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Review: SDesk 2025.05.06 (aka 20mini)
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
This time around, the experience was better, at least at the start. The initial install and configuration steps were smooth, the distribution did an excellent job of supporting my hardware, the default GNOME theme looks pretty nice, especially when dark mode is enabled. The first impression, in fact the first few impressions, were good.
A lot of that initial good will was won by Calamares and by the current state of GNOME. I've never been a fan of the GNOME desktop, but it has improved a lot in the 40+ series compared to where GNOME was in the 3.x days. It's smoother, maybe more responsive, and the distribution has done a nice job setting up the dock, desktop icons, and layout.
Looking through the release announcement highlights I mentioned at the start of this review, I found that the points talked about were mostly in place and functioning. There is an emoji bar, there is a pretty GNOME theme, and the new dock works nicely - at least in the GNOME Shell session. The project deserves credit for getting these features in place and clearly explaining them to its audience.
Where the distribution falls apart is just about everything beyond hardware, system installer, and GNOME. The most glaring issue is the default web browser, Swirl. It is a terrible, early-alpha quality web browser which is far too slow and awkward to be included, let alone made the default. Swirl has almost no features, but is slower and less responsive than full-featured browsers like Firefox and Chromium, making it a poor choice for inclusion. Likewise, the music player (both music players, really) are terribly limited and unsuitable for desktop use. On top of that, two of the three included SELinux utilities failed to even launch, let alone function properly. This, along with SELinux being turned off by default, makes for a poor showing for a distribution which touted its SELinux-based security capabilities in its release announcement.
There were a few other problems, such as Octopi not handling dependencies well and sometimes bailing out when recommended dependencies conflicted with installed ones. This made Octopi slower and less convenient than just using the pacman command line tool. As someone who finds pacman's syntax cryptic, at best, it takes a lot to drive me away from graphical front-ends for the package manager.