Review: Drauger OS 7.6
I appreciate what Drauger OS is attempting to do. The project is taking a Ubuntu base and trimming it down to make it more like a gaming platform, or a gaming portal platform. The large icons and reduced number of applications give Drauger's desktop a console-like feel, not unlike an XBox or PlayStation. From a visual perspective, the distribution seems to be hitting the mark.
On the other hand, Drauger presented me with several issues. The problem with the default kernel on the live media being different from the one which is used when the distribution is installed really stood out as an issue since one of the kernels failed to boot in my test environments. The Firefox browser using a local, invalid URL for its home page was a smaller issue, but a bit baffling as I was surprised it didn't get caught before the current version was released.
What surprised and concerned me most about using Drauger is the distribution seems to struggle in areas where other Ubuntu-based distributions usually do not. I was unable to install or upgrade any Flatpak packages, for instance, with Drauger. This is something which usually "just works" on other distributions, at least when working from the command line. Similarly, this week was one of the few times I've run into a dependency error while using Synaptic. Drauger uses its own system installer which, while it works, isn't as streamlined and friendly as either Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer or the Calamares installer used by at least one Ubuntu community edition.