SparkyLinux

Reader supplied reviews for SparkyLinux Average rating 8.2 from 118 review(s) What are your thoughts on SparkyLinux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 8.12025.097.86.75.164.134.5.23.63.12.12.0.1 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 8.1 Rating: 5 Date: 2025-12-20 Votes: 0 I like Mate desktop and installed Sparky 8.1 Mate (“Seven Sisters”) in one of my backup machines. Installer is easy and the whole installation took 10 minutes. I was greeted by a very pleasant custom Mate desktop. Sparky uses a familiar successful layout, that of Mint Mate with more vibrant colours and a cleaner theme where everything is slightly more readable. That’s a win OOB. Software selection: the usual Mate stuff you cannot go wrong with + a mixed assortment of preinstalled apps I’m undecided about its value. Venerable Pidgin and Hexchat are featured in a prominent place in menu favourites but, really, almost no one uses these in our days. Hexchat is in fact EoL and archived. Exaile a GTK music player I didn’t know of. I guess its advantage is that is still being developed unlike your usual Rhythmbox. Noi, a front-end for running LLMA locally? Is this app really a thing? At the heart of the distro is Aptus Software Center. A GUI built with yad usually cannot be state-of-art. But I don’t blame Aptus for looking scruffy but for acting buggy. There’s a misaligned row of apps in “Development” page. I’m trying to resize the window to get to the end of row and the whole window is sliding towards the… opposite direction. It is acting funnily (hehe). Does not the custom version yad used by Sparky play well with default compositor? Cannot say. The problem with Aptus is not lack of “class” but lack of “substance”. Ambitious projects to provide all kinds of “third-party” software on top of standard repos many a time fall short of the expectations because of the high cost of maintenance in time and effort. Sparky offers a ton of “repacks”, sometime obsolete, instead of links to up-to-date upstream sources. Why should I need an old repack of Floorp? You press a button in Aptus to edit your main software source. It does nothing because main repo list is not there any longer in Debian 13. However, the most controversial thing in Sparky is enabling deb-multimedia repo by default. Deb-multimedia has this reputation of wrecking Debian systems. There is a page in Debian Wiki posted by the debian multimedia maintainers team that cautions against the usage of this repo. Of course Sparky takes a radical approach by fully replacing the debian multimedia stack with packages from the third-party repo. I guess they want this way to eliminate the risk of breaking dependency management. I haven’t experienced any issue yet but it is still early to judge. I cannot recommend Sparky to average user because of “funny” Aptus and considerable lack of community around this distro but Sparky is very enjoyable to me as a Debian Mate skin. And you cannot be but happy with Debian and Mate. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 8.1 Rating: 4 Date: 2025-12-11 Votes: 0 My primary issue is with passwords. Selecting a password for your personal computer or laptop shouldn't be that overly strict. Passwords that are too simple or fewer than 6 characters are not allowed. Also, an easily remembered password they said could easily compromised by dictionary attacks. Though, I don't remember the exact words that it says, but it’s frustrating. Additionally, the information available on online wikis is kinda unclear and not as detailed as I'd like. It's a shame, given that they are among the earliest Debian-based distributions updated right after version 13 was released. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 8.1 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-11-29 Votes: 10 i have used sparky several times on different HWs but it really excels with older stuff. I had mainly used Q4os for such situations, but what makes sparky better for me is APTus, I suppose most people would say isn't this just another synaptic package manager no better than say OctoXBPS ?. In that i like to use multiple Desktop environments (DEs ) on the same distro APTus makes that easier. Previously i had to use debians' ancient tasksel which never seems to get the installed DEs quite right. Sparky's implementation of package management of aptUS makes many DE's under lightdm (sddm slim etc) possible. For example enlightenment which is only available natively on some distro like Bodhi just works (and is not an option for tasksel). As a further test case; i have never been able to get Trinity to install/work right (thinking q4OS & exegnu distros), but on sparky installed with aptUS it just works !!. I find Bodhi interesting, but the Budgie Desktop is just as lightweight as E17 on older HW perhaps slightly better than xfce, but i suppose lxQT is my go to. Forget gnome, gnome flashback. kde, etc on anything less than 8G imho. I have used sparky on Toshiba's (both 32 & 64 bit) and thinkpad 470's along with dell [57]480s with absolutely no issues. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 118 reader reviews of SparkyLinux...