Finding a Linux distro and software that work
This article is part of a series titled Trying Linux 2022. You can read the other items in there series here:
I wrote yesterday’s article about giving Linux another try while things were still installing, i.e. too soon. Here is everything that I tried:
- Ubuntu Mate 22.04: Installed but setup wouldn’t complete (I probably tried 3-4 times).
- Ubunutu 22.04: Installed and setup, but it was very slow and crashed multiple times.
- Ubuntu Mate 22.04 (attempt 2): Installed and setup, but I was unable to open Firefox.
- Lubuntu 20.04.5: Couldn’t get it to install on the microSD card. Maybe
because I renamed an
.isofile to.img? (Following this recommendation) - Raspberry Pi OS: It worked! 🎉
With the OS up and running, I moved on to installing software. Git was included
already, and I used apt to install nodejs and vim. Brew doesn’t work with
ARM devices, so I need to manage some software manually.
I decided that it would probably be a good idea to use pnpm instead of npm on a
low-memory device. It required at least Node.js 14, but the latest version
available from apt was 12.
After going through the usual journey of trying to update Node.js, I ended up
installing NVM and going with the new 18 LTS.
With that updated, I could install pnpm with: npm i -g pnpm
The included version of Chromium struggled to render emojis correctly, so I
opted for Firefox instead. I used the Raspberry Pi’s package manager to install
firefox-esr and it worked great. I made sure to install
uBlock Origin to hopefully help a bit
with performance.
With all that in place, I now have a serviceable Linux machine for tinkering! It still struggles a bit running multiple processes at the same time, but it’s definitely good enough for now.