Welcome.
Slim is meant to be the least bloated of the ISO’s, which means you will need to add things you want later. We tend to not bloat any of the packages as a general principle, and it sometimes breaks things. We tend to move ahead with newer software releases, which tends to break things. Despite all that, we are approachable when it comes to fixing them, where other distros are not.
If all they are doing is browsing the web and creating an occasional document or card, then Rock should meet their needs. It’s the least impacted by updates over a long period of time, so they won’t be annoyed with update prompts. We don’t enable updating by default, but it can be done. Please be sure to note the update command that we use and it should be pinned on the forum or the newcomer chat. It’s the command needed for all releases because of how we release versions of the distro.
The spins will all have the base system underneath. In that, they have feature parity. We make our best effort to have newer versions available so they don’t end up in legacy Hell like other distros would. I’m not going to point any fingers here, but anyone that has used a distro in the past 6 months had distro hopped at least once and knows what I’m talking about.
Spins are community maintained, just like with other distros. We do our best to supplement for the lack of maintainers. One thing people don’t understand about independently managed distros, is we do not get funding from tech oligarchs and govts. As a result, there are maybe one or two people that are working on OMLx full time, but no one is getting paid to do so. The hope is that people will see the value in owning the process and the results of what they are doing with OMLx with their time and their hardware.
We have already been made aware of this. It is on our to-do list.
I’m not sure that is necessary. If you don’t trust the source, why do you trust the key the source provides? We make the ISO’s available directly from our build farm with two forms of checksum. I don’t think adding a signature provides any further digital trust. If our host is compromised, the key could be as well. So, we would just be adding another step and layer of complexity. Something that was already brought up as an annoyance.
I would like to revisit this with you:
You have mentioned nothing about your video card or system specs, at all. You briefly, possibly allude to it here, but we are all volunteers.
You don’t even provide the system specs until after we have read through this entire thing. I get it Pop_OS is Ubuntu based and they just make it so you can consume it, but we really need more than just what looks like a “mildly worded letter,” before we can even begin to help you.
Here’s what I’m going to say about the entirety of this topic for the sake of helping you and others:
- Put the issues you are having into separate topics in the Support section with the template and pinned topic I linked requirements provided in each. This way, people searching don’t have to wade through this or every possible post you have put on the forum to find an answer.
- Use Coffee break to ask questions about things not support related, such as new DE’s or alternative DE’s. You can even bring up formal requests in Development > Packages and features requests
- Don’t blog in Support, and provide cleaner formatting to help readers achieve the goal of helping you better.
We get this a lot where people try to white knuckle their way through using OMLx like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora and ask AI/LLM/Search Engines/etc… instead of us. Then they dump absolutely every problem and disappointment into a single post that reads like trolling. It’s difficult to not think you are just trolling because you don’t really seem that invested in fixing the problems. Maybe that is the fault of indifferent distro projects failing to respond when you needed help, but that isn’t us. If you (and others) just simply do what we ask then the help will come and problems will get solved. We aren’t just sitting in front of our PC’s waiting for someone to give us work, either. Some degree of patience and understanding will be appreciated and reciprocated.
It’s also not a good look to come to a Plasma focused distro, spend 2+ months “fighting with” it without asking anyone for help on the back of a statement like this:
I don’t think your expectations are reasonable in that context.