Review: GetFreeOS 2023.05.01, Slint 15.0-3, Liya N4Si
Something I found tricky about evaluating Liya was the project didn't list much in the way of specific goals or features. The website mentions it is intuitive with a graphical package manager and open source. All of these points are true. However, beyond being an Arch-based desktop distribution, Liya doesn't seem to be trying to fix a problem or fill a niche.
Liya does some things well. It offers good performance and some useful (if uncommon) application choices. Its hardware support on physical hardware seems to be good.
There were a few areas where Liya struggled in my trial. The system installer crashed and aborted a couple of times before I managed to get it to finish an install successfully. When running in a virtual machine Cinnamon crashed frequently, interrupting work. These crashes didn't occur on my physical workstation, so this seems to be an issue with a video driver.
Package management was the consistent weak point once the install was finished with Pamac repeatedly failing to apply updates and locking up or crashing a few times. Package management from the command line worked well.
In short, Liya seems like a pretty typical Arch-based desktop distribution, just with a few unusual choices - such as running Cinnamon instead of Xfce or Plasma, and using OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice. The project doesn't seem to have found a specific goal yet and it still needs some polish. It's off to a decent start for a young project, but I feel like it needs more time to mature before I'd recommend it over other Arch-based desktop systems.