Bookwoorm not so stable

[mls]

I have tested Sparky 7 on a core duo HP laptop and got multiple problems with the distro.

Sddm, which replaced lightdm, doesn't save last DE as default DE, in result the minimual gui system starts to openbox WM after installation of another DE. Besides, when typing the password into sddm, the last password characters are visible in the password window, which is unacceptable. So the safest option seems to be installing lightdm and setting it as default display manager (then edit etc/light/lightdm.conf to enable autologin).
NM applet keeps notifying me about connections until I disable notifications in it, but this on a side note.
When installing second Sparky 7 on the same disk, the MBR partition table got broken whit a message "invalid partition table on /dev/sda -- wrong signature 0". I have lost two system partitions and a data partition with a couple of system disk images (luckily it's a testing computer). Then, after having formatted the disk with GPT and two installations of Sparky 7 on it, the Grub sees only one system. The line "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false" in etc/default/grub in uncommented, but grub-update doesn't see the other system.

So I install Sparky 6 with its Grub and magic happens: I see all the systems. However, when starting Sparky 7, instead of quiet boot this time I can see all boot messages...

So I don't know - is it me, my computer or simply Debian Bookworm is still unstable?
I have been using Sparky 5 and 6 with no problem so I will stick to them.

[Jake Sully]

G'day,

I cannot give you a definitive answer but, considering the agonising testing of Debian I doubt it...

For reference, I did a clean install of Sparky 7 Rolling (Debian Unstable/Sid) a couple of days ago. I have not experienced the problem you describe. I would check for this in the Debian forums, or Bugs Tracking System https://bugs.debian.org/

Cheers!

[mls]

I have tried Sparky 7 on another core duo laptop (Asus with dedicated Nvidia graphics)
Two fresh installations with GPT.
Icewm and Jwm instead of Xfce and Lxde.

SDDM's behaviour is the same. The password letters are visible as I type.
If I type walo, I can see 'dot a', 'dot dot l', 'dot dot dot o'.
After restart I am logged to Openbox. NM shows "connection established" message util I disable messages, simply "don't show again" doesn't work anymore.
In addition, when re-logging from Icewm ,once I saw stripes instead of letters, and once the login screen was so messed up that I couldn't find the "shutdown" button.

The Grub does see the other system this time. Didn't try a MBR partition table to see if it gets broken during Grub installation. Both laptops are in bios mode.

I have been playing with Sparky 7 for a week on the HP laptop and din't find anything else, except that it is more resource hungry, startup lasts longer, CPU spikes bigger (but the tasks don't get accomplished necessarily faster). Another thing - Vlc video gets pixelated (Radeon dedicated card). It happens, depending on card and distro. The easy fix is to disable "Hardware-accelerated decoding" in preferences/input/codecs. The difference is that without it Vlc uses 3x more CPU. This is not a big deal, the thing is that it works fine in Sparky 5 and 6.

So the SDDM is pretty, but useless. This is Windows Vista way of doing things.

ps. I've discovered in Aptus a wonderful usb tool: Ventoy. From now on I will use it instead of Sparky Live usb creator. Basically Ventoy installs a small tool on the usb drive so that you can use it as pendrive and live iso at the same time. You just drop as much iso files as your drive can handle (copy-paste) and chose one during booting. Also apparently it can handle windows iso's (haven't tried) I recommend to everyone!