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Review: Tribblix 0m37
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I have always been a fan of the Solaris family and what its members can provide. Projects in the illumos/OpenSolaris community tend to be rock solid, traditional Unix, and I appreciate the reliability.
Tribblix is up front about the fact it is designed to be "retro" in its style. We can see this in its green-on-black terminal, conservative application choices, and, minimal installer. However, even knowing Tribblix is striving to be retro, I wonder if it is being too retro. The operating system is running a five year old desktop with less commonly used office software and there is a distinct lack of documentation to assist us.
I think it is fair to say there is a difference between having a retro style and actually being out of date. There are a number of capable, modern Linux distributions which look retro while still providing modern conveniences if we want them. Tribblix seems to be sliding farther along the scale, becoming dated in its technology as much as in its style. The project's self-description refers to Tribblix's components as "modern" twice, but nothing about Tribblix is modern, it's visibly ageing, and not in a charming way.
I appreciate a platform that looks like a classic - I've been known to enjoy minimal environments and to install desktops with older designs, such as CDE. However, at the end of the day, I still need to be able to read up on how the operating system works and then install several applications to get work accomplished. This isn't something I can do to the extent I need with Tribblix. There are some extra applications in its repositories, but there are big gaps when comparing Tribblix's package options against most Linux distributions. There is an edition of Tribblix (called OmniTribblix) which can reportedly run Linux in isolated environments called zones. However, if we need to install a full Linux distribution just to run a few extra applications then we would probably be better served running Linux from the start.
In short, it's nice to see the illumos community is still alive and producing new variants. On the other hand, Tribblix isn't entirely practical as a desktop. It's close, but showing its age and I quickly ran into limitations when trying to find and install extra applications.