Review: Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta
I tend to like distributions which strive to keep their technology base simple, I like the Unix philosophy of being open, simple, having most components focused on doing one thing well. Adelie seems to take this approach to heart and I appreciate this style of design.
The project seems ambitious, supplying builds for multiple architectures with multiple desktop environments and multiple profiles of each desktop. That is a lot of ground to cover. Adelie is still in beta, nearing its first stable release, so I don't want to assume too much or expect too much. However, it does feel like the distribution's team is stretched too thin at the moment. There are a lot of good goals and designs evident in the Adelie project, but the implementation has some concerning holes, at least in the two desktop editions I tried.
Adelie Linux is one of the only distributions I've encountered to not have working trackpad support. Not including tools for wireless networking in its Mobile flavour seems like a significant oversight. Likewise, not allowing the creation of a user called "guest" at install time and crashing the install process over it, and then blaming the hardware feels like a series of problems which should have been avoided (ideally by just allowing a user called "guest" like every other distribution).