Ark Linux Review, A Distro with an Identity Crisis

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Ark Linux 2006.1, which launched earlier this month. Overall, the reviewer likes this free KDE-based distro, but had to question some implementation choices, such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser. And for a distro that bills itself as 'a Linux distribution for everyone — designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux' the installation should hide command-line scrolling and be able to more automatically install standard graphics card drivers."

Re:Konqueror

[johansalk]

Firefox is a proper browser. Konqueror on the other hand is a file manager, also a file viewer. It's such a good file viewer that you can view either local or remote files, and not only pictures and pdfs, but also html files, meaning you can also view graphic html files on remote servers, aka the web. As such, firefox is dedicated to being a browser where the web is a primary focus, whereas konqueror is more like a swiss army knife where the web is an included convenience.

Re:How do people . . .

[MrNonchalant]

Here: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a =186517,00.asp [extremetech.com]

Reviewer missed the point

[dbIII]

Konqueror shares libraries with other KDE applications so is likely to have a smaller memory footprint than Firefox.

Konqueror

[AaronW]

I have been using Konqueror a lot. I got fed up with Firefox when after 24 hours of browsing it was consuming 800MB of RAM, even though the cache size was set at 32MB. I have found that Konqueror is often faster, uses a lot less memory, and is generally more stable. There are a few sites where I have had trouble, but I've also had problems with some sites with Firefox (and a few of those worked with Konqueror). Konqueror has gotten a lot better, especially 3.5. A number of additional fixes went into 3.5.4. My only real complaint is that the adblock feature needs a lot of work to catch up with the Firefox extension.

The file dialog for Konqueror, when I download and save binaries, is infinitely better than the one in Firefox. The UI on Konqueror is also much easier to customize, adding or removing buttons at will. Some of the buttons I find quite useful, like scaling the web page larger or smaller. I also like the fact that plug-ins run as a separate process than the browser and I can run them niced. It also means I can run a 64-bit browser and integrate 32-bit plugins.

I also like the bookmark toolbar better in Konqueror. I can easily add folders or book marks to any folder I want with only a couple clicks.

As a file browser, Konqueror is actually quite nice. It's not the big bloated mess people make it out to be. In fact, if anything is a big bloated mess, it's Firefox. Konqueror uses kparts, so that if, for example, I open a .c file in it, it loads the shared libraries for the editor, or if I click on a multimedia file, it loads kaffeine. Just about everything in KDE is a part, so they can be reused. PDFs are also great in Konqueror when it uses kpdf instead of that bloated Acrobat mess.

Hell, I can't even open more than one instance of Firefox, even on different machines if my home directory is shared over a network. Konqueror has no such problems.

The Konqueror browser I'm typing this from has 18 open tabs and has been open for probably about a week or two. It's consuming 475MB of virtual memory and 116MB of resident memory, but I have had a *lot* more tabs open in the past. I can rarely keep Firefox going for more than 24 hours or so, and it gobbles up memory at an astronomical rate (even 1.5.0.6).

As far as rendering web sites goes, I believe Firefox had problems with Slashdot for the longest time, while Konqueror did not.

apt-get firefox

[x3nos]

Overall, the reviewer likes this free KDE-based distro, but had to question some implementation choices, such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser.

Simple:

apt-get firefox
enter

From the Ark Linux website: Ark Linux uses a combination of rpm and apt-get.
That wasn't so hard was it?

Re:So which is it?

[ozmanjusri]

So which is it?

It's Konqueror. The Ark Linux devs give their reasons in one of the forums:

We think that Konqueror is a much better browser. Konqueror follows the standards (in particular CSS) more closely than any other browser, it integrates better with the rest of the system, it doesn't drag in hundreds of libraries nothing else needs, and its user interface is better, because it doesn't make weird decisions like using the wrong button order. (We think the weird "Do you want to do this? [No] [Yes]" button order used by Firefox and a couple of other projects is plain wrong, because it contradicts normal language use -- what's the last time someone asked you in plain English "Do you want to xyz? No or yes?"?

If you absolutely need it, you can simply apt-get install firefox though.

http://forum.arklinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=65&highl ight=firefox [arklinux.org]

Re:To add to it

[arose]

You on the other hand fail the facts test. Acid2 [webstandards.org] is not a W3C test:

Acid2 is a test page for web browsers published by The Web Standards Project (WaSP).

Passing the Acid2 doesn't mean all that much:

Everything that Acid2 tests is specified in a Web standard, but not all Web standards are tested. Acid2 does not guarantee conformance with any specification.

So if a browser passes it can be because:

• it has really great standards support
• it has the bits tested by Acid2, but everything else could be broken
• it has been optimized for the test and does not actually conform to the standard even in the tested bits

Re:Konqueror

[JackieBrown]

"My only real complaint is that the adblock feature needs a lot of work to catch up with the Firefox extension." You will probably like this http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=3 8915 [kde-apps.org]

Re:Konqueror

[VENONA]

I find it (3.5.4) excellent. It's my default browser, and I have few compatability issues, though YMWV. And of course Firefox is on the system if I do have a problem. I like the cookie control, including being warned about cross-domain cookies. I like being able to move the tabs, or save them into a bookmark folder. It launches much faster than Firefox, though that's less important to me than it might be to others, as it's nearly always running. Being able to enter 'man:whatever' in the location window is something I find extremely handy, due to the nature of the work I do.

You won't have Greasemonkey in Konqueror. That might be a problem for you. I was never a heavy user of it, and a security vulnerability led me to drop the small amount of stuff that I was doing with it. In the same vein, Konqueror has had few exploits published against it. Though that could be purely a popularity thing, I feel it's a somewhat safer browser.

It's kind of tough to present a list of features it might have, which other browsers might lack, because it's very rare for me to need another browser.

If I have one complaint, it's that editing bookmarks slows down if you have a large collection. I have hundreds, and that XML file is getting large. If it became a problem, I could maintain multiple files, of course. But the problem isn't that severe. Just slow enough to annoy you if you're putting in massive changes.

Re:what's with that, after all?

[miro f]

That's the way it's done in GNOME (if you follow the HIG properly). I imagine this is because Firefox on linux was more aimed at GNOME users, rather than KDE. So this is in fact acting consistantly, if you happen to be using GNOME

Re:default browser should be lynx instead

[WWWWolf]

can anyone name a single text-based browser that supports AJAX? A text-based browser where CSS positioning actually works? A text-based browser which has tabbed browsing?

ELinks [elinks.or.cz]? Supports limited Javascript, limited CSS, and does tabs. Can't quite run most Ajax stuff, but it's still a surprisingly capable text-based browser. The world isn't stuck in Lynx, you know =)

Re:What's the point of this?

[BorgxQueen]

Q: What's the point of this?
A: To create, explore, understand and to share with the world. The four greatest reasons behind hacking.

Q: Who is going to use this?
A: My clients, my company, my friends. I run small but growing GNU Linux company in NJ. My clients, home users (including my best friend's 87 year old mother who "rocks on the Ark"), 3 recording studios, 2 photography studios, 1 independent film studio and last but not least me. All my critical systems user Ark Linux 2006.1. Which, btw, is the only "full sized" distro that will run on my "Hell Labs" test machine. An AMD k6-2 500 with 256MBs of RAM with a Trident 4MBs PCI video card. Ark works completely.

S: but no newbie is going to use this, they're going to use Ubuntu.
R: And almost all of them ran back to MS Windows. I convinced them to try again with Ark and they love it.

S: The people that are going to use this distro are the tinkerers that have the knowledge and capability to customize their own distro to meet their own spec.
R: Which means its powerful enough for experienced users (such as myself). Thank you.

S: Distros like this piss me off.
R: Good to know we are doing something right. Thanks again.

S: Shit like this is holding Linux back.
R: Isn't that somewhat similar to someone in the proprietary software field said regard software diversity? Can you say MONOPOLY?

S: Instead of forking every time and serve a user base of 200, why don't you use your talent and skill to polish a distro that's actually going to go somewhere!
R: It is going somewhere. Onto my clients and friends computers. I'm using Ark Linux for my company's only distro and thus far it has served me so well, I decided to join the Ark Linux team. Perhaps a tiny little company run by a woman out of "Joisey" doesn't mean much to people at large, but it certainly seems to scare the hell out of Microsoft and software vendors (I'll ask them to blog next time they call, begging me NOT to sell GNU Linux based computers).

Last thoughts:
Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat and the like have millions of dollars behind them and hundreds if not thousands of employees working for them and yet, Ark Linux has achieved nearly the same results. In some cases, they have done better than their rich, well staff counter parts. A word on Polish? MS Windows is well polished but polish, doesn't save your data when you computer suddenly crashes. Polish doesn't protect your privacy, or protect you from HOLES in the OS so large millions of viruses can get through, even with firewalls and antivirus software. Polish doesn't protect you from DRM BS that's really a smoke screen for trying to cash in more than once on a product you already purchased.

Which would you rather have? A car that looks great, costs a fortune but can't move itself out of your driveway? Or an old chevy that can make a Mac Truck leak its oil? A chevy you can recreate to match youself? You do the math.

Proudly signed,

Kate Draven
CyberPunk X Computers

Re:Konqueror

[ajs318]

Nothing - provided you are using the latest version. It's fast, it looks good, it supports CSS (even passing ACID2), it has tabs, it accepts Mozilla-style extensions. In fact, it does everything Opera does -- but, unlike Opera, you get the source code.

Konqueror 2.X was a poor imitation of Internet Explorer (without the vulnerabilities). But things have moved on a lot since those days ..... except IE .....

Re:Let's be accurate.

[IamTheRealMike]

A quick way to compare KHTML to Gecko (the rendering engine of Firefox) is to look at the source code for each. What one will immediately notice is that while both are written in C++, the code of KHTML is far cleaner than that of Gecko. Gecko suffers from an over-architecturing, which directly leads to code bloat and unnecessary complexity. KHTML, on the other hand, has been designed to be simple and clear, without an overly convoluted architecture.

That's a little unfair. In fact I have read the source code to each and I wouldn't say one is far clearer than the other. Maybe that used to be the case but they've cleaned Gecko up a lot in the past few years. It's true that the Mozilla dialect of C++ is a little more obtuse than the Qt dialect, however, Mozilla is a hell of a lot more portable than KHTML is not only between operating systems but also between compilers, and that makes a big difference. Gecko also has a lot of features that KHTML does not have - for instance the combination of the fact that its objects are easily exposed to JavaScript and XUL is what makes the Firefox extensions culture so vibrant. Where are the extensions to Konqueror? There might be a few, I guess, but nothing like what you have with Firefox. It's hard to see how they could have made extensions so powerful without the platform parts like XPCOM which make the C++ harder to read.

What we end up getting with KHTML is a rendering engine that is of a far higher quality than that of Gecko

Meaningless assertion, not backed up by fact. I claim the opposite. Gecko is fast, very standards compliant and trivial to extend using reasonably well documented APIs and technologies. For instance look at XTF. It has support for a lot of new things like SVG, MathML, designMode and so on. KHTML might support these things, depending if you use the Apple fork ... or it might not.

With the upcoming KDE 4 release, which will likely be portable to Windows and Mac OS X, the portability advantages of Gecko's architecture will be rendered obsolete.

No, I rather think it won't. The portability of Geckos architecture already allowed it to make massive gains on Windows, the only platform that matters statistically. Where was KHTML in all of this? Now don't get me wrong, it's not a bad rendering engine at all, but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive. Maybe KDE 4 will rock my world but right now it's mostly a set of marketing web pages and fancy codenames for various abstractions over already quite abstract technologies (HAL, gstreamer etc).

Re:Let's be accurate.

[The Mysterious X]

Has been available forever here [sourceforge.net].

Developement on a native port is relatively new though, see here [sourceforge.net].

Re:Speaking of standard graphics drivers...

[cortana]

Yes, it's fine as long as you don't care about 3D, or being able to plug in a new mouse or joystick or graphics tablet or monitor without restarting the X server entirely.

Konqueror is more secure than Firefox

[argent]

It's not that Gecko is insecure, it's that the way Firefox extensions install and run mirrors (albeit at the application rather than the rendering engine level) the ghastly security hole that is ActiveX.

There must not be a mechanism in a web browser (or any other application that displays untrusted content) for a document to request privileges above and beyond those that are actually required for displaying untrusted content. Rather, the user must request privileges by installing a plugin or extension outside the encapsulated user interface.

Re:Let's be accurate.

[Per Wigren]

a portable KDE? [...] Can I replace the windows shell with it? (explorer.exe)

No. The KDE libraries are being ported so you can code/port KDE applications for Windows and MacOS X using features of KDE such as KParts, KIO (ssh://, audiocd://) and so on. More or less with just a recompile. That will give you a native app for that OS, not the whole environment.

I'm sure someone will port things like Konqueror and Kicker though (KWin is very X11-specific), so maybe you'll be able to run the complete KDE desktop on Windows as a shell replacement in the future but that is AFAIK not in the todo-list at the moment.

Correction ;)

[cortana]

Sun have finally seen the light, and have created packages that allow distributors to include Java in their operating systems: https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/ [java.net].

After a few back-and-forths with Sun's legal department, even Debian have packaged it for their non-free section: http://packages.debian.org/src:sun-java5 [debian.org]. Users can simply install the sun-java5-plugin package. In a few days time, the packages will be eligible [bjorn.haxx.se] for inclusion in the forthcoming Debian 4.0 ("etch") release.

Re:what's with that, after all?

[JCholewa]

There are ways to change the Firefox No/Yes button thing. One way is here [kde.org], and I think there's a way to do it in about:config

Re:yeah, yeah, where's the problem?

[iced_773]

But, hey, I could be missing something. What is it?

Accessibility. Because of my visual disability, I have to have light text on a dark background, meaning I need to override the specified colors on many web pages, which Konqueror doesn't let you do. Firefox does. Even IE does.

But, hey, I could be missing something. Where in Konqueror can I do this?

Re:Oh come on.

[crystalattice]

I agree with this. I noticed that SUSE 10.1 hides the install process too. All it shows is a little spinning circle or splash pages that tell you nothing. Maybe some people don't want/need to see what all is going on behind the scenes, but at least let me know progress is being made and the system hasn't locked up.

My favorite distro that I've tried is Gentoo. Sure, it's a pain in the butt and I wouldn't recommend it for most Windows-converts, but I learned so much about how Linux works and how everything interfaces that I actually enjoyed the experience. Windows tells you nothing and hides everything in the Registry. Hacking the Registry is worse than editing a config file, which is why there are so many GUI-driven Registry hacks.

Sure, Windows is "dumbed-down" enough that casual users can reasonably work with it, but when something breaks they have no idea what to do.

Reply to the review from the Ark team

[Bero]

Here's a reply we've sent to the reviewer -- mostly it's asking for more information, but it also makes clear why we think some of the biggest "flaws" are actually features. ;)

Hi,
thanks for reviewing Ark Linux!
We've read your review and found it very constructive - we're already working
on some improvements (the current snapshot
[http://arklinux.osuosl.org/dockyard-devel/iso/ark linux.iso] already does
away with most of the text mode stuff on installer startup).

There's also some things that aren't entirely accurate, and some things we
need more information on in order to fix them:

The installer offers 4 (not just 2) options, depending on the configuration of
your system -- the ones you omitted are Express Install (uses up all
unpartitioned space, leaves the rest alone -- this option is grayed out
unless you actually have a big enough fragment of unpartitioned space) and
Parallel Install (shrinks a FAT partition and then uses the unpartitioned
space) -- this option is grayed out unless you have a big enough FAT
partition).

We were a bit puzzled about the graphics card not being detected correctly;
Are you sure it wasn't detected correctly as opposed to it simply not having
the right Mode entries in xorg.conf? This is addressed in the FAQ section on
our website: http://www.arklinux.org/index.php?page_id=149&lang uage=en [arklinux.org]

If it really didn't detect your graphics card, please send me the output
of "lspci -vn" so we can figure out what went wrong there.

The browser choice is a matter of opinion -- you're free to disagree with our
choice, but here's the top reasons why we made it and why we stand by it:

• Konqueror is much more than just a browser -- it can open anything
  registered with KDE, making it very easy to make it handle additional stuff:
  For example, if you click on an rpm file in Ark's Konqueror (no matter
  whether it's on the local filesystem or on a website), you get a graphical
  tool that will let you install the file. There's no easy way to get
  comparable functionality with any other browser.
  Similarily, we can just embed kmplayer into Konqueror to play any video, in
  the current version, even including WMV9. There are Firefox plugins for
  videos, but they're always lagging behind mplayer.
• Konqueror integrates better with the rest of the system.
• Konqueror's user interface is better - it generally does what people expect
  it to do, and it doesn't use the wrong button order that causes lots of
  people to click on the choice they didn't want to make (of course that bit
  could be fixed in Firefox)
• Konqueror is much smaller, and is what allows us to keep the basic
  installation to 1 CD -- Firefox with all the libraries it depends on (even
  excluding the ones we include in a default install) would need about 20 MB of
  additional space on the CD.
• Konqueror's rendering engine is better for standards compliant websites --
  Konqueror even passes the Acid II test, which Firefox fails pretty badly. The
  sole reason why there are sites that show ok in Firefox but not in Konqueror
  is that Firefox has a bigger user base, therefore web designers adjust their
  pages to its bugs. This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem -- Konqueror
  isn't getting accepted widely because there are some (though rather few)
  sites it doesn't render correctly, and webmasters don't bother fixing it
  because "nobody uses Konqueror anyway". We've decided to make our (small)
  contribution to start getting rid of the problem.
• Konqueror makes progress much faster. If you look back a couple of years,
  you'll remember Konqueror as a bogus browser that can render only the most
  basic websites correctly, while the Firefox predecessor of the time was a
  pretty decent browser and Firefox has remained that. Konqueror has managed to c