I’ve heard a lot over the 11 or so years I’ve been using Linux about truly free software. Presuming that to use it meant a couple of hundred gig of unplayable media I avoided it. But, being somewhat bored this afternoon I wandered over to the Free Software Foundation and was looking at their list of “recommended distros” and decided to give Trisquel a go.
I have to say I’m somewhat surprised.
Everything works! My folders full of .mkv, .mp4, .mp3 and .avi’s all play fine. Youtube works. Etc. I had expected to find that none of them worked.
The default version seems to be based on Gnome 3, but there are user built versions - xfce, Cinnamon (both 32 bit) and KDE (64bit).
It’s a single image that you can try and then install from.
It defaults to Gnome 3 Classic (ugh!) it took me a while to find out how to customise it (being used to KDE, that is the most customisable DE of all). The User built versions aren’t on the main site.
User versions are here - http://trisquel-users.com/trisquel-downloads/
Youtube works because pages are availale in html5 (or so I presume) because no other flash, that I can find, works at all, even with the gnash plugin installed.
Logging into disqus (to leave comments on various sites) is very hard, though slightly better with the icedtea plugin.
Firefox is not available in the repos (I thought it was opensource and even if it is only the actual FF icon that isn’t, icedove/icecat are also not available). Not sure why this is. Anyone know more?
A bunch of browsers are available - Arora, Midori, Epiphany, Dooble and Abrowser. I’d heard of 2 of them before - Midori and Epiphany. Midori has a lovely UI but struggles with logins and doesn’t seem able to use the gnash plugin as abrowser does.
Seems Abrowser is an unbranded Firefox by another name, that never offers non-free stuff … so is really IceCat with different icons/start page/search (duck-duck-go).