Review: Rhino Linux (Beta) (UPDATED)
I want to underline that Rhino Linux is in its early stages of development. The snapshot I was using was a development release of a rolling platform, built on Ubuntu's development branch. In other words, we should expect some issues and unpredictability. In fact, I would have been surprised if there had not been a few problems.
Early on there were a few glitches. The live media wouldn't boot in UEFI mode which is a problem on newer hardware. I also found Calamares was prone to crashing during its clean-up phase, preventing the system from booting. I could work around these problems, but it would be a barrier for anyone not familiar with using the command line and chroot environments.
After those initial issues, things actually became pretty comfortable for me while using Rhino. The distribution is a pleasantly medium weight, I like the initial welcome wizard which helps us configure a few things, and Xfce offers a pleasant, stable user interface. The application menu is lightly populated, encouraging us to install software we need beyond the bare basics. Apart from some issues with Firefox, the included software worked well.
The key feature though of Rhino Linux is its package manager. I found it worked quite well. Really, this is just glue binding together multiple package managers behind the scenes, but it works unusually well. It's fairly quick, the packages and their sources are neatly organized, and it makes upgrading software much more streamlined for the user.
It's still early days for Rhino Linux, but it's off to a good start. If the developers can sort out a few issues with the start-up process and maybe remove GNOME Software so people aren't tempted to use it over the prescribed package manager, I think it will be a good experience.
A lot of people have been saying they'd like to see a rolling flavour of Ubuntu and now it is here. It's not an entirely smooth experience yet, but it's close. The one thing I feel is missing is a method to rescue or rollback system upgrades, perhaps using Btrfs snapshots, so that following Ubuntu's development branch doesn't break the system. Once some rollback method is in place, I think it will make Rhino a very appealing, Ubuntu-compatible rolling release platform.
UPDATE
Some coverage by Linuxiac days later:
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Rhino Linux Brings the Rolling Release Model to Ubuntu
Want a new Linux experience? Rhino Linux, still in beta, gives users a rolling Ubuntu experience with an Arch AUR taste.