Review: Rhino Linux 2024.2
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My trial with Rhino Linux got off to a rocky start. Not that the first few hours were bad, but there were some obvious problems which really should have been caught in testing. The installer not being able to display release notes and the Xfce desktop session failing are key examples. Rhino mostly worked well on my laptop, and flawlessly in VirtualBox, but had some issues with my Intel video card and my laptop's sound system. These two issues virtually never happen with any other distribution.
While not exactly a bug, I wasn't a fan of the unified menu bar on the panel. These rarely work properly on Linux and, while Rhino's mostly worked well, I don't like the added mouse movement when switching between applications.
On the other hand, once the system was installed and running, I liked the setup wizard and I really liked rhino-pkg. It's one of the few (perhaps the only) all-in-one package manager I've used which really works smoothly. It's fast, it pulls from multiple sources pretty seamlessly, and it allows the user to prioritize package formats. I think, in order to gain wider appeal, the Rhino developers should probably add a GUI version of rhino-pkg. For now, the command line version offers a good experience.
Rhino Linux is one of those distributions where I feel the application selection says more about what the developer finds interesting than what they think their audience will find useful. The distribution ships with very few applications and what we do have (a cloud storage tool, a video player, and a coding suite) are not exactly going to hold widespread appeal. There was no music player, office suite, password manager, note taking application or other things I'd expect most people to want.
I do like that few applications are installed by default - I like a lean system - though this effect is somewhat countered by the large collection of configuration modules which crowd the application menu. I think Rhino would benefit from hiding these modules or placing them all in a sub-folder the way GNOME groups associated tools.
The idea of a rolling release flavour of Ubuntu appeals to me, and I expect it does to other people too. With this in mind, I was happy to see Timeshift is included in Rhino Linux. It would have been even better had Btrfs snapshots been offered as boot environments from the boot menu, the way openSUSE's Tumbleweed does. Perhaps that will come in a later version.