The Buster install booted without issue and ran through the setup menus very nicely. I added a personal user and am able to log in to the CLI, run startx and run applications.
Next I mounted the Stretch microSD and copied my home directory to the new installation. No problems, no errors.
However, after reboot the desktop is now Gnome, not LXDE (or whatever subset of it Raspbian used for both the old Stretch setup and the new Buster installation at least to start with.
Any hints as to how this happened? I tried to stick with defaults so far as obvious, never having intentionally invoked Gnome even as an experiment. Only intentional non-default is the experimental GL Desktop, which didn't seem to have any effect on the DE.
My principal objection to Gnome is that it's bigger and slower than LXDE, but that's based on very old experience. Is it still true?
Oh, here's another oddity: I'm typing this across a wireless network, but the network icon reports no wireless interfaces found. That's odd.
Not speaking to the specific of *your* gnome or even your underlying distro, but 'generally' across linux distros gnome has become the most 'bloated' resource consuming DE of them all. All of the DEs based on gtk+ have increased use of resources from having gone to gtk3, such as XFCE and Mate and LXDE going to Qt instead, except KDE which has managed to reduce its resource consumption by achieving more/better modularity.
That opinion is based on booting various live linux distro/s w/ various DEs over the years to their default desktop and measuring ram used w/ free.
If you want something a bit more sophisticated and less flat, I recommend the MATE desktop. It's uses a little more resources than Pixel/LXDE, but nowhere near that of Gnome.
Perhaps I'm mistaken about the DE being gnome, I keyed on the replacement of the raspberry icon in the upper left by a bare footprint with four toes. I _though_ that was a gnome trademarke, no? Is there a way to check/select which DE to use?
Performance seems no worse than with Stretch, which is acceptable for my purposes. Chromium no longer locks the Pi on weather satellite images, which by itself is enough to justify the upgrade.
The tool I like to use to look at various features of a system is inxi, which isn't /quite/ as useful in all its reports for rpi, but its
inxi -S
(or add some xx after the -S to get a little more) will tell you the inxi read on the system, which reports lxde & openbox; the xx adds lxpanel and lightdm.
I don't have your distro loaded at this time, but I'm getting ready to write it to a spare SD that I previously used to look at LibreElec and OSMC which I didn't care for.
Chiming in on this sub-thread to agree about MATE and also to suggest XFCE4 as a possible DE alternative. I'm using it on my latest Raspbian Lite install and couldn't be happier.
XFCE has been one of my goto DEs on any machine where a tiling window manager isn't appropriate and KDE is overkill feature wise, but I was a bit concerned about performance on the Pi. The version on Raspbian repos isn't the latest one, so it still relies a bit less on GTK3 and performance is lightning fast. I couldn't be happier, especially as the features it provides are worth it. In the future though, as they fully migrate to GTK3 it could change.
--
Vasco Costa
AKA gluon. Enthusiastic about computers, motorsport, science,
technology, traveling and TV series. Yes I'm a bit of a geek.
On a sunny day (Sun, 23 Feb 2020 01:14:10 -0000 (UTC)) it happened A. Dumas wrote in :
Indeed! After installing buster that was the first disaster I came across, so added a user 'flip' and gave it root rights. now I can ssh -Y IP_OF_RASPI without the ..@ part.. The second thing was the desktop Replaced it by fvwm and xfm as file manager, 9 virtual desktops. Hardly any system usage at all, 8 rxvt running one in each desktop and in desktop 1 xfm with all the icons. This has been on ALL my puters since ? 1998?? Third thing I did was compile old version of libforms and install that so all the xforms based programs I wrote work on raspi. The new debian version of libforms does not work is incompatible.
Then I have hundreds of scripts in /usr/local/sbin/ some from old raspis, some from old PCs, some needed modifying, but that gives me hundreds of commands from the command line.
It is a bit like that supermarket thing: you go there shopping and look at the shelves.. takes a while.. you get what you want or come home with something else to try out... Or go to a hardware store and ask the guy 'I want this, and that'. and he gets it for you. In short my command line speaks English and knows me. All the silly tinkering and ever changing user interfaces by people who obviously never program anything are bloat on bloat people use ever more bloated 'high level' languages where does it go? Many tasks can be run on a 3$ micro for 1/100 of the power with only a few kB of memory at many times the speed in REAL time.
Modern browsers and web sites are so complex because of advertising.. The content is often still shit.. Same with TV the programs, those do NOT get any better on 4k and 8k room sized screens.. Its the same silly Trump face and babble, but bigger and with more detail. Same for broadband speed, 5G: anybody watch 3D UHD movies on their phone while walking down the street?
5G does not work very well indoors I think.
Extrapolating will the next raspi 5 ? Do WHAT?
root, anybody drive their car from the passenger seat and hops over to steer at he corners? Mind you steering is dangerous.. its true I once ...
Do yOu gUYs kNoW IT SelLs MOre wHeN People aRe giVEN ROOT righTS?
It looks as if I'm getting a different DE when I log in as a regular user. Logged in to the Pi account I get all the familiar icons. Logged in to my personal account the icons are different. Must be something to do with adduser behavior. I don't recall it happening with Stretch.
How did you update to Buster? Clean install or via a version upgrade? How will you do it in future?
It sounds yo me as though you did a clean install, otherwise all the changes you made previously should still be there.
All my other systems run Fedora Linux, which was well behind Debian in implementing a version upgrade process. Consequently, every 6 months I had to do ac lean install, which was a pain, if I was to run current software. However, it did teach me a lesson, which is that its a very good idea to make a copy of every file you change in /etc and its subdirectories and keep the copies in one of your normal login user. AND make regular backups of /home.
This way, after a clean upgrade you simply:
- restore your backup of /home
- add back the users and groups that aren't standard
- work through the /etc copy, diffing each file, altering your copy as needed to include any new parameters and copy the result back to /etc/ overwriting the newly installed version and restarting the service it configures or rebooting to check everythinf still works.
However, making a complete system backup and immediately before doing a version upgrade is much easier: nonetheless, I still keep copies of anything I change in /etc.
There is a fuller description, along with suggestions about how to include the contents of /usr/local in a backup of /home, here:
Clean install on Samsung Evo Plus 64 GB card. I used the Desktop version, the previous setup was, I think, minimal.
This time I left the pi account undisturbed and made a second personal account using adduser. That somehow set up a slightly different DE compared to the pi account. Just how different isn't obvious. The only clue is a four-toed foot icon in the menu bar, replacing the raspberry icon which appears for the pi account.
Not sure. Still can't get cups to work right, but it's unclear whether that's related to the choice of installed image.
I'm using the Pi as a terminal and attempting to change as little as possible. I do need occasionally to print. I don't want to use the pi account for routine activity, preferring to treat it more like root, which it really is. The Pi runs lots of xterms, a browser, and maybe some personal productivity software from time to time. It sits behind a DHCP router.
In this case I simply copied /home from the old microSD card to the fresh install, which worked nicely.
I didn't _think_ there were enough changes in /etc to cause serious trouble, ie, I could just fix what went wrong manually. Maybe that's over-optimistic.
Even better, install the etckeeper package. This will store all changes to files in etc in git repository. When you edit a file, you can either manually commit it with a comment explaining what you have done, or if you forget it will automatically commit them on a daily cron task. It also detects changes made by the package manager, so its easy to find out what happened if things go wrong.
On a sunny day (Wed, 26 Feb 2020 20:33:07 +0000) it happened druck wrote in :
Even better, backup everything on a regular basis
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31312576512 Feb 24 16:44 raspi_95_24_2_2020_external_sdcard_reader_verify_OK.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35482342 Feb 24 17:19 RP4_95_p1-5_external_sdcard_reader.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8197553174 Feb 24 19:03 RP4_95_p2-5_external_sdcard_reader.tgz
The first is an image of the complete card made on an other PC (rp4 off, card in other PC) the other two are the tar -zcvf of both partitions of that card, Easy to unzip one and get any file back. It is some more work and needs a reboot, but as I modifiy so much 're-install' or 'update' is not in my books. Practically every image is a new system.
Hijack and encrypt and ask for bitcoins? back in a 'FLASH'. Bad card? Want a copy for an other raspi4? etc etc..
I identify the raspis here by the last digit of their fixed IP address.
192.168.178.95 is raspi95 etc.
I have backups that go back to almost the original buster install.. You need a couple of huge harddisks... Every backup is on at least 2 different harddisks\, one is almost always offline.
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