SparkyLinux 5.1 SparkyLinux is a Debian-based distribution for 32- and 64-bit computers. According to Sparky's website, the distro aims to "provide a ready to use, out of the box operating system with a set of slightly customised, lightweight desktop environments." There are no less than 24 desktops to choose from, as well as various "Special" editions. Like Debian, Sparky has three branches, which Sparky refers to as 'editions': Stable, Rolling and Development. For each edition there is a "Home" and "Minimal" version and, to make your choice yet more overwhelming, for each version various ISOs are available. Among others, the Home versions include ISOs for four different desktop environments and the Minimal versions include a "Linux Freedom" ISO. I couldn't find any information about the Linux Freedom version on the Sparky website but I am assuming that it ships with a libre kernel and no non-free packages.



If the download options sound complicated then that is because they are complicated. It doesn't help that the download section on the Sparky website is poorly designed. The pages feature long lists with links to dozens of ISOs and virtually no information to help you pick a suitable image. Worse, what little information is available is ambiguous. Various pages on the Sparky website state that the distro uses Debian's Testing branch while it is in fact built on all three Debian branches. Also, the download page suggests that the Stable editions are recommended - the link to the Stable ISOs is listed first and features an icon of a computer with a green monitor. The Rolling ISOs use the same icon with a red monitor, while the Development branch uses the colour black.



While trying to decide which version of Sparky to install I made the following table, which might make the available flavours a little easier to digest.



Edition Home Minimal Special Stable • Calamares installer

• ISOs for LXDE and Xfce • Basic GUI or CLI installer

• Single ISO with choice of 24 desktops

• Linux Freedom edition Rolling • Calamares installer

• ISOs for LXQt, Xfce and MATE • Basic GUI or CLI installer

• Single ISO with choice of 24 desktops

• Linux Freedom edition • Calamares installer

• ISOs for GameOver, Multimedia and Rescue edition

• Linux Freedom edition Development • Calamares installer

• ISO for Xfce

• Basic GUI or CLI installer

• Single ISO with choice of 24 desktops

• Linux Freedom edition



Table: a simplified overview of Sparky Linux editions.

Sparky Rolling with the LXQt desktop



I decided to go with the Rolling edition and to try two different desktops: LXQt and Manokwari. I started with LXQt, for which there is a ready-made ISO. The Home versions use the Calamares installer which, as always, worked flawlessly. The installer did have a few defaults which I hadn't seen before though. I was missing the option to encrypt the installation and by default the installer will configure the system so that users are logged in automatically (without entering a password). Also, unless you tell the installer otherwise the root password will be the same as your user password. My guess is that Sparky uses these defaults to make the distro more user-friendly.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- The Calamares installer's Users tab

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The LXQt desktop has a traditional layout with a modern look and feel – Sparky uses the Numix theme with the Flatabulous icon set (which have been renamed Sparky5 and Ultra-Flat-Icons). The desktop is quite configurable but some of the settings menus are somewhat basic. For instance, there isn't an easy way to change the default wallpaper or to use a background colour for the desktop. I should note, however, that LXQt is a relatively new desktop environment - the version that was installed was 0.11.1.



There were a also few small tweaks that I hadn't come across before and which I quickly changed. Most notably, by default task manager buttons have a width of 400 pixels (which makes them a lot wider than I'm used to) and the system tray displays items for windows on any desktop. The desktop is quite configurable but some of the settings are basic.



Software



Even though LXQt uses the Qt framework there are various non-Qt applications pre-installed. We get the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and HexChat IRC client. LibreOffice is the default office suite and we can edit plain text files with Leafpad. For scanning documents we can use Simple Scan and Xfburn is available for burning CDs. The most prominent Qt applications are QTerminal and the Clementine audio player. I would have liked a few more Qt applications but it didn't really bother me. All the pre-installed applications have the same look and feel, so I never really noticed I was using, say, a GTK application in a Qt environment.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Installing QupZilla using Web Browser Installer

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Sparky doesn't have a software centre. To manage software we can use Synaptic, the command line or APTus. The latter is in effect a graphical front-end for Debian's package management tools (APT and dpkg) and can be used to manage third-party software. APTus also features a web browser installer. If you like to try different browsers you will feel like a child in a sweet shop - there are 24 browsers to choose from.



Aesthetics, bugs and aiming to be user-friendly



LXQt certainly looks good for a lightweight desktop. That said, there were various minor aesthetic imperfections. Somehow the font for the user interface was set to point size 11, which is quite large when the font used for title bars is size 9. The relatively large fonts might also explain why notifications were sometimes truncated (the text didn't fit in the available space). A more annoying issue was that icons in the system tray are white and displayed against a light-grey background. These are minor issues but I hope the out of the box experience will be improved. With a little more polish LXQt would be a very compelling desktop environment indeed.



Perhaps unavoidably, I did encounter a few more serious issues. After playing with Sparky for a couple of hours my laptop suddenly suspended itself. The reason was that the battery was nearly empty. It was only then that I realised that the system tray didn't include a battery status indicator. There are plenty of widgets available for the system tray but nothing to show how much life is left in the battery. I later discovered that there is an 'Enable Battery Watcher' check box under "Power Management Settings", with a separate check box for displaying a system tray icon. It is not really a bug, but not showing a battery icon when a laptop is being used is an odd default setting.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Font size and power management settings

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A second issue worth mentioning is that I couldn't open an external encrypted drive. Sparky would recognise the drive but after entering the pass phrase I got the cryptic error "function bd_crypto_luks_open_blob called but not implemented". I couldn't find much information about the error, other than a suggestion to install the package libblockdev-crypto2. Luckily that worked; after also rebooting the laptop I was able to mount the drive. My guess is that the initial error was the result of Sparky's attempt to create a user-friendly distro. Earlier I mentioned that the installer didn't provide an option to encrypt the hard drive - it appears that encryption is poorly supported all around.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Error while mounting an encrypted drive

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There are other areas where Sparky is trying to make Linux more user-friendly. To mention some random examples, a screen-saver pops up after ten minutes of inactivity but the screen is never locked, so you never need to log back in by entering your password (the setting to change this is hidden in the above-mentioned "Power Management" menu). The sudo utility is enabled and you can perform tasks that need root privileges by entering your user password. Non-free and contributed packages are available out of the box (no need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to add repositories) and the vi and vim text editors aren't installed - you get the nano editor instead.



Most Debian users will probably frown upon such customisations but those users are clearly not Sparky's intended audience. And there were convenient features I liked. For instance, Sparky makes it very easy to access various third-party repositories. In the /etc/apt/sources.d directory we find Sparky's repositories as well as third-party repos for, among others, Dropbox, Google Earth, VirtualBox and PlayOnLinux.



Many of these third-party packages can be enabled via the above-mentioned APTus application. APTus mostly worked well. It failed to install Skype and when I installed the non-free codecs I found the installer only wanted to install two packages: flashplayer-mozilla and gsfonts-x11 - dozens of forbidden fruits such as libdvdcss2 for playing encrypted DVDs were already installed. I had no issues installing Google Earth, SpiderOak and various web browsers.



My only real APTus criticism is that some of the options should arguably be a bit more hidden for new users, or at least come with a prominent warning. For instance, I am not sure if it is a good idea to let users install the Liquorix Kernel or remove all non-free packages with a click on a button and without any information about what exactly the scripts do. And I also encountered a bug when I re-installed Sparky LXQt towards the end of my trial - APTus was no longer installed because of a dependency hell.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- APTus can't be installed because of unmet dependencies

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Intermezzo: Openbox



With the release of Sparky 5.1 the project added Manokwari to its collection of desktop environments. I had not heard of Manokwari and thought it would be interesting to see what it has to offer. There is no ISO with Manokwari pre-installed and the Minimal editions don't give you the option to select the Manokwari desktop, which means we need to use APTus to install the desktop. I didn't want to install Manokwari alongside LXQt as this would leave all the applications that came with LXQt on the system. My plan was to use the advanced installer to completely wipe LXQt; to not select any desktop environment in the installer and to then install the sparky-desktop-manokwari package.



The minimal ISO boots to a nicely themed Openbox desktop. The installer is quite minimal and not recommended for people who are new to installing operating systems. In particular the first steps - choosing the locale and keyboard layout - can be awkward if you're not in the US (and therefore need to change the defaults). Partitioning wasn't much easier. The installer first gives you the option to set up partitions and then asks where different file systems should be created. The installer works but provides very little guidance, and I was missing an option to go back to the previous page. The absence of a "Back" button meant that I couldn't, for instance, double-check which partition was meant for which file system.



Towards the end of the installation you can pick one of 20 desktop environments. As said, the new Manokwari desktop isn't listed and I therefore decided to skip this step. I had expected that the result would be a system without X11 and a desktop environment but that wasn't the case - after rebooting my laptop I was again presented with Openbox.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Selecting a desktop in the advanced installer

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For many years I used CrunchBang, a now discontinued distro that combined Debian with Openbox. I still have a soft spot for Openbox and have to say that Sparky has done a great job setting up Openbox so that it is nice looking and usable out of the box. It features a panel (tint2) and the same Numix theme that is used in LXQt. Also worth mentioning is that applications you install are automatically added to the menu (something that normally needs to be done manually in Openbox).





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Installing Manokwari using Desktop Installer

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Strictly speaking Openbox is a window manager rather than a desktop environment. It is therefore a good base for installing another desktop environment. The APTus application includes a desktop installer and Manokwari is included in this list, so I decided to install Manokwari on top of Openbox. Running the installer opened a terminal window via which the desktop was installed, without any further prompts. Once the installer had finished I unfortunately encountered a Sparky Openbox bug - the "Logout" button doesn't work. The "Reboot" option did work, although I had to enter my password twice, in separate windows. The first window was particularly confusing: it said "Authentication is required to set a wall message".





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Trying to reboot in Openbox

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Manokwari desktop



While installing Manokwari I realised that Sparky's desktop installer will install just the desktop and nothing else. Applications that are likely to be useful, such as an office suite and e-mail client, are not included. I suspect that largely explains why Manokwari turned out to be hardly usable. Before I get into that, though, I should explain what Manokwari is. The Manokwari desktop is based on GNOME 3 and appears to have been created for BlankOn Linux, a Debian-based distro developed in Indonesia. The desktop features a single panel at the top and clicking on the menu-icon in the top-left corner opens an application menu. A second menu is revealed when you poke the top-right corner of the screen with your mouse.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- The Manokwari desktop

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The main menu is quite neat. A search box lets you to quickly open installed applications or to search for something in Google or on Wikipedia. It is also possible to enter a command to be run in a terminal window but that feature didn't work for me because GNOME Terminal wasn't installed. As said, I suspect this is a Sparky-related issue - presumably GNOME Terminal is installed out of the box on BlankOn Linux.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Running the top command from the Manokwari desktop

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The second menu is similar to the Raven menu in the Budgie desktop but not quite as useful. Manokwari's implementation features four bookmarks (which are all links to BlankOn Linux websites and social media accounts, and which cannot be changed); a set of audio controls which can only be used in combination with the Audacious audio player; a weather applet; quick access to menu settings and the current date and time. I didn't use the menu at all but other people might find it useful.



To say that Manokwari is a minimal desktop environment is an understatement. In fact, if you feel GNOME 3 is too minimalist than you don't want to go anywhere near Manokwari. Various basic features appear to have been disabled and there is very little that can be customised. To mention just a few examples, the super (Windows) key does nothing and right-clicking on the desktop has no effect. GNOME Tweaks isn't installed, which means you can't, for instance, use a different theme (Adwaita is the default) or add a "Minimise" button to windows. It is not even possible to set up work spaces or to change the wallpaper - there is a "Backgrounds" menu in the settings but the active wallpaper isn't shown in the list and picking another wallpaper doesn't do anything.



Again, Sparky is to blame for at least some of these issues. The gnome-tweak-tool package, for instance, isn't a dependency of the sparky-desktop-manokwari package (it's a "recommend" item). It appears to be an odd omission but my guess is that the Sparky developers may have left out Tweaks by design - after I installed Tweaks I found several options didn't work. For instance, I could change the theme (the Numix/Sparky5 theme was still there) but I couldn't add a minimise button to windows. I also found that Tweaks showed that four work spaces had been set up but I still had no way to switch between desktops.





SparkyLinux 5.1 -- Customising Manokwari using GNOME Tweaks

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At this point I have strayed into the topic of bugs, of which there are plenty in Sparky Manokwari. None of the sound buttons and Fn keys on my laptop worked. The Alt-Tab behaviour was completely broken - sometimes random windows were displayed, other times Manokwari cycled back and forth through two windows, even though many more windows were open. Windows you open don't always get focus and may therefore hide behind other windows, and the same was happening with the "fly-out" panel. There is no network applet in the system tray, which makes it awkward to use wireless networks, nor is it possible to use the volume applet to quickly change the sound level - the volume icon simply opens the settings menu. The screen-saver is configured to come up after ten minutes of inactively but it never does. Applications you install don't appear in the applications menu until you have logged out and logged back in again. The list goes on.



Conclusions



It is not that easy to review Sparky. The project spreads its wings far and wide and there isn't a flagship version of the distro. To get a good feel for the project I looked at one of the Home editions (LXQt) and one of the Minimal editions (Manokwari).



By and large I enjoyed Sparky LXQt. The desktop could have been a little more polished out of the box and there were a couple of annoying issues but I ended up with a nice looking, fully functioning and lightweight operating system. My time with Manokwari was a different story. The desktop had plenty of eye candy but was hardly usable. My guess is that the Sparky developers mainly focus on the Home editions and that alternative desktops are made available on a 'why not' basis. That theory could be wrong though, as Sparky's Openbox spin is very nice indeed. Perhaps Manokwari was the rotten apple among the available desktop environments.



Still, it is probably fair to say that Sparky is biting off more than it can chew. For a small project it is maintaining an incredible number of spins. Getting a single desktop environment to work nicely is hard work. Getting 24 desktop environments to work nicely is an enormous task - and then I haven't even mentioned the Linux Freedom and Special editions. As a result at least one of the Sparky versions is, quite frankly, an embarrassment. I would argue that the scale of the project also explains why Sparky has an off-putting download page and why the project seems to be confused about whether or not it is based on Debian's Testing branch. The same goes for the documentation. Sparky's wiki is rather basic. The page about the Manokwari desktop, for instance, includes only a very short description and basic installation instructions. That is still better than the page about the LXQt desktop though as it doesn't exist. Again, I don't think at all that this is because of incompetence or laziness. I think it is simple a case of there not being enough hours in the day to give everything the attention it deserves.



A final thing that stood out for me is Sparky's focus on providing a convenient system. My daily driver is a Fedora install with an encrypted hard drive and SELinux in enforcing mode. Sparky's default configuration felt wrong but I realise it will suit other users. * * * * * Hardware used for this review:



My physical test equipment for this review was a Lenovo Z570 laptop with the following specifications: Processor: Intel Core i3-2350M, 2.3GHz

Memory: 4GB of RAM

Wireless network adaptor: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285

Wired network adaptor: Realtek RTL8101/2/6E 05) * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



SparkyLinux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.3/10 from 139 review(s).

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