Wars have been fought over what is the best Debian-based distribution, but Shashank Sharma is convinced that this ready-to-use OS is a contender
Apart from being one of the first Linux distributions (distros), Debian also has the distinction of fathering, or inspiring a large number of other distros. Several of these descendants, such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint have since gone on to achieve fatherhood in their own right. Despite the choice of different repositories (repos) as their base,most projects prefer Debian Stable as the foundation for their distro. But the Stable repos features thoroughly tested, albeit older, software which makes it ill-suited for distros that wish to serve only the latest of everything to their users. SparkyLinux is one such distro and it uses the Debian Testing repository as its starting place.
The project ships several editions each featuring a different desktop environment and we tested Mate. Apart from Mate, the latest release now offers, KDE, LXDE, LxQT and Xfce variants.
Despite being designed for performance, the live installable distro provides most of the popularly used apps, such as LibreOffice, VLC, Gimp etc out of the box, instead of relying on lightweight alternatives. The distro also features IceWeasel and IceDove, the rebranded-for-Debian versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.
The desktop is adorned with the Conky system monitor on the right of the screen, eager as ever to keep you informed on the state of your machine’s internals. The distro also ships with Conky Manager, a graphical tool to help you quickly start/stop Conky or access the config file to make modifications, without ever going near the terminal. The desktop appearance necessitates comparisons with CrunchBang, but unlike that distro, using SparkyLinux with a fully featured desktop environment isn’t advised for older machines and systems with less than 2GB RAM. For such machines, users would be better off with the OpenBox or JWM editions. In addition to these different editions, the project also ships a codec-free variant as well as a CLI only version. The latter is aimed at experienced users who wish to piece together the distro.
The distro is designed to provide the best out-of-the-box experience. When last we looked at SparkyLinux, it wasn’t a distro designed for new users. That thankfully is no longer the case; the project has taken major strides towards making newbies feel welcome.
To begin, the distro features a new installer which supports installation on 32-bit UEFI machines. The installer itself is as good as alternatives in any modern distro and while SparkyLinux doesn’t ship with Gparted, the installer’s partitioning step does an adequate job. It even lets you install to the hard disk or a connected USB drive.
Users can also use Synaptic or the command-line APT tool to manage software. As a rolling-release distro, another advantage of SparkyLinux is that users don’t have to manually reinstall the system with each new release. The distro also has several custom tools, such as SparkyAPTus, to help you manage software, remove the proprietary codecs from the distro with a single click and perform upgrades etc.
There’s also a custom tool to help you install alternate office suites if you don’t favour LibreOffice, and Wine and PlayonLinux are available out of the box.
While Linux Mint offers similar functionality, SparkyLinux comes out on top thanks to its speed, stability and its arsenal of custom tools. If you’re even the slightest bit dissatisfied with your current distro, look no further than SparkyLinux.
This Debian-based rolling-release distro is a perfect blend of features, functionality, speed and stability.