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Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping
Quoting: Neptune OS is Debian made easy, but needs a cleanup —
Neptune is a moderately tweaked Debian remix with KDE Plasma 5, a few alternative app choices, and a longer history than we anticipated.
Neptune OS sounded to us like it might appeal to quite a few people. Its about page tells you it's based on Debian stable, with KDE as a pragmatic choice of desktop, plus some selected newer apps than Debian itself includes. For instance, instead of Debian's ESR release of Firefox, you get a more recent version of Chromium.
The latest release, version 8.1, came out during Easter, and the announcement mentions some of the other changes. Rather than the KDE defaults that Debian offers, you get the Thunderbird messaging client and the VLC media player. So far, so good. These are solid choices. Also, as we described a few years ago, upgrading Debian to a newer web browser can be tricky. Neptune pre-installs Flatpak support, making it easy to add newer apps than Debian's conservative – and thus sometimes rather dated – collection. However, no flatpaks are installed by default.