Condres OS 19.02 "MATE" Condres OS is a rolling release distribution based on Arch Linux and one of the more recent members of the DistroWatch database. The distribution is available in nine editions (most of them for various desktop environments) and ships with convenience features such as desktop icons enabled (on GNOME), the ICE site specific browser, and the TLP power management software.



There are several desktop editions to choose from, including Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE, and Xfce. A minimal, command line only edition of Condres is a 1GB download, most of the desktop editions are about 2.3GB in size, and the KDE edition is 3.3GB. I decided to focus on the MATE edition which is a 2.3GB download.



Booting from the live disc brings up the GNOME Shell desktop which made me wonder if I had grabbed the wrong ISO by mistake. However, I rechecked the ISO's name and confirmed it was the MATE disc. (My second thought was that maybe all Condres discs standardize on GNOME for the live session and then install the desktop corresponding with the edition's name. However, I tested the KDE edition and found it boots into the KDE Plasma desktop.) GNOME Shell is presented with a dock at the bottom of the screen for launching applications and there are icons on the desktop for accessing the distribution's resources and launching the installer. The desktop icons do not work. Clicking them does not launch an application, instead the icon file is opened in a text editor. Things were not off to a great start with the unexpected desktop choice and broken icons, but I pushed ahead and launched the installer from GNOME's Activities menu.



Installing



Condres uses the Calamares graphical installer, as many Arch-based projects do these days. Personally, I like Calamares. It works quickly and has a friendly, streamlined interface. The installer walks us through selecting our preferred language, picking our time zone from a map and confirming our keyboard layout. Calamares supports automatic and manual partitioning. The manual approach is nicely streamlined and shows a graphical representation of the disk we are working on. The automated approach will suggest setting up swap space and installing the operating system on an ext4 partition, or taking over an existing partition. We are then asked to make up a username and password for ourselves. The installer worked quickly and without any problems, offering to reboot the computer when it was finished.



Early impressions



Booting into Condres OS brought up a graphical login screen and I signed into my account which logged me into a GNOME Shell session. I signed out and discovered there are four login session options available on the MATE edition: GNOME, GNOME, GNOME on X.Org, and MATE. The launchers for the GNOME sessions all seem to be the same and run the same command. The MATE session, which I focused on during my trial, is set up with a two-panel layout. The top panel is home to the Applications, Places, and System menus along with the system tray. The bottom panel holds the task switcher. Condres currently uses MATE 1.21, though being a rolling release, new versions of the desktop will become available over time.



On the desktop we find icons which link to the project's on-line resources, including the forum, documentation, source code, and donation pages. These icons open their corresponding links in the Chrome web browser. Another icon opens the Caja file manager. There are a couple of icons on the desktop which do not work, such as an icon for the system installer and another for displaying a list of installed packages. These icons appear in the GNOME session too and clicking the icons causes their short-cut information to be opened in the LibreOffice word processor.



Software management



When software updates are available a red icon appears in the system tray. Clicking the icon opens the Octopi graphical package manager. Right-clicking the icon gives us the option of configuring checks for updates, syncing the package database or opening an update manager. The update manager is simple, it opens a window which lists available package upgrades with the option to proceed or cancel. We cannot select which packages we want to download or ignore.





Condres OS 19.02 -- The Octopi package manager

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Since Condres is a rolling release distribution, it gets a steady stream of updates. The first day I was using it there were 75 new packages available, totalling 511MB in size. The second day there were 27 packages,151MB in size. For someone like me who usually uses fixed releases, keeping up with Condres upgrades is like drinking from a fire hose.



The Octopi package manager has a simple layout, displaying available packages in the repositories to the left and categories of software on the right. A pane at the bottom of the window provides a short summary of highlighted packages. While Octopi's controls are simple and straight forward, package names are displayed with just their short, cryptic name and a version number. The categories (of which there are many) are likewise named in a way that will likely only make sense to experienced Linux users. Most people won't know at a glance what the "fprint" or "dlang" categories will provide, for example.



Octopi lets us search for programs based on their name. Searches for descriptions or other key words tended to not yield results. Octopi can perform installations, remove packages and perform mass upgrades, using the pacman command line package manager in the background.



One issue I ran into while using Octopi is that attempting to clean the package manager cache would result in an error "pacache could not be found on the system". This error was also displayed when trying to run the cache clean-up tool from the application menu.





Condres OS 19.02 -- Trying to clean the package cache and launch the firewall tool

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Hardware



I explored running Condres OS in two environments, starting with VirtualBox. Condres automatically resized its desktop to match the VirtualBox window and could use my full screen resolution. As normal, the GNOME desktop was sluggish in the virtual environment. What surprised me though was the MATE desktop was also slow to respond at first. I discovered MATE was set up to use compositing by default, which was making windows and menus respond slowly. With compositing disabled the MATE desktop became more responsive with no noticeable side effects. Videos still lagged poorly in the virtual machine, both when streaming on-line or playing local video files.



When run on a physical workstation, Condres performed better. The desktop was responsive with its default settings, audio worked out of the box and my screen resolution was properly detected. Condres was able to detect wireless networks in the area, but not connect to them. The network manager would not even prompt for my wi-fi password.



Something Condres does that I appreciate is it sets the noatime mount flag on the operating system partition. This prevents the system from writing new access times on files we have opened, improving disk performance.



The MATE edition of Condres used an unusually large amount of disk space, about 7.8GB. This is probably a side-effect of installing two desktop environments. Memory consumption was pleasantly low and running a MATE session required just 255MB of RAM.



Applications



The distribution ships with a fairly standard collection of applications. Looking around I found the Firefox, Chrome and Chromium web browsers, the Filezilla file transfer client and LibreOffice. The Thunderbird e-mail client is included along with the Transmission bittorrent software. A document viewer, image viewer and the Caja file manager are installed too. We can edit images with the GNU Image Manipulation Program and Inkscape. Rhythmbox is present for playing audio and the VLC and Totem players are include for showing videos. Condres ships with media codes out of the box.





Condres OS 19.02 -- Running LibreOffice and Caja

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Along with a text editor and archive manager, Condres offers us the Steam gaming portal and the WINE software is available for running Windows applications. The distribution uses Network Manager to get online. In the background we find Condres uses systemd for its init software and runs version 4.20 of the Linux kernel.



A few programs and launchers caught my attention. Stacer, for example, is a program I had not used before. Stacer monitors the system, provides a dashboard with an overview of resource usage, and includes a system monitor, file clean-up tool and a process monitor. The monitoring and dashboard tabs of the Stacer application are certainly helpful for getting a quick glance at the system's status. Other screens were less helpful.



For example, one tab of the application lists available background services and provides controls to start/stop or enable/disable services. These controls do not work and Stacer has no effect on the background services. I suspect this is because Stacer does not run with, or prompt for, administrator access.





Condres OS 19.02 -- Stacer's services management screen

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In a similar vein, Stacer's file clean-up area shows us how much disk space is consumed by temporary files, package archives or other items. Selecting one of these categories of files gives us the option of purging them from the disk. When I clicked the clean-up button, a message would appear saying something like "610MB cleaned". However, if I reloaded the tab it would once again show the same collection of files were still on the disk. This means Stacer was not only failing to remove files, it was giving a false message reporting success to the user.



An odd quirk of Condres is it ships with two welcome screens. One of these screens is shown when we are using the live disc, but neither welcome screen appears when we sign into the installed system. Both welcome screens appear to have been borrowed from other distributions with just the name and links to on-line resources changed. These welcome screens connect us to on-line documentation and the forum. Some of the links worked and some did not. One of the welcome windows would lock-up after a button was pressed to open an on-line resource and would only resume responding when the web browser it launched had been closed. Clicks are still registered though so if we open one link and then click four more buttons in the welcome window, nothing will happen until we close our browser. Then we will find four more browser processes queued up to launch.



I tried playing with Steam. Steam failed to launch, reporting it was missing dependencies, mostly 32-bit libraries. I was able to remove and re-install Steam to get it working.



Pressing the keyboard's Print Screen button would cause an error to be displayed saying the MATE-screenshot tool was not installed. This means the short-cut was set up at some point but the associated package not installed to handle the short-cut. No dedicated screenshot tool is present by default, but the GNU Image Manipulation Program can take screenshots, or we can install one using Octopi.



Settings



The MATE desktop ships with a collection of configuration tools which can be accessed through the System menu or by opening the distribution's control centre. The tools mostly deal with the appearance of the desktop, window behaviour, and desktop effects. There are some other modules for handling how notifications are displayed, configuring the firewall and setting up printers.





Condres OS 19.02 -- The settings panel

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I ran into a number of issues with the configuration tools. For instance, there are two notification modules, one for the MATE desktop and one for the KDE Plasma desktop (which was not installed). The firewall tool would not open, whether accessed from the System menu or the control centre. Trying to open the firewall tool from the command line failed if it was run as a regular user (who was then prompted for the sudo password), but the firewall utility would open if it was run with sudo directly. In other words, running "sudo gufw" works, but running "gufw" and entering our password when prompted for it causes the firewall tool to crash.



The printer utility also failed to function. It would open, but clicking the Unlock button to access printer settings had no effect and the utility remained locked. This prevents the user from setting up a printer.



Related to the topic of settings, there is no global volume control in the system tray. There is no sound mixer or audio volume control in the application menu either. The user needs to find and install a sound mixer from the distribution's repositories.



Special features



The Condres OS website mentioned seven key features the distribution provides and, since they're prominently displayed, I would like to quickly explore each one and my impressions of them.



ICE - ICE is a tool which creates (or removes) site-specific browser links from the application menu. Basically it asks us to provide a URL, a bookmark name and the menu category we want the short-cut to appear under. ICE then creates a launcher in the application menu and clicking it will open a web browser with a minimal user interface. This makes the target website look and act more like a typical application window. Personally this is not a feature I find useful, it seems more roundabout than using a regular browser short-cut. However, for administrators who want to set up quick access to web-mail or an on-line service, ICE does its job well.





Condres OS 19.02 -- Setting up site-specific browsing with ICE

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Battery usage (TLP) - Condres ships with the TLP software installed. TLP is designed to improve battery life on Linux. I did not run any benchmarks on it this week, but in the past I have tried TLP with modest success in improving battery life. Laptop users should benefit from having it available.



Desktop memory usage - The Condres website claims the distribution's desktop has been trimmed down to offer better performance: " Condres OS idles at just a few hundred megabytes of memory usage, as opposed to other popular operating systems that idle at up to several gigabytes. This also helps bring boot times down to just a few seconds. "



I have a few thoughts about this claim. The first is that the MATE edition does indeed require relatively little memory, about 255MB. So that aspect of the claim is certainly accurate. The second is I have rarely, if ever, encountered any operating system (open or proprietary) that consumed multiple gigabytes of memory at idle. The heaviest Linux distribution I have used required about 1GB. Which makes the project's statement feel more like marketing hype than a technical perk.



These two points bring me to the conclusion that while Condres is relatively streamlined compared to, for example, some proprietary systems and may boot faster and run lighter than those, Condres is not noticeably lighter, faster or quicker to boot than other GNU/Linux distributions running the same desktop environment.



The next advertised feature is Pushbullet. The Condres website says Pushbullet can be used to sync small files and notifications between devices. However, Pushbullet is not installed on Condres. There is, to be fair, a desktop client for the Pushbullet service in the project's repositories. The user just needs to install it, as with any other distribution.



Another advertised feature is Syncthing. The Syncthing software allows users to share multiple files or directories between devices without using cloud storage. Imagine using bittorrent, but just for files you wanted to keep in sync between two or more computers. Syncthing is indeed installed on Condres and works. I find its interface confusing. The big drop-down menu doesn't have any actionable items and the menu where we can set up shares is a tiny button in the upper-right corner. Sometimes the same folders are listed as being synced multiple times which can further add confusion to the experience. Syncthing seems to work well enough, but I wouldn't recommend it for less experienced users as there are a bunch of manual steps to be done sharing device names and access codes between systems.



Powerline-Shell is the penultimate feature listed on the project's front page. Powerline-Shell is described as an adaptive and beautiful terminal prompt. This software is installed, but not enabled by default. I followed the setup instructions on the upstream project's website and it replaced my shell prompt with an error message. Like Pushbullet, Powerline-Shell is technically available, but not set up by default and requires manual work to get it functioning.



Finally, Condres points out the distribution is a rolling release, based on Arch Linux. " It is not - nor will it ever be - necessary to re-install a later release of Condres OS in order to enjoy the very latest and most up-to-date system possible. " In this case the choice of words is unfortunate because, on the second day of my trial, I installed a new batch of updates and it rendered the operating system unable to boot to a login screen. While I could rescue the system enough to get a command prompt, all graphical tools no longer worked. I had to re-install Condres from scratch to get it working in a reasonable amount of time. Of course then I had to wait a few days for replacement packages to become available so I was stuck on older versions of software for a few days in order to avoid damaging the operating system again.



In short, this is one of those instances where I must acknowledge Condres always provides the latest versions of software, however I must also state that it is sometimes necessary to re-install the operating system.



Conclusions



I was thoroughly frustrated by my experience with Condres. Trying to use this distribution produced no shortage of error messages, false positive messages, settings modules that didn't work and the edition I tested did not even default to using the correct desktop environment. Two of the seven key features (Powerline-Shell and Pushbullet) are not enabled by default and, in Pushbullet's case, not even installed.





Condres OS 19.02 -- Various error messages from trying to launch programs

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Some of the desktop icons don't work under MATE and none of them work under the (default) GNOME session. There are two welcome screens, neither of which launch, and there is a KDE configuration module installed when KDE is not one of the available desktops on the media I tested.



The icing on the cake of this week's trial was the system being unable to boot to its login screen after the second round of updates, which is a poor showing for a distribution that advertises one of its key advantages as not needing to be re-installed.



To be fair, my experience was not all bad and I will give credit where it is due. Having Syncthing installed to share files between computers is nice. Syncthing may have a rough user interface, but it is a useful tool that side-steps the need to have a server or cloud service when synchronizing documents between machines. I will also say that most of the applications installed (the web browsers, LibreOffice, and so on) worked beautifully as usual. Plus I like that Condres installs TLP by default for better battery performance.



However, the list of issues rolls on, including being able to see, but not connect to wireless networks, not being able to launch the firewall utility without using the command line, not being able to connect to printers, and not having a sound mixer control on the system. Oversights like these make me wonder if anyone tested the ISO files before they were uploaded to the public as it is difficult to imagine how else key features like wireless Internet access and volume control could be overlooked. I think Condres OS has a long way to go before it will be ready for most people to use. * * * * * Condres OS 19.03 was published shortly after this review was finished and about two days before it was due to be published so I have not had a chance to fully test the new release. I did download the MATE edition of the new version. The MATE edition still uses the GNOME Shell desktop with desktop icons on the live media. Some icons work in the live environment, some do not. During the install process, the desktop keeps prompting the user for the administrator's password. Dismissing the four prompts without providing a password does not negatively affect the install process.



Once installed, the new version of Condres OS MATE appears to be virtually identical to the previous version, still featuring GNOME as the default desktop with MATE as an alternative. The one big change is every time the user logs in the interface is locked and we are prompted for the administrator's password in order to allow pacman to check for updates. Once the check is complete, two update icons appear in the system tray. When I first installed Condres OS 19.03, selecting one icon told me 8 new packages were available while the second said there were 20. The latter turned out to be correct.



There is a new update manager which lists available upgrades. None are selected by default and there is no "select all" button, leaving the user to select all new packages manually. The upgrade manager then then failed, indicating packages were in conflict with no method offered for resolving the situation. Beyond that, so far, I have found the new version to be much the same as the previous with some updated applications. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Condres OS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 6.9/10 from 16 review(s).

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