SparkyLinux 5.8 RC Xfce

[jotapesse]

Thank you for bringing back the much needed Xfce version. Happy to report that it installed fine, full disk encryption, sparky theme issue (full cpu resources) resolved, no issues at all. :)

[miniXFCE]

I love XFCE version/DE. Thank you very very much for making one!  ;)

[Yoogle]

I'm all with you - it's a great comeback, amazing over all!
Just when seeing more and more distros focusing all their resources towards things like GNOME and Wayland which as of current state show themselves much more annoying than anyhow useful Xfce will need the voice of friends more than ever! From my personal point of view, there is no desktop environment that can only come near to the magnificent benefits of Xfce. Help us Lord never get losing it!
Considering current work of Sparky in general, there's yet one critical appointment I have to remark hereby:  (Maintainers, please listen!!!)
When making their own kernels Sparky's bosses seem having forgotten to enable AMDGPU features (.si and .cik support)! So me, I was forced to recompile my own one to get my Radeon R7 260X graphics card work on AMDGPU instead of old Radeon kernel drivers whereby the latter would be the worse choice. Any AMD GPU even newer will require this setting as more! However, for me this was a lucky occasion to change my kernel configuration for some other matter, too, meaning because of me eclusively using XFS for file systems I decided to include XFS in the inner kernel instead of just having it become a module as common ...

[pavroo]

kernel 5.1.14 with the missing amdgpu modules enabled moved to sparky unstable repos, give it a try, please.

[Yoogle]

Everything o.k. by 5.1.14 even with amdgpu now - thank you very much!

Just as an additional remark I want to give some additional hints for private recompilations. At least on my self-assembled workstations the following settings do appear working great - though I haven't done benchmarking, so it's seen from superficial impression only:
Changed SLAB (though common with all Debian) to SLUB
Had kernel frequency rise from 250Hz to 300Hz
Enabled energy model for CPUs
Just for my personal preference for exclusive use of XFS on root as well as on data partitions (as reported before), included XFS support in the inner kernel (m -> y)
My hardware is
1. Ryzen 1500X with 2x8GB 2666Hz DDR4 (Crucial single rank withot XMP) and R7 260X graphics
2. Ryzen 1600 (tuned up to 3.5GHz by Pstate0 without having risen voltage, but fully stable) with 4x4GB 2400Hz DDR4 (Crucial single rank withot XMP) and RX570 8G graphics
both on ASRock B350 chipsets, each machine holding one 256GB SSD from Transcend (good old 2D-MLC) and one 2TB 3.5'' enterprise level HD (HGST and WD), performance does hardly leave wishes open ...

Be the Ancients with ye!

[yashletn]

Hi everybody,

A message for Sparky developpers.
A few days ago, I installed Sparky 5.8 XFCE on an old HP Pro 3010.
Everything seems alright but I have some small bugs I wanted to report to improve this new release :

- The text shadow under the desktop icons is displaced

- When I want to change the wallpaper : Right-clic on an image >> Set as wallpaper doesn't work.
I have to use the "traditional way" : Right-clic on Desktop >> Change the repertory >> Select the image

These are some minor bugs.
Sparky 5.8 XFCE is fine - very close to pure Debian buster + XFCE - but I still prefer MX or SolydX.
I tried the LXQt version too, I find this one more interesting.