 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1129, 7 July 2025 |
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Welcome to this year's 27th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
The Nix package and system manager is a fantastic piece of technology which makes it possible to configure most aspects of a Linux-based operating system from a single text file. Nix also handles dependencies, works across multiple distributions, and enables instant rollbacks to previous packages without needing a reboot. Despite all of these perks, and a massive package repository, not many distributions have adopted Nix. This week we explore an exception: GLF OS. The GLF OS distribution is focused on gaming and is based on NixOS which makes it possible for the distribution to change its software packages and desktop on a whim. Jesse Smith explores GLF OS in this week's Feature Story and share his first impressions. In our News section this week we talk about Alpine Linux seeking to reduce the maintenance burden for X11 desktop environments which may soon be pushed aside in favour of Wayland-only distributions. We also talk about Fedora dropping plans to stop building i686 packages while AlmaLinux extends its add-on package support. Plus we talk about Ubuntu dropping support for existing RISC-V devices while Rhino Linux partners with UBports to work on the Lomiri user interface. We also report on PCLinuxOS recovering from a website outage. Then our Questions and Answers column discusses the sensitive question of whether there is a "world's worst" Linux distribution. Plus we share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. Finally, our Opinion Poll invites our readers to vote for the next feature we add to DistroWatch. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
- Review: GLF OS Omnislash Beta
- News: Alpine seeks to reduce maintenance burden for X11 desktops, Fedora drops proposal for removing 32-bit packages, AlmaLinux extends EPEL support for more CPUs, Ubuntu dropping older RISC-V processors, Rhino Linux working with UBports, PCLinuxOS experiences website outage
- Questions and answers: Is there a worst Linux distro?
- Released last week: ExTiX 25.7, Melawy Linux 2025.07.04, Linux Kamarada 15.6, MocaccinoOS 1.8.3, Rhino Linux 2025.3
- Torrent corner: KDE neon, Melawy Linux
- Opinion poll: What should we work on next?
- Site news: Description tool tips for distros and packages
- New additions: Arkane Linux, ATZ Linux, CuerdOS, Expirion Linux, Huayra GNU/Linux, LangitKetujuh OS, LibraZiK, LinuxHub Prime, Luberri Linux, Melawy Linux, Sculpt OS, Tribblix, Tsurugi Linux, UBLinux
- New distributions: Vincent OS
- Reader comments
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
GLF OS Omnislash Beta
GLF OS is a gaming-oriented, live Linux distribution based on NixOS. Developed by a French-speaking community called Gaming Linux FR (GLF), the distribution includes everything one would need for gaming on Linux, including Steam, Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, as well as MangoHud, a tool for monitoring system performance and for benchmarking applications. GLF OS comes with specific hardware-management configurations for PS5 DualSense, Xbox and 8bitdo controllers. The live distribution image uses the GNOME desktop environments, but KDE Plasma is available as an option during system installation.
On top of the above features, the GLF OS website states: "You can go back to a previous version of your system or packages with one click." We are also told the project supports automatic updates:
GLF OS updates automatically when you start your computer, for the first 5 minutes, which also includes system maintenance and cleaning. No manual intervention at the terminal is necessary, you can simply use your system as usual.
The website also tells us the distribution should be run on machines which have at least 8GB of RAM and 60GB of disk space. GLF OS is available in one edition for x86_64 machines and its live media runs the GNOME desktop. The ISO available for download is a hefty 6.3GB in size.
Booting from the ISO brings up a menu where we have the option of loading the distribution normally or pulling it into RAM before booting. Either approach loads the GNOME desktop. A thin panel is placed across the top of the screen with an Activities button and the desktop's system tray. A dock at the bottom of the screen holds a few launchers, including one for Firefox, one for Discord, one for Steam, and an icon for opening a full screen application grid.
The GNOME interface is displayed in French by default and the keyboard uses a French layout. While I can read French fairly well, having my keyboard not match the assumed layout made typing difficult and I wanted to change language settings. I tried to open the GNOME Settings application, first from the application grid and then from the system tray, and in both case the settings panel failed to open.
This turned out to be my first issue with the distribution. Not only did the settings panel fail to open, but I soon found all applications failed to launch when clicked. I could access a local text terminal and, with some difficulty, type commands to run (which worked), but no desktop programs would open. This might be a first time this has happened during one of my trials, where no applications at all would launch or even show an error message.
Installing
I ended up trying to boot the distribution in a variety of ways. After looking for Wayland/X11 options (and not finding any) and switching between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes, I finally found that booting the live ISO with the kernel option "nomodeset" enabled allowed me to launch desktop applications. I also found when booting with the "nomodeset" kernel parameter that, upon signing into the live GNOME desktop, the Calamares system installer would launch automatically.
As a footnote to my attempt to get desktop applications working, it turned out to be pointless with regards to GNOME Settings. When I changed the language settings in the settings panel, the desktop advised me to sign out and log in again. I did this (there is no password on the live user account) and discovered that the language and keyboard options had reverted back to French. So using the GNOME desktop for anything which required typing was a non-starter.
On the other hand, the Calamares installer does allow us to switch language and keyboard settings on its opening screens and these settings take immediate effect inside the application. This makes it easier to install the distribution than to write a note in its text editor.
Once we have selected our language, keyboard layout, and timezone Calamares asks us to make up a username and password. We are then asked to pick between Plasma and GNOME for our desktop. Since I had problems with GNOME on the live media I decided to use Plasma. We are shown four roles (Standard, Mini, Studio, and Studio Pro) and asked to pick one. The Standard edition appears to offer typical desktop applications and some gaming tools. It includes Firefox, office software, Steam, and NVIDIA drivers. The Mini edition offers just basic desktop usage and includes a web browser and a few small desktop utilities. Studio appears to include everything from the Standard edition, plus creative tools such as Audacity, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and Discord. The Studio Pro role appears to add the DeVinci Resolve Studio software on top of the Studio role. We should not worry too much about which role we choose as we can change to a different role post-install.
Disk partitioning comes next. Calamares offers a friendly disk manager we can use to customize our disk layout. It also offers a guided approach which will set up ext4 for the root filesystem with no swap space. (Actually, a zRAM swap device is set up inside RAM whether we create a swap partition or not, so there is always, technically, a swap device present.)
The first time I tried to install GLF OS the installer appeared to get about halfway through and then locked up. In fact, the whole GNOME desktop stopped responding and I was unable to cancel the process and had to force a reboot. The next time through I opened Calamares' progress log and watched it while the installer worked. The second time through, with the same configuration, the install completed successfully. I noticed, in the log, GLF pulls its packages from NixOS repositories.
Early impressions
When I first booted GLF OS the distribution presented me with a login screen where I could pick from three session options: Plasma on Wayland, Plasma on X11, and Steam. The Plasma sessions worked for me, however the Steam session did not. Picking the Steam option caused the screen to go blank and the operating system to stop responding to keyboard input (including trying to switch to a text terminal). A hard reboot was required to restore the system.
GLF OS Omnislash -- The KDE Plasma application menu
(full image size: 958kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
When signing into Plasma the Nix package manager runs in the background and works for a few minutes. I suspect it is checking for (and applying) updates in the background, though I was never shown a notification to indicate whether updates had been applied.
When I first started using Plasma there was no offer of a tour and no pop-up asking us to customize the experience. The distribution hands us the Plasma desktop and steps out of the way.
Hardware
The distribution worked pretty well in my test environments, both on my laptop and in VirtualBox. The desktop performance in each case was good and GLF OS detected my laptop's hardware. My touchpad, wireless networking, and audio all worked out of the box.
The distribution uses about 950MB to 1000MB of RAM when signed into the Plasma desktop (after Nix stopped running in the background), which is heavier than average, but typical for Plasma 6. The distribution is huge in terms of disk usage with the Standard edition (the one with gaming applications, but no creative tools) consuming a massive 26GB. Though 5GB of that space was just leftover data in the Nix cache after the install completed. We can free up that 5GB of space by running the Nix garbage collection process with "nix-store --gc".
GLF OS Omnislash -- Using the Dolphin file manager
(full image size: 683kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Included software
The software which will be included with the distribution varies, depending on which role we select at install time. The Standard edition ships with some typical desktop applications, such as Firefox, Transmission, KDE Connect, and Discord. The Celluloid video player and Elisa audio player are installed for us, along with media codecs for most formats. LibreOffice is included along with the Dolphin file manager.
GLF OS Omnislash -- Using the System Settings panel to test dark mode
(full image size: 709kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The Standard edition also ships with the Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, Oversteer (a steering wheel manager), the Steam gaming portal, and Wine Tricks for setting up Windows games. These items and the Celluloid video player are not included in the lighter Mini role.
In the background we find manual pages, the GNU command line tools, and the systemd suite. GLF OS offers users the fairly modern 6.14 version of the Linux kernel.
The distribution's website mentions several gaming controllers are supported out of the box. I think this is great, and from my limited testing, it appears to be a working feature. Though I have typically found most game controllers are supported in other, non-gaming distributions too. This seems to be less of a perk of GLF specifically and more just a positive "business as usual" situation that the developers are highlighting on the website.
GLF OS Omnislash -- Visiting the project's website in Firefox
(full image size: 477kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Custom features
There are a few custom applications which ship with GLF OS. The first, and perhaps most interesting one, is the GLF-OS Environment Selection application. This application duplicates a few of the questions from the system installer. Specifically it asks if we want to be using GNOME or Plasma (the is no option to use both) and then it asks which role we want to install (Standard, Mini, Studio, or Studio Pro). Once we make our selections the system updates its configuration and runs Nix to apply it.
This works quite well, we can "upgrade" or "downgrade" across roles and switch desktops on the live system. This is handy if we start with just the Mini experience to get a feel for the distribution and then want to install more tools, or if we install everything and then realize we don't need so much. Switching between roles and desktops only takes a handful of minutes and cleans up (or installs) all the components for us as if we were setting up a fresh install. The exception is our user settings and files; those remain intact across role changes.
GLF OS Omnislash -- Switching between roles
(full image size: 906kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I downgraded to the Mini edition for a while and found it provided me with a Plasma session with a web browser and audio player, but no gaming tools (like Steam, Lutris, or WINE), and no office suite. The disk usage and memory usage stats remain close to the same when running the Mini flavour.
Another custom utility is the GLF-OS MangoHud Configuration application. Earlier I mentioned MangoHud, a performance tracking application. The MangoHud Configuration application asks us if we want MangoHud to be Disabled, Light, or Full. There is no context for this choice provided and no information supplied about how MangoHud works or why we might pick one option over another. I tried switching between these, but never actually saw MangoHud displayed. Perhaps it only runs with specific applications or perhaps we need to manually run it or enable a service. I didn't find any information on setting up MangoHud or any launcher for it in the application menu so its usefulness was lost on me.
Nix, updates, and package management
The main tool for managing applications on GLF OS appears to be Easy Flatpak. The Easy Flatpak program is a software centre with a simple layout. Categories of desktop applications and games are places to the left side of the window while specific programs are listed, in alphabetical order, on the right. Installing new software is as straight forward as clicking an install button next to an application and then selecting whether the program should be installed system-wide or for our user only. Easy Flatpak worked well for me. It has clearly labelled categories and has a simple search feature for finding applications by name. I had no problems when installing or removing programs.
GLF OS Omnislash -- Downloading software with Easy Flatpak
(full image size: 581kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
As the name implies, Easy Flatpak works on Flatpak packages only and, by default, GLF OS pulls in software from the Flathub repository. As it happens, Easy Flatpak is, itself, installed as a Flatpak. It's one of the very few Flatpak bundles installed for us out of the box.
Another tool for working with software is Nix and the Nix command line tools are included. However, while I've generally had good experiences with Nix (while using NixOS or as a third-party package manager on other distributions), Nix did not work for me when I used it directly on GLF OS. The package manager would spew out errors about CUDA and then lock up. This happened whether I was performing searches for packages, trying to perform updates, or installing new packages. I didn't get Nix to work manually. It did work to switch roles when using the desktop front-ends mentioned above though. I'm not sure what is different about Nix on GLF vs NixOS, but it breaks basic usage. As a result, I used Flatpak for installing most software (at least software outside of what was provided through Steam).
Speaking of Steam, and gaming in general, I installed a few games and they worked well for me. I wouldn't say there was any notable difference between running games on GLF OS as opposed to gaming on other distributions. Games, whether installed through Flatpak or Steam, work the same on GLF as they do on other distributions.
Conclusions
While trying out GLF OS I tried to keep in mind that the release I was using was a beta snapshot, not a polished, final product, even though the developers say, "Although we still qualify it as a 'beta' version due to lack of hindsight, it is fully functional. This success is the result of incredible teamwork, which together has transformed GLF OS from an ambitious project into one that is poised to deliver on its promise: to become the most accessible distribution for beginners and anyone wishing to switch from Windows to Linux."
Their celebrations are, in my opinion, premature. GLF OS does have some nice features. It is fairly responsive, it can switch between roles in minutes, it has a great front-end for Flatpak package management, and the Standard edition comes with lots of gaming software. The project is fulfilling a lot of its goals with this first beta. I also appreciate that the team is trying to use Nix to automate software updates with the option of rolling back changes from the boot menu. I tested this and we can, in fact, revert to a previous "generation" of packages from the boot menu, which is great.
However, as with many first releases and development versions, GLF OS still needs to be tested and polished further. The project's live mode has a weird video bug that its parent doesn't have, its copy of Nix vomits errors and fails to install new packages (while NixOS handles manually installing new packages without any problems), and the GLF-specific applications are not well explained or documented.
Most of these issues are not deal breakers and I like a lot of the approaches demonstrated by GLF. However, most elements could be made just a little more user friendly, especially since the team claims to be targeting beginners. Beginners need clear explanations, documentation, an installer that doesn't lock up, maybe the launcher for Easy Flatpak on the desktop panel, and a welcome window to explain where things are. This is a good beta, but it is still a beta and not quite ready for people migrating from other operating systems.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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Visitor supplied rating
GLF OS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 9.1/10 from 21 review(s).
Have you used GLF OS? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Alpine seeks to reduce maintenance burden for X11 desktops, Fedora drops proposal for removing 32-bit packages, AlmaLinux extends EPEL support for more CPUs, Ubuntu dropping older RISC-V processors, Rhino Linux working with UBports, PCLinuxOS experiences website outage
As much of the Linux community moves toward replacing the X.Org display software with Wayland implementations, it raises some questions for people who want to run applications (and even full desktop environments) which are not Wayland-compatible. The Alpine Linux team are working on one solution for users of X.Org-only desktops: "Wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server. It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.Org server in Alpine, thus reducing maintenance burden of X applications in Alpine, but a lot of work needs to be done first." More information on Wayback can be found on its GitHub page.
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Following strong feedback to its proposal to drop i686 CPU support, the Fedora project is withdrawing plans to drop the 32-bit packages. "It is clear that the Fedora 44 target for this Change was too early. To some degree, I expected this to be the case, and was prepared to move the proposed implementation of the Change to a later release."
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The AlmaLinux OS distribution supplies package builds for a wider range of x86_64 CPUs than its parent distribution, creating builds for both x86_64-v2 and x86_64-v3 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux is limited to x86_64-v3 only). The AlmaLinux project has also taken it upon themselves to extend the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux repository, offering x86_64-v2 builds for its users. "In March, ALESCo approved a proposal to build EPEL packages from Fedora's source RPMs (SRPMs) to maintain long-term feature parity for our x86_64-v2 support initiative. Last month, these packages became available for AlmaLinux Kitten 10, and today we are happy to announce that x86_64-v2 EPEL support is now available for AlmaLinux 10 Stable as well. The EPEL package builds for AlmaLinux OS 10 stable are now complete and ready for use!" Tips for enabling this add-on repository are provided in the project's blog post.
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Future versions of the Ubuntu distribution will be dropping support for existing RISC-V processors, focusing on future CPUs and their capabilities. An issue report on Launchpad outlines the change: "For Ubuntu 25.10 release we plan to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile family to RVA23. The ubuntu-release-upgrader should stop upgrades beyond Ubuntu 24.04 on hardware that does not support the RVA23U64 profile. RVA23U64 is the profile relevant for user space. As there is no upgrade path from Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky for RVA20 systems, we should also stop upgrading these RISC-V systems from Noble to Plucky. Probably a warning is adequate here." The interesting implication here is that virtually no RISC-V processors currently support RVA23, which means almost no existing devices running RISC-V will work with Ubuntu 25.10 and later. Only newly created RISC-V systems will work with the upcoming Ubuntu release.
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The Rhino Linux team have announced a partnership with UBports, the developers of an Ubuntu-based mobile operating system. "We are extremely excited to announce that Rhino Linux has been officially sponsored by The UBports Foundation, the maintainers of Ubuntu Touch and creators of Lomiri, the convergence desktop environment.
As part of this collaboration, Rhino Linux will be contributing patches upstream to Lomiri, helping to sustain and support its ongoing development, and assisting in the transition to Qt6.
Looking ahead, Rhino Linux 2025.4 will see Lomiri becoming the official Desktop Environment for Rhino Linux on all PINE64 devices, replacing Unicorn Mobile, bringing a more integrated mobile experience to Rhino Linux." The announcement points out that this will effectively make Rhino Linux a rolling release alternative to UBports LTS releases for PINE64 devices, such as the PinePhone.
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The PCLinuxOS project was hit by a setback this week as its website and forum were knocked off-line. "The site that hosts the PCLinuxOS website caught fire and burned. We don't know if or when it will be back up. This is a temporary forum we can use until things return to normal." The temporary forum has been set up to give community members a chance to communicate until the main website is restored. A new website is being built, though it is in its early stages.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Is there a worst Linux distro?
Seeking-the-lowest-point asks: What would you say, in all your experience, is the worst Linux distro?
DistroWatch answers: This is an interesting question because, I believe, if asked what our all-time favourite Linux distro is, most of us would have an immediate answer. Most of us have a distribution which, maybe because it was our first or because it was the first one which really "clicked" for us, stands out as a favourite. I often see massive threads on forums in which people are chiming in with their favourite distro or the distribution they recommend for newcomers. It's a popular topic and one people will often join to share their opinion.
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