Reborn OS 2018.09.09 This month I spent some time digging through the waiting list and trimming projects that have not survived the harsh and demanding growing period of their first year of existence. Among them I found a project which seemed simple on the surface, an Antergos-based distribution offering even more install-time options than its parent. What caught my attention was the specific list of extra options: 15 desktop environments to choose from, able to run Android apps through the Anbox compatibility software, optional Flatpak support, and the Mycroft desktop assistant. All of this on a rolling release base provided by Arch Linux.



The distribution is called Reborn OS and I downloaded what was, at the time, the latest build. Reborn is available as a 64-bit build only. The ISO I downloaded was 1.5GB in size and, booting from this ISO brought up the Budgie desktop environment. At the top of the desktop is a panel with the application menu, a couple of quick-launch buttons and a system tray. The Budgie desktop seemed to respond well once it finished loading and I was eager to get started.



Installing



Reborn automatically launches the Cnchi graphical installer, a component it borrows from Antergos. The installer lets us know it requires a network connection to download the latest available packages. The installer also insists we have at least 8GB of free disk space for the operating system. I had both of these and so proceeded.



Cnchi walks us through selecting our language, location and time zone. We are then given a chance to select what kind of user interface we want. There are a lot of options, ranging from KDE, GNOME, i3 and a console only setup. We can also install Budgie, along with other popular desktops and something called Windows Interface, which looks like it might be GNOME with Zorin's Windows 7 style theme. Unfortunately we can only select one desktop to install. I decided to go with Budgie, since it seemed to be the distribution's default.



We are then asked to select which optional features we would like. There is a long list of items we can toggle to enable or disable, including the Chrome web browser, Bluetooth support, Firefox, Dropbox, Flash, LibreOffice, Mycroft, Redshift, WINE, VLC and WPS Office. The Anbox software for compatibility with Android apps was mentioned on the website, but not listed as an optional feature in the installer. We are then given the chance to manually select package mirrors or have the installer do it for us. Taking the automatic mirror selection takes a few minutes during which the installer appears to lock up.



Disk partitioning comes next and we can choose automated or manual partitioning. I noticed the ZFS storage volume option was disabled in Reborn's version of Cnchi, otherwise the options are the same as on Antergos. The last step is to create a username and password for ourselves.



Here the installer failed, reporting it had run into error zero, which the Reborn website says is a common problem that happens when a package cannot be found or downloaded. There is a manual workaround suggested, but the problem is the workaround assumes the installer is failing to download a specific package. In my case the installer was failing before that, while apparently trying to download a manifest of available packages. To make matters worse, the installer exits when it encounters error zero, forcing the user to go through the entire configuration process again.



I went through the installer a few more times, after confirming I had a working and stable Internet connection. Each time the installer failed with the same error and quit, whether I used automatic mirror selection or manually picked mirrors myself. Since Reborn could not install, even after multiple reboots and trying different package selections, I gave up and moved onto another project.



Update: After writing this review I corresponded with one of the Reborn OS developers about the installer bug. They believe the issue has been corrected, but I have not yet had a chance to confirm whether their fix works. * * * * * Nitrux 1.0.15 Since Reborn OS had left me with some spare time in my week, I decided to follow-up on a request to review Nitrux. I previously reviewed Nitrux just over a year ago and, from what I have been told, the project has made some significant progress since then. I wanted to see if the reports of an improved Nitrux were true and so downloaded the latest release. The distribution is described as follows: Nitrux is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu suitable for laptops and desktop computers. Nitrux provides all the benefits of the Ubuntu operating system combined with a focus on portable, redistributable application formats like AppImages. While based on Ubuntu, Nitrux trims down the list of applications installed by default. Only a small collection of desktop software is included. The distribution uses a customized version of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop, called Nomad. The download for Nitrux was 1.5GB in size and I found the distribution is available for 64-bit computers only.





Nitrux 1.0.15 -- The Nomad Menu

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Booting from the project's live media brings up the Nomad desktop. A panel at the top of the screen holds the application menu and system tray. A single icon on the desktop launches the system installer. A dock at the bottom of the display provides quick-launch buttons for commonly accessed applications and also doubles as the desktop's task switcher. My initial impression was the desktop, with its brightly coloured wallpaper, was working and I immediately opened the system installer.



Installing



Unlike its parent distribution, Nitrux does not use the Ubiquity installer. Instead Nitrux uses the Calamares installer. Calamares is quite easy to navigate and makes selecting our time zone, keyboard layout and making up a username/password combination straight forward. We can opt to have the installer set up disk partitions for us (which will result in a ext4 partition for the operating system and a small swap partition), or we can manually set up file systems. The manual partitioning option is quite easy to navigate. The installer then copies its files to our local hard drive, completing its work quickly.



While the installer was working, my screen locked and asked me for a password to get back to the desktop. The password for the live environment is blank. Something else I noticed at the end of the process was, when we reboot the computer, Nitrux will appear to lock-up when powering off the system. I found out the operating system had not crashed, it had merely paused and (I suspect) displayed a message asking for the install media to be removed, but if there was a message it was displayed as white text on a white background, making it invisible and the system seem unresponsive. Pressing Enter got things moving again and the computer restarted.



Hardware



My freshly installed copy of Nitrux booted to a graphical login screen where I could sign into the Nomad desktop. When running in a VirtualBox test environment, the login screen was unusually slow to respond to input, but performed quickly when run on my desktop computer. In a similar fashion, the Nomad desktop proved to be slightly sluggish to respond in VirtualBox, but ran smoothly on physical hardware. I was pleased to find the desktop automatically resized itself to match my host computer's screen resolution when run from a virtual environment.



Nitrux took up about 4.4GB of disk space for a fresh install and consumed about 510MB of RAM when logged into the Nomad desktop. All in all, the resource usage and performance of Nitrux running Nomad appears to be about the same for me as running most Linux distributions with the Plasma desktop.



Early impressions



Once I got signed in and started looking around the Nomad desktop, a few key characteristics popped out. One is that the application menu, located in the top-left corner of the screen, presents launchers in a small grid. The menu, which is a custom widget called Nomad Menu, is divided into two pages, one for favourite/popular items and one for all installed applications. I tried swapping out the Nomad menu for a classic tree-style menu and not only did the alternative menu not appear, but the Nomad Menu button disappeared too. This left me temporarily without an application menu until I tracked down a solution.



Another feature of Nomad is the dock at the bottom of the screen. To avoid taking up too much space, the dock gets hidden behind application windows. However, if the mouse pointer gets close to where the dock is, it pops-up, hiding the content behind it. I found this a frustrating arrangement as it meant I couldn't, at a glance, see which windows were open, but it also meant that if I was working on something near the bottom of a window it would get covered by the dock.



Nomad uses a global menu bar at the top of the screen. This means our application windows do not have their own menus, whichever window is active displays its menu in the top panel. Some people like this, some don't, and I fall into the latter group. I tried to remove the global menu to restore in-window menus, but the steps to do this in Plasma do not work in Nomad. I then tried to remove the default panel and replace it with a custom Plasma panel of my design, but found it is not possible to remove the Nomad panel. Going into the panel settings and trying to remove it does nothing. I could create as many new panels as I wanted and arrange them as I liked, but never remove the default one. I couldn't find a way to move the default panel either though moving new panels I created was straight forward.





Nitrux 1.0.15 -- Using the global menu bar

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Settings



Since I am talking about adjusting settings and widgets I think it is worth talking about the desktop settings panel. Nomad appears to use a nearly unaltered copy of the Plasma System Settings panel. This gives us access to a wide range of themes, looks, window behaviours and the chance to adjust visual effects. I think a few minor items dealing with themes and the KWin window manager were missing, or maybe Nomad is just using an older version of the Plasma settings panel. The controls which were present all worked well for me.



Nomad Software Centre



Of all the features in Nitrux, I feel the Nomad Software Centre probably deserves the most attention. Nitrux makes a point of being geared toward portable software packages, AppImages in particular, and the Software Centre reflects this. The software manager displays available AppImage packages in a grid, listing just their name and a truncated version number. There are no descriptions or icons associated with the packages and we cannot get more information about them by clicking on them. The packages are shown in alphabetical order with no method, so far as I could find, for sorting them into categories. We can search for packages based on their name, but otherwise we are left with a long list of packages with short names like "jaxx" or "xchat" without context.



Each package has a "Get" button associated with it and clicking "Get" appears to do nothing for a minute or so, and then the button changes to say "Remove". New applications do not appear in our application menu and are not added to our path and I began to wonder if the items I had selected were downloaded at all.





Nitrux 1.0.15 -- The Nomad Software Centre

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After some digging around, I found AppImage programs can be located in one of two places. In our home directory there are two folders, Applications and bin. The former holds programs added to the system at install time, as far as I can tell, and the bin directory holds programs installed from the Nomad Software Centre. Neither of these locations was a part of my user's path, which meant I had to open a terminal and explicitly run the newly installed items using their full path name.



As far as I could tell, there does not appear to be any method in place to upgrade packages. Perhaps this happens automatically in the background, but I could find no method for checking on potential AppImage updates and downloading them.



For me, installing large, portable versions of packages which are (for the most part) already available in Ubuntu's repository and which will not be added to my menu or path seems like a big step backwards. I probably would have overlooked the inconvenience of this approach had there been another software centre, like GNOME Software or Discover, on the system, but to deal with Ubuntu's underlying packages we need to use the APT command line tools.



The one aspect of working with portable packages I did like was AppImage packages did not integrate with the Nomad desktop. Basically this means that any program we install via AppImages cannot use Nomad's global menu bar and instead has its own, in-window menu. There is a touch of irony in that AppImages not working with the Nomad desktop provided me with programs which presented themselves in the manner I wanted.



Applications



Nitrux ships with a minimal collection of software. In the application menu we find the Chromium web browser, the VLC media player, the Babe music player and the qpdfviewer document viewer. Media codecs are included for playing videos and music. The Dolphin file manager is included along with the Kate text editor and a calculator. In the background I found the GNU Compiler Collection, the systemd init software and version 4.18.5 of the Linux kernel. The included software worked well and I had no problems with the default applications.



Conclusions



I went into my experiment with Nitrux optimistic that the reports I had been given that the distribution had changed and improved would prove to be true. To the developers' credit, Nitrux has matured over the past year. The last time I tried Nitrux it failed to work with my desktop computer, even though its parent (Ubuntu) ran smoothly on the same equipment. Now Nitrux runs well on my workstation, so hardware support has improved. In the past I questioned the wisdom of swapping out Ubuntu's friendly Ubiquity installer for an alternative. While Nitrux still uses a different installer (Calamares), I have to say Calamares is just about on par with Ubiquity these days so the choice to use an alternative did not have any negative side effects for me.



Previously, when I tried Nitrux I did not like the default audio player. I think the Babe audio player has come along nicely. While it might not be my first choice for a music player, it gets the job done and worked much better for me during this trial.



I did run into some design choices that frustrated me. The first being that Nomad seems to be basically the Plasma desktop with some hard-wired choices made for us. I like the Plasma desktop and greatly appreciate its flexibility. To run into fixed features I didn't want (such as the global menu bar I couldn't remove) in a Plasma-based environment somewhat soured me to the experience. This is all the more unfortunate because some of Nomad's style and approach I liked, but being unable to tweak it to better suit my workflow left me wanting to swap out Nomad for plain KDE Plasma.



My biggest issue with Nitrux though is the software manager. Instead of having a rich and easy to browse software manager like GNOME Software or mintInstall (or a powerful package manager like Synaptic) the distribution uses a custom software manager that only works on AppImages. This not only limits easy access to Ubuntu's massive package repositories, it also makes searching for packages harder. There are some other possible side effects too. For instance, AppImages are a mixed bag when it comes to security updates. Ubuntu's main repositories get regular security fixes, but AppImages may or may not depending on the specific package's maintainer and there isn't much the user can do about that. Another concern I had was that each AppImage is installed in the user's home directory, not a central location. This means on computers with multiple users we may end up with the same AppImage installed multiple times as each user gets their own copy. AppImages are relatively large so it may become a storage issue as well as a security concern.



Finally, AppImages are not added to the application menu so the user needs to be able to find and manually run their newly installed programs and this seems like a lot of unnecessary fiddling about when most software managers add new programs to the menu for us.



To be fair, I like AppImages, I use them sometimes myself. But I feel they work best when used sparingly as an add-on to the distribution's default repository, not as a replacement. It's helpful to have an AppImage when we need a newer version of a package than what is in the repositories, or a program that hasn't been added to our distribution, but it is not a convenient method for doing day-to-day software management.



While Nitrux does some things well - it is easy to install, desktop performance is good, the default layout is nice and fairly clean - after a few days I was reminded of something I wrote about the distribution last year. "This style of approach seems to be repeated throughout the distribution: replacing working utilities (music player, system installer, software manager, application menu) with alternatives that do not function as well as the ones provided by the parent distribution."



I believe the same description applies today. By the end of the week I wanted to replace Nomad with the more flexible Plasma, replace the software manager with Ubuntu's GNOME Software, replace the dock with a classic task switcher. All the customizations and special features Nitrux introduces I wanted to undo to get back to a more mainstream, arguably more convenient set of tools.



It's not that Nitrux introduces poor ideas, but that it replaces existing good tools with its new ideas which haven't matured to the same levels as the items being replaced. I would probably like the new software manager if it were an add-on alongside another package manager, like Discover. I might enjoy the Nomad menu and panel if I could customize it as I can any other Plasma widget without my application menu vanishing. In short, I think Nitrux's custom tools make good additions to the Ubuntu base, but not good replacements for more mainstream utilities. * * * * * 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

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



Nitrux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 7.8/10 from 51 review(s).

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