Review: Oreon 9.3 / Lime R2
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
A lot of the characteristics which make up a good server operating system are also welcome features for a desktop system. Long-term support is nice to have and Oreon offers feature updates through to 2025 and then security-only updates through to 2032. Stability and predictability can be nice and Oreon will remain largely unchanged for the remainder of its near-eight year lifespan.
On top of this, Oreon seeks to add easy access to more software, both Linux and Windows applications along with gaming options. This rounds out the typical RHEL desktop experience a bit.
On the other hand, whenever a project tries to turn a primarily server operating system into a desktop experience it tends to feel... well, like a server system with a desktop bolted on top of it. This tends to be true whether we're looking at Alpine Linux running a desktop, GhostBSD, or (in this case) Oreon. It's the little things like GNOME Software not being able to work on day one because of an add-on repository was missing a GPG file, the mismatched theme, and the giant icons next to tiny text. To be fair to the project, virtually everything works, the system is functional and stable. It's just that aspects of the experience feel a little "off", a little unfinished. A lot of this impression is probably the age of the distribution and its software.
Oreon seems to be falling behind. RHEL is at version 9.5 at the time of writing, Oreon is still on 9.3, about a year behind its parent. The GNOME desktop is three years out of date now and it shows. This is a distribution would be benefit a great deal from having backported packages of its desktop software. The project has some good ideas about expanding packaging and desktop capabilities. However, the current desktop still has those little awkward quirks. The expanded repositories are nice, but mostly just pull from existing RPMFusion and EPEL repositories RHEL users can already access.
This is still early days for Oreon. The project's promised new package manager hasn't arrived yet. Hopefully it will be in version 10 next year, along with newer software and a smoother desktop experience. This isn't a bad start for the project, the major pieces are all in place, but next it needs to demonstrate what makes Oreon stand out from the multitude of other RHEL clones.