Reader supplied reviews for SparkyLinux
Average rating
8.2 from 120 review(s)
Version: 8.2
Rating: 9
Date: 2026-04-13
Country: United States
Votes: 0
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My older machines work very well with Sparky 8.2 everything works and it is the one distro that recognizes all my hardware (I have tried quite a few, Mint, Zorin, Peppermint, Bodhi, etc...), I also like that I can install any D.E. that I want (some D.E.'s run better on some machines and some not at all) it also includes mk-usb download among various other software that I like to run plus icons , themes etc.. I will be trying to install Sparky on a older Intel Macbook air in a week or two, we will see how that goes and maybe I will give an update. There are a lot of good linux distros out there and I think this is one of them, oh and they have an ARM version you can run on Raspberry Pi or other SBC. --- I did dock one point for the long password issue. (it is better to be safe I suppose but I think that should be left to the user)
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Version: 2026.03
Rating: 7
Date: 2026-03-17
Country: United Kingdom
Votes: 1
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It's been a while since I last took Sparky for a spin. It certainly remains familiar with little visibly different, a good thing in my opinion. Installing as a VM or on bare metal is straight forward, the installer used is clear and follows a logical path. As a VM in VirtualBox it performs without a hitch and (as far as I can tell) no performance hit.
I ploughed through an afternoon's work using Sparky, everything's where you expect it to be, and there's no learning curves to be concerned about, the Devs have done a good job of that. My own feelings are that Sparky is a reliable distro, it's does what it says on the tin which is more than some distro's can say, so really that's good enough!
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Version: 8.1
Rating: 5
Date: 2025-12-20
Votes: 0
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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.
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