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Review: Expirion 6.0
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
The Expirion website states "So what sets this apart from Devuan? Not much really the kernel for newer hardware support and LibreOffice has been updated, and some minor software & firmware changes, but that is about it and added some icons and themes - Basically I built this to suit my needs, hopefully it will satisfy yours as well."
To say it has been updated is not really accurate. The software included in Expirion is newer than Devuan's Stable branch, but only because Expirion is build on Devuan's Testing branch, which will be more up to date. We could install Devuan's Testing branch with the LXQt desktop and get approximately the same experience.
It's not a bad experience, on the whole, as long as the user has quite a bit of Linux experience. Expirion is a distribution which requires that you know the device names of your partitions, that you know how to change your PATH variable, that you can navigate multiple system installer windows working in parallel. It's not at all modern, elegant, or streamlined. This is a distribution for people who want to run a conservative, "for experts" distribution like Devuan, with LXQt preconfigured to look nice.
As the developer pointed out, this is something they made for themselves and made it available for other people to use. Since I'm one of only 24 people to download the LXQt edition of Expirion since it was released, I'm guessing no many people have the same wants and style as the distribution's creator. This is a niche, conservative, expertese-required distribution and its small audience reflects that. It's a working, functional distribution, but one aimed at a highly specific audience - one that doesn't mind some effort and applying Linux knowledge to get functioning. I wouldn't recommend Expirion to many people because, chances are, if this is the distribution for you, you already know about it.