, RHEL (at work,) and if you want to include Unix platforms, throw FreeBSD into the mix. I find it insulting that you're assuming how much I know when I've done nothing of the sort for you. I might want to throw out there that I used to be a linux system admin and I'm currently a lead developer who does most of his work in Linux, so I would be careful to make any assumptions about my knowledge. I don't do that for other people and you shouldn't as well. Lets stick to the facts.

I do want to point out a couple things with your pro/con list.


yesyesloud said:


> Live CD
> Pros:
> -Burn an ISO with proprietary video drivers into your flash drive and you will have good multimedia performance out of the box.


I don't see how you can say that because short of SteamOS (I've never used it, so I can't say what it has or can do,) but most distro's don't come with restricted drives and open source drives are slow and terribly inefficient, so if you have an older computer, this isn't going to hold true.


yesyesloud said:


> -Making Live media is much faster than installing/setting up the whole operating system.


You missed the part where VM disks can use a thing called snapshots, so if you do something and want to revert it to the way it was, you just revert to an old snapshot of the disk, turn the machine on, and you're done. On top of that, if you're using a VM, it's not like you can't do something while it installs. You don't need to sit there and watch the progress bar. Also, if you have the ISO on your tower, I have a feeling that installing from HDD/SSD to HDD/SSD will be a lot faster than imaging a flash drive.


yesyesloud said:


> -You don't really have to touch your main system/drives to run or when running a Live CD (let alone ruin them).


Very true, but technically you're not touching your main system with a VM either, the only thing you're doing is using a little bit of space on the filesystem you already have. The point of using a VM is to *isolate it from the host*. That isolation gives you better security than a LiveCD ever will. At least if a VM crashes, the host is still there and you only have to reboot the VM and rebooting a VM is a lot faster than rebooting from a flash drive. Not to mention if Linux is hosed, you can easily revert to a prior snapshot.


yesyesloud said:


> -If you didn't set up Persistence or any similar feature when building your Live CD, you'll lose settings/files upon reboot.


Yes, very true, but even if persistence is setup, most flash drives write even slower than they read. It's one of those things where the user better be patient. 

On to VMs!


yesyesloud said:


> VM
> Pros:
> -OS-in-OS (do other things on the host OS, including limited troubleshooting etc.)


I personally find this a big plus when you're trying to learn how do something, even more so if you're doing things that can screw Linux up. This is one of those cases where between this and snapshotting, you can learn a lot very easily and since you have a browser in the host handy, you can figure out why something doesn't work very quickly in comparison.


yesyesloud said:


> -No need to reboot.


Just for clarification, there is no need to reboot the host. The VM will undoubtably get rebooted several times.


yesyesloud said:


> -Run it from your main storage.


That's not a requirement. This also implies that you can't run a LiveCD from a VM using an attached flash drive which you can. You also can put the VM disk image anywhere you want. For example, I could put it on my SSD RAID, my HDD RAID, the 500GB drive attached, an external hard drive, a network drive, a flash drive, etc. The location of the disk doesn't matter, that's my point.


yesyesloud said:


> -Pretty cool.


Don't placate to me. I will say I come off as insulting but it's just me trying to be direct. 


yesyesloud said:


> Cons:
> -Taking time to install and configure VM software, including each OS "profile".


I'm not quite sure what you're talking about here. Most VMs will automatically setup defaults for you depending on the OS you're installing. Also configuration doesn't take that long, so I'm not sure how you can call this a "con". In fact resource limiting in VMs is probably one of the reasons why cloud servers are a thing now, so I wouldn't exactly call this a shortcoming of VMs but rather a strength and since it makes defaults for you, it's not like an unexperienced enduser will have trouble with this aspect.


yesyesloud said:


> -Installing the system, pretty slow for an eager tryout (unless you prefer going Live on a VM, go figure haha...)


You install it once and you're done. Assuming the user uses snapshots, there should be no need to ever need to install it again since you can revert the drive to any prior snapshot. So while it takes more time, you do it once and never again. You also don't need to leave a flash drive plugged into your tower as well. Also if you're going with a LiveCD, you're not installing anything so that's a false equivalency and if feels more like baiting. Also, if you're installing a VM, there is a good bet the installer ISO is on a physical disk which means installing will go a lot faster than you think.


yesyesloud said:


> -A lot of tweaking in order to get decent video drivers not that optimized.


I find FGLRX to be very easy to install for supported hardware. I do find multi-monitor (3 displays) to be a little strange because of how my own tower is configured but it's not like most people have such a setup and I would call restricted drivers half decent at this point.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 17, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> I'm not sure where you're getting that information from but most distro's don't come with restricted drivers, it has something to do with copyright and how FGLRX and nVidia's priorietary drivers aren't open source. With respect to open source drivers, they're pretty bad for everything outside of 2D to be completely honest.


I already listed some distributions coming with proprietary video drivers preloaded. You can run 3D applications with those on a Live CD, smoothly.

There are hundreds of distributions lying around, not all of them stick with purist FOSS philosophies. Many simply aren't crazy about being all open source by default.

As to performance, again, both 2D and 3D rendering on free drivers running natively are faster than when handled by a VM.

Things will be smoother on a cold-booted Porteus (as an example) than on its VM counterpart.

Video performance is kind of a major thing for home use.



Aquinus said:


> That depends on your hardware and the open source driver, but I would put them on par because at least VirtualBox can accelerate 3D, but once again I wouldn't be using a VM if I was doing 3D.


I wouldn't put them on par.

Definitely, you wouldn't be doing 3D within your average pc VM, which video support sucks hairy dinosaurs in general, regardless of loading proprietary drivers.

Also, it's not like there are hundreds of free video drivers ready for load by default on current distros. For amd gpus, for instance, you'll seldom use something other than xf86-video-ati (context: free drivers - just clarifying, you know).



Aquinus said:


> Don't expect to play HD video on OpenSource radeon drivers either. A great example is my old Dell laptop with a 2.1Ghz Penryn in it. It has a dedicated Mobility Radeon HD 3650, FGLRX removed support for legacy hardware and when I try to even play 720P it struggles when it used to do hardware decoding 1080p without an issue under proprietary drivers when they worked, so there really is a huge difference between the two, even more so if you want hardware acceleration of any kind (which is very helpful for HD video).


Seriously? I play high bitrate 1080p videos on my 7640g (APU-based laptop radeon graphics) with open source drivers. And it's pretty gimmicky hardware.

Many Linux users don't even bother installing proprietary video drivers if they don't perform heavy 3D tasks.



Aquinus said:


> If you have 512MB of memory free, you're probably okay so I don't see how that's an issue. It comes down to rule #1 of virtualization, don't over-provision more resources than the host has.


I just pointed out you will have all your memory for a single OS on a cold Live boot.

On the other hand, in a VM session... Why would someone over-provision the guest more resources than the host has? Is it even possible? Tis crazeh.

512MB of ram free? If you're talking about modern distros and applications, it seems you love swapping during extensive tryouts.



Aquinus said:


> I've worked with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, CentOS, RHEL (at work,) and if you want to include Unix platforms, throw FreeBSD into the mix. I find it insulting that you're assuming how much I know when I've done nothing of the sort for you. I might want to throw out there that I used to be a linux system admin and I'm currently a lead developer who does most of his work in Linux, so I would be careful to make any assumptions about my knowledge. I don't do that for other people and you shouldn't as well. Lets stick to the facts.


God, how insulting was that! Maybe you didn't spot your implying about my lack of knowledge. Implicit "misassumptions" won't always attract docile answers, beware.

I'm sure you are great at your job. I believe you. Nice to know that, also. A public display of facts relevant for some of the background information we can share in this discussion, but not for all:

It seems you're not the greatest authority in the current huge variety of forked distributions, also as to what's prepackaged in them.

Such assumption mustn't harm your major Linux/developing skills in any way. We rather know how to manage the base Linux systems than all the specific software each forked distribution bears.



Aquinus said:


> I do want to point out a couple things with your pro/con list.
> 
> I don't see how you can say that because short of SteamOS (I've never used it, so I can't say what it has or can do,) but most distro's don't come with restricted drives and open source drives are slow and terribly inefficient, so if you have an older computer, this isn't going to hold true.


That underlined part isn't a specially good statement coming from an experienced Linux user. Nor true.

And if we happen to extend the same line of thinking to foss drivers in general (beyond video), it gets more ridiculous than this discussion in itself (I admit ).

I am particularly curious about and minimally experienced in the _universe of distributions_ so that I could learn that base distros, or just "most distros" (as you said) can be a rule of thumb, but not the rule for what's packaged into each and all distros.

I never said most distros have proprietary video drivers preloaded. I said many do. And we can use them for Live CDs.

As a side note: Mint and its "parent", Ubuntu, come with all broadcom wi-fi firmwares and drivers. Debian doesn't, because of its FOSS philosophy, rendering some wireless devices useless until necessary software is properly installed and configured. Just one interesting detail among a number of others.



Aquinus said:


> You missed the part where VM disks can use a thing called snapshots, so if you do something and want to revert it to the way it was, you just revert to an old snapshot of the disk, turn the machine on, and you're done. On top of that, if you're using a VM, it's not like you can't do something while it installs. You don't need to sit there and watch the progress bar. Also, if you have the ISO on your tower, I have a feeling that installing from HDD/SSD to HDD/SSD will be a lot faster than imaging a flash drive.
> 
> Very true, but technically you're not touching your main system with a VM either, the only thing you're doing is using a little bit of space on the filesystem you already have. The point of using a VM is to *isolate it from the host*. That isolation gives you better security than a LiveCD ever will. At least if a VM crashes, the host is still there and you only have to reboot the VM and rebooting a VM is a lot faster than rebooting from a flash drive. Not to mention if Linux is hosed, you can easily revert to a prior snapshot.
> 
> Yes, very true, but even if persistence is setup, most flash drives write even slower than they read. It's one of those things where the user better be patient.


Writing an ISO to a flash drive is always faster than installing the OS, except when using a truly horrible, below average flash drive. Yeah, isolation prevent recklessness, gr8 for noobs. As with all these and those matters I couldn't possibly have conceived on this Earth, thanks big time.



Aquinus said:


> On to VMs!
> 
> I personally find this a big plus when you're trying to learn how do something, even more so if you're doing things that can screw Linux up. This is one of those cases where between this and snapshotting, you can learn a lot very easily and since you have a browser in the host handy, you can figure out why something doesn't work very quickly in comparison.
> 
> Just for clarification, there is no need to reboot the host. The VM will undoubtably get rebooted several times.


Good remark. If you didn't clarify that, I would have thought that one had to reboot the host OS in order to reboot the guest OS or load another guest etc. Just a very obvious misunderstanding here. Snapshottig is also news to me... Thanks.



Aquinus said:


> That's not a requirement. This also implies that you can't run a LiveCD from a VM using an attached flash drive which you can. You also can put the VM disk image anywhere you want. For example, I could put it on my SSD RAID, my HDD RAID, the 500GB drive attached, an external hard drive, a network drive, a flash drive, etc. The location of the disk doesn't matter, that's my point.


Nice that you brought up it was not a requirement. Because I didn't.

"Run it from your main storage" isn't equivalent to _only _running from your main storage. Very factual. Great remark.

I can't quite make out why you thought I implied one can't run a LiveCD from a VM. Take a look at the VM cons - I stated otherwise, only implying running a Live CD on a VM can be silly:

If one really wants to run a Live CD, a logical first choice is writing the ISO to some medium for a regular boot. But if one craves to run a Live CD from a VM, then loading the image as a guest OS will do the job.



Aquinus said:


> Don't placate to me. I will say I come off as insulting but it's just me trying to be direct.
> 
> I'm not quite sure what you're talking about here. Most VMs will automatically setup defaults for you depending on the OS you're installing. Also configuration doesn't take that long, so I'm not sure how you can call this a "con". In fact resource limiting in VMs is probably one of the reasons why cloud servers are a thing now, so I wouldn't exactly call this a shortcoming of VMs but rather a strength and since it makes defaults for you, it's not like an unexperienced enduser will have trouble with this aspect.


Here you go again some homebrew tryouts nosing into cloud server business...

Oh, trying to be direct isn't much different from implying insults, so no worries.

From your whole paragraph talking about that particular matter, it turns out you understood what I was talking about. And you converted me. That's a big pro, not a con from any perspective.



Aquinus said:


> You install it once and you're done. Assuming the user uses snapshots, there should be no need to ever need to install it again since you can revert the drive to any prior snapshot. So while it takes more time, you do it once and never again. You also don't need to leave a flash drive plugged into your tower as well. Also if you're going with a LiveCD, you're not installing anything so that's a false equivalency and if feels more like baiting. Also, if you're installing a VM, there is a good bet the installer ISO is on a physical disk which means installing will go a lot faster than you think.


Again, as I said right above, you got me.

Can't argue with the underlined stuffs. Not even if I just want to boot into a full blown OS in around 5 minutes (considering writing ~2GB Persistence that can hold configuration and anything extra you install/save on your Live CD).

Writing 0.7-3GB ISOs to flash drives will always be faster than installing and configuring the same distros on VMs.



Aquinus said:


> I find FGLRX to be very easy to install for supported hardware. I do find multi-monitor (3 displays) to be a little strange because of how my own tower is configured but it's not like most people have such a setup and I would call restricted drivers half decent at this point.


FGLRX sure is an easy install. And if you pick a distro in which it's preloaded, there's no need to install. Anyway even proprietary video drivers can perform far from ideal when handled by a VM.

Regardless, VMs are wondrous. I love and use them a lot. Seriously. I even did the silly thing and loaded some Live CD ISOs on them. Sorry, I'm a placater.

Also, I often boot humble Live CDs and I'm pretty happy with such habit. I enjoy trying new distributions like this.

Nobody is bound to leave their flash drives plugged 4eva whateva reezn. Except if they'll die otherwise. Now you can imagine some serious implications I still didn't...

thought for foods


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## brandonwh64 (Apr 17, 2015)

I didnt know if anyone has seen this but ESX hosts can have a GPU that the VM's can share for 3D acceleration. We run many VM's for people using autocad


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## Solaris17 (Apr 17, 2015)

Iv never had these "performance" issues in any of my VMs. However I have had serious performance issues when using booted live environments off of thumb drives even when allocating high space in persistence mode. I honestly think some of these arguments go both ways but I would have to say that now most against VMS are unfounded. The technology has come a long way in terms of hardware usage and balancing with the host OS assuming you are using a VM layer inside of a consumer OS like windows or another linux distro or even OSX. let alone the stability of low layers like ESXI.

If making a VM is difficult then I would have to attempt to shoot that down too since most people have easy access to virtual box or vmware which offer free alternatives to virtualization. Their are dedicated sites that offer pre build downloadable images for you too import. Most of which are no bigger then the ISO image themselves.

http://www.osboxes.org/virtualbox-images/

If third party sketches you out some of the more popular  distributions occasionally offer pre built VMs of their own either by their own distribution or through VMware or otherwise.


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## Aquinus (Apr 17, 2015)

brandonwh64 said:


> I didnt know if anyone has seen this but ESX hosts can have a GPU that the VM's can share for 3D acceleration. We run many VM's for people using autocad


I touched on that earlier. You can do the same with with KVM with a Linux host as well. In fact you're not even limited to GPUs, you can attach other real devices such as ethernet adapters, RAID controllers, PCI-E SSDs, or anything that would benefit from having direct access to hardware. VT-d/IOMMU is some pretty awesome stuff.


Aquinus said:


> Doing things like using VT-d (hehe) to do PCI-E passthrough can let you attach real hardware directly to a VM, as a result, a machine outfitted with VT-d and probably if it's not a newer nVidia GPU, you can get desktop-like performance out of a VM with dedicated hardware.


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## xvi (Apr 18, 2015)

I like Debian myself. Not quite as polished as Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but almost everything is optional and it's just nice and lean. I actually don't use it often, but in this regard, Ubuntu Server might actually be best. Install a very base system and if you need anything else, you have to apt-get it.


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## yesyesloud (Apr 22, 2015)

Solaris17 said:


> Iv never had these "performance" issues in any of my VMs. However I have had serious performance issues when using booted live environments off of thumb drives even when allocating high space in persistence mode. I honestly think some of these arguments go both ways but I would have to say that now most against VMS are unfounded. The technology has come a long way in terms of hardware usage and balancing with the host OS assuming you are using a VM layer inside of a consumer OS like windows or another linux distro or even OSX. let alone the stability of low layers like ESXI.
> 
> If making a VM is difficult then I would have to attempt to shoot that down too since most people have easy access to virtual box or vmware which offer free alternatives to virtualization. Their are dedicated sites that offer pre build downloadable images for you too import. Most of which are no bigger then the ISO image themselves.
> 
> ...


You're a lucky guy for not having performance issues on any VM of yours. It took me some work to get there at first.

Making default VMs is not difficult at all generally, but only custom VMs may perform decently for the average joe (like... non-laggy/frameskipping youtube). In this sense, I wouldn't say most arguments "against" VMs are unfounded, given that particular background (average joe/newbie tryouts).

Otherwise, yes, VMs are great when you have good software and some technical skills. Great link by the way.

As I mentioned, when my main laptop HDD died, I ran a Live CD with persistence from an usb flash drive for ~6 months. I used to play TF2 with it. Maybe I'm lucky too.



Aquinus said:


> I touched on that earlier. You can do the same with with KVM with a Linux host as well. In fact you're not even limited to GPUs, you can attach other real devices such as ethernet adapters, RAID controllers, PCI-E SSDs, or anything that would benefit from having direct access to hardware. VT-d/IOMMU is some pretty awesome stuff.





brandonwh64 said:


> I didnt know if anyone has seen this but ESX hosts can have a GPU that the VM's can share for 3D acceleration. We run many VM's for people using autocad


We've seen that. It's not like they need 60fps. As to configuring that VM vs out-of-the-box video performance in general (and 3D in particular), which I guess is the whole point of the "Live CDs vs VMs" discussion - regarding tryouts -, to each their own...

Anyway, the best of luck for those who want good video performance from VMs pronto.


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## ManofGod (Apr 29, 2015)

I prefer Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for a primary host Linux OS. I love Windows but enjoy messing around with other Operating Systems and I am in IT so anything I can learn helps my employer as well. With Ubuntu, you can install any desktop environment you prefer and go from there. (Unity is excellent but is not for everyone, personally, I cannot stand the default Mint or Cinnamon desktop.)


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## Uplink10 (May 2, 2015)

If you want to put multiple distributions on USB device use YUMI. I have Lubuntu which is the most lightweight and Kubuntu to show people Linux can be more beautiful than Windows.



yesyesloud said:


> Regardless, when it comes to VMs, I would run VMware instead of often choppy VirtualBox.


While I do agree Vmware Workstation is faster it is shareware and not open source. And open source is free and secure.



Aquinus said:


> Also consider for a minute that big businesses scale out by using cloud servers (VMs). If they're really that slow and useless, companies like Google and Amazon wouldn't offer cloud services the way that they do.


Yes, but they use Type-1 hypervisor.



Aquinus said:


> Booting EFI installs regardless of where they are tend to be faster than legacy BIOS boot, but that only has an impact on the first couple seconds of booting.


EFI is still unsupported in many situations, I tried YUMI and it did not boot in EFI mode on VM.



Aquinus said:


> That depends on your hardware and the open source driver, but I would put them on par because at least VirtualBox can accelerate 3D, but once again I wouldn't be using a VM if I was doing 3D.


You can easily play games like Mass Effect 2, 3 on VM on Type-2 hypervisor.


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## xvi (May 5, 2015)

Uplink10 said:


> If you want to put multiple distributions on USB device use YUMI.


+1 for YUMI. I have an array of utilities, multiple distros, and even Windows 10 Tech Preview on my main flash drive. Works nicely.


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## vectoravtech (Jun 11, 2015)

I use Linux Mint Mate from a usb stick to watch movies. The volume can go to about 250% and Mint comes loaded with non-free drivers pre-installed also.


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## xorbe (Jun 11, 2015)

openSUSE here, best KDE support I have found.


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## slackin (Jun 15, 2015)

Frick said:


> I say don't bother, unless you just want to play around with Linux but if you're a newbie I still say don't bother, do it on a PC instead. But anyway Kali should work, and there are mobile variants of Ubuntu and Debian, though I don't know how stable they are.
> 
> But if you want it on a PC, Linux Mint is really nice, but you won't really learn anything as everything just works (generally) out of the box. Slackware used to be the distro of choice if you wanted to go deep.



Haha, love to see slackware even mentioned! Slackware is where my nick comes from. I started in slackware and used it exclusively from '98-2012. I actually have Windows and ubuntu installed now. Slackware is awesome, but between 65 hour work weeks and two young children I don't have time to keep up with it anymore.


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## mroofie (Jun 15, 2015)

Linux Mint / Linux Windows


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