SpiralLinux

Reader supplied reviews for SpiralLinux Average rating 9.0 from 46 review(s) Please selecting a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on SpiralLinux? 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: -- 12.23112011.220925 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: 12.231120 Rating: 10 Date: 2024-07-24 Votes: 105 After a few days of distro-searching, hopping & an awful time trying to like MXLinux on my recently adopted 2012 ThinkPad L530, I came across SpiralLinux & haven't looked back. It truly lives up to the claims as an out of the box, ready to go Debian desktop. Coming from years of Xubuntu, I fell right into place with the XFCE spin. Instead of spending a few hours getting drivers, installing updates & all the tedium you might associate with a clean-slate Debian system, I spent a few hours PERSONALIZING my system with themes, cursors & all that visually fun stuff! Zero hardware issues, wifi just worked, both touchpad & trackpad worked without any setup, hibernate & standby both reliably work & waking up is a seamless experience. I'm sure I'll come across some hiccups eventually, but I'm truly impressed with SpiralLinux! Plus, it's a relief that "the 'developer-hit-by-a-bus' concern" of smaller distros isn't an issue here since, well, it's just a very polished Debian! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 12.231120 Rating: 10 Date: 2024-05-20 Votes: 106 The Absolute Best Out of box Debian experience one can get! The developer of Geckolinux have done it again and this time, the developer have done it to debian. The dev have set sane defaults for the base Debian, amplifying the out of box experience and it works like a dream with the rock solid stability of Debian Bookworm paired with OpenSUSE like BTRFS layout and implementation. Plus Spiral Linux have enabled BTRFS compression and Snapper application OOTB and they rules out some major pain points of post-install configuration in Debian based distros. SpiralLinux have also opted for the "grub-btrfs" fork instead of regular grub, so that we can easily list the available BTRFS snapshots right from boot menu for easier rollback plus SpiralLinux also have zRAM swap preconfigured. More than everything, SpiralLinux never tries to "one-up" Debian and rather than being yet another Debian derivative, it becomes just an optimized version of core Debian and it's one of the major selling points of SpiralLinux. Following this ideodology, SpiralLinux doesn't host separate repositories for it- Instead, it re-uses Debian's core repos. There's still other tons of optimizations and absolutely logical decisions made by the dev like TLP, Wide array of DE selections, Flatpak preconfigred etc and this is by far the absolutely underrated Linux distros I've ever encountered! Kudos to the dev and if the person reading this review is a Debian fan or someone who's wanting to dip their toes into the Debian world, then this is the perfect distro for you to try and it's enjoyable for Beginners and veterans alike. I honestly wish this distro gets more traction and other Distro maintainers and developers take inspiration from SpiralLinux Developer and their choices! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 12.231120 Rating: 10 Date: 2024-05-20 Votes: 106 This is the distro for those older PCs out there that nothing seems to work with very well. It is the closest I've ever seen to a version of Debian intended to compete in the desktop Linux market with its own descendants like Ubuntu and Mint. The software is all Debian rather than a true new distro requiring new repos with modified packages. However the Debian people don't maintain a version of their distro that takes full advantage of all of their own repos to produce a desktop Linux viable for new Linux users not wishing to get deep into system configuration. Sticking to all Debian repos means there's no risk of our needing to install something else if the person behind SpiralLinux decides to never update it, so long as Debian is still around. That is a major advantage over other distros in my view. Distros often have few problems installing on Windows PCs from the last few years. The real test is the old devices and Macbooks. SpiralLinux XFCE is the only distro that could install smoothly on my 2015 Macbook Air and Thinkpad Education model with an ancient AMD E1-2500. None of the mainstream distros had the wifi drivers for either of these laptops. People often spend many hours, days or weeks trying to figure out how to get certain wifi chips working on laptops. Save yourself the time and use this instead. XFCE is a little too much for the E1-2500 to handle, but installing and switching over to the LXDE desktop was extremely simple on SpiralLinux XFCE and now the ancient low-end Thinkpad runs just fine. The only caveat for those with Macbooks is that you still need to do a little customization to get the internal fan running, which is a common problem across all Linux distros. I highly recommend this distro and am kind of surprised there is so little coverage of it among the Linux podcasters and other reviewers out there. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 46 reader reviews of SpiralLinux...