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Review: StartOS 0.4.0
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I realize that it wouldn't be fair to try out an alpha snapshot of a distribution and then point out that it is missing key features and has some bugs. Though, at the same time, I do need to acknowledge StartOS's current alpha is missing some key features and has a couple of significant bugs. Most of these, like the lack of distro-specific applications and the Tor connection issue, will likely be fixed before the stable release of version 0.4.0.
I do think it's more reasonable for me to point out problems with the distribution which appear to be more along the lines of design concerns than specific implementation problems. A couple examples which spring to mind improve the install process and the user accounts. StartOS seems to be, effectively, a single-user system. There is just one account for accessing the web portal and there doesn't appear to be any approach, other than working from the command line, which would allow us to set up regular user accounts. This hampers our ability to set up services such as shell access, Samba shares, printing support, and cloud services. In short, it feels limiting compared to other home server distributions.
In terms of the installer, I ran into a few problems. The big one, to my mind, is the lack of information. The StartOS installer has very few steps and it is wonderfully fast, but when things go wrong it doesn't tell us why. I ran into two issue, the mkfs command failure was the first and it said it could not work with my drive, but didn't report what the error was. This issue magically disappeared on the second attempt. The other issue was the report that my data partition, which StartOS had created, was too small, but it didn't say how big the partition should be. As it turned out, the original partition would have been more than big enough to handle both the operating system and my data files, so the uninformative error also turned out to be wrong.
Software will always have bugs or limitations; it would be nice when bugs were encountered if the user could be told what went wrong and how to fix it. A cryptic error is hard to troubleshoot (for the user) and hard to fix (for the developer).
Moving from my complaints to the positive aspects of my experience, there were certainly some highlights while using StartOS. Even in its alpha stage, the distribution did install successfully and unusually quickly. The web-based interface is easy to use, and (once I read the handbook) the remote shell was easily accessible.
I also like that the web portal is uncluttered. Some remote access tools pile a lot of controls and functionality into their web interfaces. This can make it hard to find information as it hides functionality. StartOS goes in the other direction, keeping the web interface sparse while focusing on the essentials. We have networking, updates, a status dashboard, and a software manager. For a simple home server the default administration portal doesn't need much more than that. I would have liked to have seen a user manager, but otherwise all of the basics were covered in a handful of tabs. I also liked the links to documentation scattered through the interface.