My personal experience with Synex

[photomf]

Hi, I wanted to share my personal experience with this operating system.
I installed it 20 days ago. I am an Italian professional photographer and have been working with Linux for years. I also like to test different distros on a test PC from time to time. I must say that everything is working perfectly with Synex. The apps I have installed are:
Rawtherapee (appimage)
Darktable (appimage)
Openshot (appimage)
Gimp
Geeqie
Krita
Neat Image
Thanks to the developers

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[root]

Ciao @photomf ! Saluti dall’Argentina! Glad to hear that! And thanks to you for share your experience and feedback!
Have a nice day!

Bruno.

[ozpos]

I absolutely love your xfce4 Synex 13 u6 distro., what a beautiful desktop.

Having suffered the plights of ubuntu zfs on root (zsys) I have been
seeking a distro. that had zfs @ installation time.

Proxmox 9.x seemed like the dogs bollocks but installing a fully working
xfce4 desktop on the host was beyond my capabilities and spice graphics
were crap and passthrough too difficult when running wine for old apps
like sketchup make 2017.

F.Y.I. the previous xfce build did not install on a Thinkpad E16 G3
(memtest kernel panic) but u6 was OK. I am willing to offer constructive
feedback if it is of any use ?

1. During the install I had a power manager screen lock, it was all OK after entering the live password.
2. It would be nice if zfs mirror/raid option was offered during installation.
3. My package update indicator does not enable the Install updates option.

The ultimate for my usage would be auto snapshot management and the ability to right click on any file and see previous versions.

Thank you very much for sharing your hard work and good luck in your
quest to take over the world with fantastic desktops. Looks verry good to me.

Best regards,
Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos,

I hope you’re doing well. Thank you very much for your kind words and for taking the time to share such detailed feedback. It is also great to hear that Synex 13 u6 installed correctly on your ThinkPad after the issue you had with the previous Xfce build.

And yes, constructive feedback is always welcome. It is genuinely very useful.

You are absolutely right about Proxmox: it is an excellent virtualization platform, but it is not really intended to be used as a desktop-oriented host system. Because of that, getting a full desktop workflow working smoothly on the host can become quite difficult, especially when GPU passthrough or older Windows applications are involved.

Regarding your feedback:

During the live session, the screen locker or power manager may lock the screen after a period of inactivity. Unlocking it with the live password is expected behavior with the current setup. Even so, your report is useful, because it may make sense for us to review that default during installation.

At the moment, in the desktop edition, ZFS installation through Calamares is limited to a root-on-ZFS layout with the predefined datasets. In Synex Server, however, we have a full installer with broader storage support. The Synex installer supports ZFS, BTRFS, ext4, and XFS. For ZFS, it supports Stripe, Mirror/RAID10, and RAIDZ1/2/3 layouts, with optional native ZFS encryption at the dataset level. We also developed a tool called synex-boot-redundancy to provide automatic boot redundancy across all pool disks. So, if your goal is a desktop system on a mirrored or RAID-based ZFS setup, the current workaround is to install Synex Server first with the topology you want, and then install your preferred desktop environment afterward, either with tasksel or by selecting the packages manually.

Yes, we are aware of the update indicator issue, where the “Install Updates” option may remain disabled, and we are already working on it.

About your final point, I completely agree that automatic snapshot management and an easy way to view previous file versions would be a very valuable feature. That kind of ZFS integration is definitely something I would like to improve in the future.

I’m also leaving you two references in case they are useful: a video showing the installation process with Synex Installer, and the Synex Installer datasheet with its technical specifications.

Installation video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZuy-dMWAzo

Synex Installer datasheet:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/synex/files/Stable/SERVER/Synex%20Installer%20Datasheet%20-%20EN.pdf/download

Thanks again for your feedback. I truly appreciate it. Comments like yours help us improve Synex and make it better with every release.

Best regards,

Bruno.

[ozpos]

@photomf

wanted

Hi Bruno, You are welcome.

Thank you for your response I will reinstall the server edition followed by tasksel for xfce.

Could you please tell me if the desktop styling will be as good looking as your xfce spin ?

Best regards,

Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos, I hope you’re doing well.

Not exactly out of the box, because the dedicated styling package is still being finalized. However, we are actively working on it, and it should be ready in the next few days.

I will let you know as soon as it is ready.

Best regards,

Bruno

[ozpos]

Hi Bruno, Good thank you. Hope all is well with you also.

I can report that xfce u6 spin installs ok on HP355 but have not tested much yet.

On the ThinkPad 16 G3 the server 13 r3 installed without a problem for zfs nvme mirror but I am struggling a to get an xfce desktop up and running. Any pointers would be welcome.

Thank you for the links though unfortunately I do not speak your native language.

On the file versioning front I had a try with illumos a while ago which provided .zfs in-folder file snapshots but there were too many other issues back then.

Thanks again for this distro.

Best regards,

Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos,

Thank you very much for the update, and I am glad to hear that the Xfce u6 spin installed correctly on the HP355, and that Synex Server 13 R3 also installed properly on your ThinkPad.

Regarding Xfce on Synex Server, I am attaching a document with everything needed to install Xfce with the Synex branding and the default desktop configuration used in the desktop edition.

The document includes the required packages, the Synex-specific packages for branding and integration, user setup notes, and the final steps recommended for ZFS systems, including Plymouth and boot redundancy.

I am also attaching the Vimix.zip file, which contains the GRUB theme. You need to extract it into /usr/share/grub/themes and then add the following lines to your GRUB configuration:

GRUB_BACKGROUND="/usr/share/grub/themes/Vimix/background.png"
GRUB_THEME="/usr/share/grub/themes/Vimix/theme.txt"

After doing that, you should repeat the GRUB mounting steps, run update-grub, and finally run synex-boot-redundancy.

I hope it helps, and feel free to share your results afterward.

Best regards,

Bruno.

PS: here’s a screenshot with Synex Server running XFCE with Synex branding on a ZFS mirror.

Install XFCE on Synex Server.txt (4,3 KB)

Vimix.zip (1,7 MB)

[ozpos]

Hi Bruno, Thank you.

Your instructions went absolutely perfectly.

Could you please offer any suggestions for snapshot management (scheduled, auto pruning sanoid, GUI) ?

Will grub be able to list rollback options ?

This has made my day, thank you so much.

Best regards,

Ozpos

P.S. If I can offer any help, please feel free to ask.

[ozpos]

Hi Bruno, hope you are well.

To get network management applet to work I had to

Reduce /etc/network/interfaces to just
source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

edited /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
[ifupdown]
managed=true

sudo apt install firmware-iwlwifi wpasupplicant

sudo apt install eject

Best regards,

Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos,

I hope you are doing well, and thank you very much for both messages.

I am really glad to hear that the instructions worked perfectly. It honestly means a lot to me.

Regarding snapshot management, I agree that automatic pruning is a good practice. To be completely honest, I have not used ZFS that extensively myself, and in my own case I have usually handled snapshots manually.

We have talked internally about developing something similar to Timeshift, but for ZFS. I think that would be a very useful direction for Synex in the future. However, we have not started working on the foundation for that yet, so for now I would prefer not to promise anything too specific.

As for rollback options, GRUB is not compatible with ZFS rollbacks in that way. For that kind of workflow, the proper approach would be to use ZFSBootMenu. It is something we do have in mind, but we have not tested it yet on Synex, so I cannot give you a solid recommendation on it for the moment.

About the network side, thank you very much for sharing those steps. I had omitted the network management part, and your notes will be very helpful for improving and polishing the guide.

I also really appreciate your offer to help. Feedback like yours is genuinely valuable, because it helps us improve Synex with real-world testing and practical use cases. If you would like, you are very welcome to join the Synex Telegram group as well:
https://t.me/synex_ar

Thanks again for your kind words and for taking the time to report all of this.

Best regards,

Bruno

[ozpos]

Hi Bruno, hope you are well.

I am flattered by your invitation but having installed weston, then waydroid and finally telegram I tried using my landline without success (I do not own nor trust mobile phones having been targeted by google). I tried my wifes mobile which did not receive an sms although my email did. I entered the code but my account was not created.

On another point I ran sudo apt modernize-sources to stay up to date and adhere to best practice but encountered ‘Warning: Could not determine Signed-By for URIs: http://repo.synex.ar/, Suites: synex’.

Could you please offer up a solution ?

Best regards,

Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos,

You can follow these instructions:

Synex Repository

After download the gpg key, just add the line to your new source file.

Best regards.

[ozpos]

Hi Bruno, hope you are well.

Your previous solution worked perfectly, thank you.

I am trying to mount a samba share using nemo and I get (nemo:65950): Nemo-WARNING **: 18:19:12.291: Current gtk theme is not known to have nemo support (Orchis-Dark) - checking…

when launching with nemo -q.

I also get (nemo:66396): Nemo-WARNING **: 18:28:10.328: Action ‘90_new-launcher.nemo_action’ is missing dependency: cinnamon-desktop-editor
CinnamonDesktop-Message: 18:28:10.743: Ignoring thumbnailer with missing binary: ‘/usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer’
CinnamonDesktop-Message: 18:28:10.744: Ignoring thumbnailer with missing binary: ‘/usr/bin/gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer’

when launching nemo.

Any ideas ?

Best regards,

Ozpos

[root]

Hi Ozpos, did you try with thunar? It seems that you have missing components that nemo need to works with samba shares.

Bruno.

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