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Review: MassOS 2022.03 and Neptune 7.0

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 4th of April 2022 07:15:10 AM Filed under
Reviews

For being such a young project, MassOS impressed me in a number of ways. The developer really understands the benefit of documentation. The steps for downloading, installing, and updating the system are all documented in detail, often with screenshots. The documentation is well organized and pleasantly to the point. In other words, we're told how to do things and spared the developer's philosophical views and marketing pitch.

MassOS is super fast, I'm not sure I've ever encountered a distribution running Xfce which performed this well. The distribution has managed to disable or avoid installing almost everything it doesn't need while including the basics most people will want. For me, at least, I was able to accomplish most tasks with the software included and a couple of Flatpaks. I suspect, were I to use MassOS longer, I'd eventually run into trouble when it came time to install more obscure development tools and command line items, but I could probably work around that by using a third-party package manager such as Nix.

Finally, I really like the dark, fairly minimal interface. I like Xfce as it walks a nice line between capable and customizable. I like its balance of performance and features. I like that MassOS includes a dark theme which seems consistent across the included utilities. The desktop felt almost immediately comfortable for me - a few conveniences were presented and then it got out of my way.

There are just two drawbacks I see to MassOS after a day of use. One is that it has a text installer. Which, for me, isn't really a problem, but it gives the distribution a legacy vibe that could scare off some people. Shifting to another installer, such as Calamares, would probably attract more users.

The second drawback is the lack of a built-in package manager. We may not need one for acquiring desktop software, but it would be nice to have a way to install small security updates. Getting the user to download and execute a script isn't an ideal way to provide new versions of software. At the minimum, I think the shell script for performing updates should be included by default.

However, this lack of package manager aside, MassOS is surprisingly mature for a young project. It's fast, it seemed to be stable, it worked well with my hardware, and it's practically documented. I really hope the developer keeps working on this as, with a few small changes, I'd feel very much at home with this distribution.

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