Installing Freedom - Trisquel 12 Basic Metrics

There's a lot of concerns watching the upstream as enormous offensive changes are rapidly taking place that actually threaten the downstream projects future viability, such as making wayland the default display server over xorg, and replacing gnu coreutils with rust replacements, that includes a variety of packages that are fundamental to the system we all know and love.

Sometimes the upstream projects, over time, remove packages that downstream projects, as well as their users, depend on, which often results in forks, or even rebasing the entire distribution. In the current default 24.04 LTS wayland is now enabled by default, but xorg is still optional. In future releases they plan to remove it completely, which is simply disasterous. They plan similarly, according to everything I've read to do something similar with gnu coreutils, which is equally unacceptable.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1014002/

"Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default"

"If all goes according to plan, the Ubuntu project will soon be replacing many of the traditional GNU utilities with implementations written in Rust"

"Release Timeline

Key milestones for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS include:

Feature Freeze: February 16th, 2026
User Interface Freeze: March 12th, 2026
Beta Release: March 23rd, 2026
Final Freeze: April 16th, 2026
Final Release: April 23rd, 2026"

"Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon" release date is April 23, 2026. This is the next long-term support release scheduled after Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, providing five years of standard support with extended maintenance available through Ubuntu Pro for up to 12 years total."

So to see where we're at, while upstream is on a path of wanton self-destruction, and before we have to deal with it, I decided to give the latest Trisquel 12, based on the 24.04 LTS version upstream a try.

In hindsight I should have tried the default version of Trisquel 12, to check out it's metrics, but it's not too different from the mini(lxde) version, except that it takes up a bit more ram. I love the mini version of Trisquel, which in my experience is very easy to customize, and play around with, it's actually much lighter, faster, and easier to work with, than the vast majority, of debian/ubuntu derivatives. I play around with all of these systems routinely, and check them out, trying to discover how they're uniquely designed, and experience how they perform differently.

Trisquel 12 Basic Metrics (of a default install, with trisquel mini(lxde))

Download link: cdbuilds.trisquel.org

Name of the iso: trisquel-mini_12.0_amd64.iso

Size of the iso: 1.8 GB

Method of install: Ventoy USB -> offline -> uefi

Time of Install from the grub menu to the reboot: 4 minutes
(with cpufreq.default_governor=performance added to the grub command line(and offline))

Ram usage after install: top: 973 MB

Disk usage after install: ? (i didn't check, but it should be around 10-15gb I'd imagine, and trisquel is easy to trim down, unlike debian/ubuntu amazingly)

Desktop environment: lxde on xorg

Trisquel's default kernel: 6.8.0-87-generic

Automatic services enabled: 12
sudo service --status-all
[ - ] acpid
[ - ] alsa-utils
[ + ] anacron
[ + ] apparmor
[ + ] atd
[ - ] console-setup.sh
[ + ] cron
[ - ] cryptdisks
[ - ] cryptdisks-early
[ + ] cups
[ + ] dbus
[ - ] gdomap
[ - ] grub-common
[ - ] keyboard-setup.sh
[ + ] kmod
[ + ] lightdm
[ + ] openvpn
[ - ] pcscd
[ - ] plymouth
[ + ] plymouth-log
[ + ] procps
[ - ] rsync
[ - ] screen-cleanup
[ - ] spice-vdagent
[ + ] unattended-upgrades
[ - ] uuidd
[ - ] x11-common

Automatic timers enabled: 12
sudo systemctl list-timers --all
PASSED UNIT ACTIVATES
systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
anacron.timer anacron.service
dpkg-db-backup.timer dpkg-db-backup.service
logrotate.timer logrotate.service
man-db.timer man-db.service
apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily-upgrade.service
apt-daily.timer apt-daily.service
update-notifier-download.timer update-notifier-download.service
e2scrub_all.timer e2scrub_all.service
fstrim.timer fstrim.service
apt-xapian-index.timer apt-xapian-index.service
update-notifier-motd.timer update-notifier-motd.service

Contents of /etc/fstab:

UUID=72eed2d0-da0c-489b-9a0a-92ce52d955a5 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
UUID=Cd76-8C29 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 1
UUID=78d637f3-ea55-4f49-8je5-0801d417f940 /home ext4 relatime 0 2
UUID=be55552d-1ej4-447f-8f8a-89wf6a4fc56b none swap sw 0 0

(513 mb for /boot/efi 14 GB for root 2.9 gb for swap 914 gb for/home)

Trisquel's sysctl values: sudo sysctl --system > out

* Applying /usr/lib/sysctl.d/10-apparmor.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-bufferbloat.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-console-messages.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-ipv6-privacy.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-kernel-hardening.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-magic-sysrq.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-map-count.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-network-security.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/10-zeropage.conf ...
* Applying /usr/lib/sysctl.d/50-bubblewrap.conf ...
* Applying /usr/lib/sysctl.d/50-pid-max.conf ...
* Applying /usr/lib/sysctl.d/99-protect-links.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf ...
* Applying /etc/sysctl.conf ...
kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns = 1
net.core.default_qdisc = fq_codel
kernel.printk = 4 4 1 7
net.ipv6.conf.all.use_tempaddr = 2
net.ipv6.conf.default.use_tempaddr = 2
kernel.kptr_restrict = 1
kernel.sysrq = 176
vm.max_map_count = 1048576
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 2
net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 2
kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1
vm.mmap_min_addr = 65536
kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone = 1
kernel.pid_max = 4194304
fs.protected_fifos = 1
fs.protected_hardlinks = 1
fs.protected_regular = 2
fs.protected_symlinks = 1

Trisquel's grub command line: /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Trisquel's default repositories: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/trisquel.sources

# Trisquel repositories for supported software and updates
Types: deb
URIs: https://archive.trisquel.org/trisquel/
Suites: ecne ecne-updates ecne-security
Components: main
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/trisquel-archive-keyring.gpg

# Source package repositories
Types: deb-src
URIs: https://archive.trisquel.org/trisquel/
Suites: ecne ecne-updates ecne-security
Components: main
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/trisquel-archive-keyring.gpg

# Optional backports repository
Enabled: no
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: https://archive.trisquel.org/trisquel/
Suites: ecne-backports
Components: main
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/trisquel-archive-keyring.gpg

The only thing that wasn't default about the install was that I disabled encrypting the harddrive. Basically what stood out to me, is that other than trisquels unique package selections, it is very similar to the upstream, which makes me shudder in horror.

After a default install, trisquel is very very easy to work with. I noticed a few error messages in the console while booting up the live cd, which is normal, and they could be ignored. Had some errors installing kstars after running apt update that looked like this

Error: Failed to fetch https://archive.trisquel.org/trisquel/pool/main/s/sonnet/libkf5sonnetcore5_5.115.0-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb OpenSSL error: error:0A000126:SSL routines::unexpected eof while reading [IP: 18.4.89.22 443]

I ignored that, and tried it later after restarting, and everything was working.

fully upgraded the system, as of this writing, abrowser is up to 147, and includes "options" for automatically feeding user input to "ai" (non-freedom alert!)

It would be better to start providing multiple packages for different browsers, and even different versions of abrowser, so we can avoid the new features, that are potentially extreme violations of our privacy.

Then after applying display settings, and turning off the monitor, I noticed my display settings were not applying, similarly to debian bullseye/bookworm where that happened to me before

After many years of using different gnulinux distro's and interacting with their communities, I have completely stopped relying on them to manage different aspects of the system, such as the kernel/drivers, so the first thing I will do after installing is actually disable all of the "default" settings, all throughout the entire operating system, and start bypassing the "package manager" and going straight to upstream to get my own kernel/drivers to manage on my own, which is very easy to do on trisquel.

On some distro's it's very hard to simply manage your own system, without being dependent on the distributor, which is something that ubuntu resembles entirely, compared to trisquel. Here it is very easy to take control of the system, and manage it independently, which is how Gnulinux should be, and is what has made it so successful and popular after all this time.

oh, and I installed xfce without issues like this...

sudo apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies

Now if I can just avoid, web "platforms," "javascript," and also "chat boxes" I think I should be okay.