Chris Titus recently vlogged about an article showing that KDE 5.17 is now smaller than XFCE 4.14 in memory usage. The article says that in their tests, XFCE actually uses more RAM than KDE. I was very interested in this, but I couldn’t quite believe it and so I ran my own tests.

First of all, we need to compare apples to apples. I created an OpenSUSE VM using Vagrant with KVM/libvirt. It had 4 cores and 4192MB of RAM. This VM has no graphical interface at all. As soon as I got it up, I took the first “No X” measurement. After patching using zypper dup, I took the second “No X” reading. Every reading in this blog post was using the free -m command. I then shut down the VM and cloned it 3 times so each copy should be completely the same.

Let me show you what it looks like from the internet’s point of view when I go to a simple website using a normal Browser (Brave):

111.222.333.444 - - [18/Dec/2019:16:29:05 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 7094 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36”

The 111.222.333.444 would be my IP address. With that, anyone can get a lot of information about. With just a simple google search, you can actually see in the general vicinity where an IP address originates from. For example, the public IP address for Google is 172.217.23.238. You can use services like https://whatismyipaddress.com/ to what company owns an IP and a map to where it is located. In this case, the IP for Google is probably in a datacenter in Kansas. When I look up my personal IP, the website shows a map of Prague and the company that I use for my internet provider.

*All are Linux distributions except ReactOS

Column descriptions:

• Distribution: Name of the distro
• Forum: Is there a support message board?
• Wiki: Is there a user-editable wiki?
• Community: Are there any links where I can directly contribute to the project?
• Membership: Can I become a voting member of the community?
• Bug Reporting: Is there a way to report bugs that I find?
• Mailing list: Is there an active mailing list for support, announcements, etc?
• Chat: Is there a way to talk to other people in the community directly?

What is this list?

This is the top 20 active projects distributions according to distrowatch.org in the past 12 months.

I’ve got too many email addresses.

I have:

• 2 for work
• 1 alias for opensuse.org
• 1 paid account with protonmail with 5 addresses shared in that account
• 1 very old gmail account (I signed up the first day I heard about it).
• 1 seznam account (Czech provider)
• 1 installation of mail-in-a-box with 4 domains that I own but only one real account that I use
• 1 librem.one account (this is a mistake and a disappointment)

The goal is to change all of the services, mailing lists, etc that I use to point to a single email account either directly or through aliases so that all of my email is in one place with the exception of my work email which should always stay separate. Also, to get people to only email me at the one account.

What is Bedrock Linux?

From their website:

Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to utilize features from other, typically mutually exclusive distributions. Essentially, users can mix-and-match components as desired. For example, one could have:

• The bulk of the system from an old/stable distribution such as CentOS or Debian.
• Access to cutting-edge packages from Arch Linux.
• Access to Arch’s AUR.
• The ability to automate compiling packages with Gentoo’s portage
• Library compatibility with Ubuntu, such as for desktop-oriented proprietary software.
• Library compatibility with CentOS, such as for workstation/server oriented proprietary software.

All at the same time, all working together like one, largely cohesive operating system.

What is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed?

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a cutting-edge Linux distribution from the OpenSUSE team. It uses the latest versions of software applications and the Linux kernel for those who want to see what will be coming up in other Linux distributions in 6-months to a year or more from the time that they appear in Tumbleweed. This means that there are bugs; lots of them. Things break, This is the price that you pay for having the very cutting edge or software technology.

A Gigglescore is a ratio score of price to performance for single-board-computers like the LattePanda or Raspberry Pi. A lower Gigglescore means a better value for the money. A higher one is worse. You can see more here: https://gigglescore.com/

My LattePanda:

sudo ./benchmark.sh 149
Repository ‘openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Non-Oss’ is up to date.
Repository ‘openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Oss’ is up to date.
Repository ‘openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update’ is up to date.
Repository ‘openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update-Non-Oss’ is up to date.
All repositories have been refreshed.
Category5.TV SBC Benchmark v1.1
Powered by sysbench 1.0.11
Number of threads for this SBC: 4
Performing CPU Benchmark… WARNING: the –test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
576.760 events per second. Price: Ģ930.02 per unit.
Performing RAM Benchmark… WARNING: the –test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
3,625,781.466 events per second. Price: Ģ0.15 per unit.
Performing Mutex Benchmark… WARNING: the –test option is deprecated. You can pass a script name or path on the command line without any options.
6.873 events per second. Price: Ģ7.80 per unit.

A few weeks ago I wrote a guide for installing OpenSUSE Kubic. I wrote it using my team at work’s lab manual templates in LibreOffice and then exported the output as a PDF. If you ever take a course from SUSE Training, you will receive a complete lab manual like this as a part of your course materials.

I received some good and some less-than-good feedback for this guide from people at SUSECON and on IRC. So a few days ago I began converting the source files from LibreOffice .odt files to AsciiDoc text files and I put them on github.

Notes:

The following is a proof of concept tutorial on how to create a Tor onion service on Windows 10 using Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux. This has not been security tested by anyone in the Tor project. It is also not exactly the same directions that I would give someone who wants create an onion service in Linux. Namely that WSfL doesn’t use systemd the way it is meant to be used natively. Instead you have to start system daemons using the old SysV method with /etc/init.d/ Also, services do not continue running after the window has been closed. If someone can find a workaround for that, I’ll gladly update this tutorial.

The following is a spreadsheet that I put together this weekend testing Linux applications and how well the work on Tor.

The first column is the name of the application and the second is the Linux distribution. In this case, I am using the latest build of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the latest patches applied.

The Torsocks column is whether or not the application is compatible with torsocks which is a wrapper around an application that send it’s networking requests to Tor instead of the standard internet.