SpiralLinux is the result of the creator of GeckoLinux turning their attention to Debian – with an interesting outcome.

Some Linux distros have many remixes and respins, while some have very few. For example, there are multiple downstream variants of Debian and Ubuntu, but very few of Fedora. The Reg FOSS desk is only aware of one for openSUSE: GeckoLinux, whose Rolling edition we looked at earlier this year.

Now, the creator of GeckoLinux – who prefers to remain anonymous – has turned their attention to one of the most-remixed distros there is, Debian, to create SpiralLinux. What can a new remix bring to the already-crowded table of Debian meta-distributions? (That is: distributions built from other distributions.)

SpiralLinux is to Debian what GeckoLinux is to openSUSE. They both offer easier, friendlier ways to install the upstream distro, but the final result is as close as possible to its parent. Neither adds any new components that aren't in the parent distro, and updates come direct and unmodified from upstream.

Both Debian and openSUSE offer default downloads which boot directly into an installation program. This is in contrast to the more modern Ubuntu and Fedora way of doing things, where the install image boots into a live desktop, so you can try it out and get a feel for it before you commit yourself to installing it. (We must be fair and note that both Debian and openSUSE do offer optional live-image downloads as well – but you need to know to look for them.)

Both Debian and openSUSE exclude proprietary drivers from their installation image, relegating them to optional additional repositories. This can make it difficult to get things like Wifi working. (Debian does offer optional "non-free" installation media with proprietary firmware and drivers, with scary warnings that these are unofficial.)

Both SpiralLinux and GeckoLinux are remixes, which take the upstream distro and repackage it in a more Ubuntu-like way: so, they boot directly into a live desktop environment, which you can try out – or use to recover a damaged installation.

Both include the most important non-FOSS drivers and firmware, so you have, for example, a much better chance of getting online wirelessly direct from the live image, and thus be able to install updates or extra software.

Once you've installed either Spiral or Gecko, what you end up with is, basically, a cleverly-configured copy of Debian or openSUSE, respectively.

This is very different from most other downstream Debian meta-distros, such as Linux Mint Debian Edition to pick one example. An installed copy of LMDE is distinctly – well – Minty, and it unavoidably contains components that didn't come from upstream Debian.

This is much like what Debian, in its rather Puritanical terms, calls a FrankenDebian: mixture of multiple different parent distros.

SpiralLinux offers a few improvements that installing from a Debian live image (even a "nonfree" one) doesn't.

You get Btrfs, configured with both compression (Fedora-style) and automatic snapshots (openSUSE-style), including for the kernel. You get improved font rendering. You get Flatpak support, complete with the GNOME Software app, even on non-GNOME installations.

Along with extra drivers, the Debian non-free repositories are preconfigured, so more hardware will work out of the box – including VirtualBox guest support, and HP printers and scanners – and they'll get updates in future.

Rather than a dedicated partition, it uses a swapfile on the root drive, plus ZRAM compressed swap for low-memory machines. TLP is installed and configured for better laptop battery life, too.

Subject to the concerns about Btrfs that we have expressed before, and more than once at that, this is all good stuff. It's also worth noting that you get the best aspects of both openSUSE and Fedora's configurations of Btrfs.

The Xfce desktop in SpiralLinux looks very much like it does in GeckoLinux… which is no bad thing

We tested the Xfce version, but you can also pick Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE, Budgie or LXQt variants, plus a bare-bones "Builder" edition if you want to configure your own desktop.

The Xfce editing installed smoothly, both in VirtualBox and on bare metal. Everything worked without a hitch, and the resulting OS feels fast. It looks very much like GeckoLinux Xfce, with a dark theme and a similar wallpaper: muted but clean.

Now, to be fair, some of these things are a little controversial. Not everyone admires Btrfs, and while Snapper can be a lifesaver, you will need significantly more disk space with snapshot support than without. Not everyone likes Flatpak, either, but given Debian's rigorous guidelines about Free Software, it's by far the easiest way to install proprietary freeware such as Chrome, Skype or Steam onto a Debian box.

At the end of the installation, you are running something that accurately calls itself Debian Bullseye. It contains basically nothing else, with only one small exception, as its creator told us:

I did have to include two unpackaged Github projects for the integration of Snapper with the GRUB menu and for the rollback mechanism because there was nothing suitable in the Debian repos, but they're just simple Python scripts and they should keep working on the long term. (And in my testing they do continue to work after upgrading the system to Debian Testing or Unstable.)

So the result is vanilla Debian, and that does mean a rather dated distro in places: kernel 5.10, and a somewhat elderly version of Firefox. But to get round that, Flatpak comes built-in, or it's possible to update the whole distro to Debian Testing or Unstable… but if you want a true rolling release, there's GeckoLinux Rolling, which uses openSUSE Tumbleweed underneath.

SpiralLinux, just like GeckoLinux, is not so much a new distro as a new and improved way to install an existing distro. If you like Debian – or the idea of Debian, complete with long-term stability and a slow, careful release cadence – but you want some of the shinier bits of rival distros, SpiralLinux looks like a great option. ®

At this point, The Reg FOSS desk must confess to some confusions in the original GeckoLinux write-up. I thought it eschewed Btrfs, but I was wrong. It doesn't. As a matter of routine, I normally pre-partition destination computers with Gparted before installing – but the GeckoLinux installation program picks up existing partitions and their filesystems, and by default won't suggest changing them. Also, GeckoLinux does include firmware and non-free drivers that openSUSE doesn't. My mistakes, and my apologies.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others.

It is also a comment under pretty much every Reg article on Linux that there are too many to choose from and that it's impossible to know which one to try. So we thought we'd simplify things for you by listing how and in which ways the different options suck.

This would be an impossibly long list if we looked at all of them since Distrowatch currently lists 270. So we need to thin the herd a bit.

Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.

Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.

At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, Linus Torvalds said he expects support for Rust code in the Linux kernel to be merged soon, possibly with the next release, 5.20.

At least since last December, when a patch added support for Rust as a second language for kernel code, the Linux community has been anticipating this transition, in the hope it leads to greater stability and security.

In a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at Cardano, Torvalds said the patches to integrate Rust have not yet been merged because there's far more caution among Linux kernel maintainers than there was 30 years ago.

A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

Microsoft has made it official. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distributions are now supported on Windows Server 2022.

The technology emerged in preview form last month and represented somewhat of an about-face from the Windows giant, whose employees had previously complained that while the tech was handy for desktop users, sticking it on a server might mean it gets used for things for which it wasn't intended.

(And Windows Server absolutely had to have the bloated user interface of its desktop stablemate as well, right?)

Version 21.3 of Manjaro - codenamed "Ruah" - is here, with kernel 5.15, but don't let its beginner-friendly billing fool you: you will need a clue with this one.

Manjaro Linux is one of the more popular Arch Linux derivatives, and the new version 21.3 is the latest update to version 21, released in 2021. There are three official variants, with GNOME 42.2, KDE 5.24.5 or Xfce 4.16 desktops, plus community builds with Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE, a choice of tiling window managers (i3 or Sway), plus a Docker image.

The Reg took its latest look at Arch Linux a few months ago. Arch is one of the older rolling-release distros, and it's also famously rather minimal. The installation process isn't trivial: it's driven from the command line, and the user does a lot of the hard work, manually partitioning disks and so on.

Right after the latest release of the KDE Frameworks comes the Plasma Desktop 5.25 plus the default desktop for the forthcoming Linux Mint 23.

Apple is extending support for its Rosetta 2 x86-64-to-Arm binary translator to Linux VMs running under the forthcoming macOS 13, codenamed Ventura.

The next version of macOS was announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on Monday, and the new release has a number of changes that will be significant to Linux users. The company has disclosed the system requirements for the beta OS, which you can read on the preview page.

One level of Linux relevance is that macOS 13 still supports Intel-based Macs, but only recent ones, made in 2017 and later. So owners of older machines – including the author – will soon be cut off. Some will run Windows on them via Bootcamp, but others will, of course, turn to Linux.

A bunch of almost unbelievably clever tech tricks come together into something practical with redbean 2: a webserver plus content in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operating system.

The project is the culmination – so far – of a series of remarkable, inspired hacks by programmer Justine Tunney: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε, Cosmopolitan libc, and the original redbean. It may take a little time to explain what it does, so bear with us. We promise, you will be impressed.

To begin with, redbean uses a remarkable hack known as APE, which stands for Actually Portable Executable – which its author styles αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε. (If you know the Greek alphabet, this reads as "actmally pdrtable execmtable", but hey, it looks cool.)

Canonical's Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.

This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it's based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.

Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.

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