Voyager 10
Just like its namesake spacecraft that is the furthest of man-made probes, Mayank Sharma believes this distro will also go pretty far.
FREE | HTTPS://VOYAGERLIVE.ORG
The Gnome 3 desktop offers several avenues for customisation, but we haven’t come across a distro that makes good use of its malleability. Delivering a customised Gnome 3 desktop is one of the highlights of the French Voyager 10 distro, but we weren’t really expecting much on this front, especially considering that this is Voyager’s first Gnome-based release in over a decade.
The distro is available in two editions. The main edition includes non-free firmware and is available for both 64-bit and 32-bit computers. Since Debian 10 now supports SecureBoot, you don’t have to disable the feature to get Voyager 10 to boot on UEFI-equipped machines. For the purists, the project also produces a version that only ships with free and open source firmware. This edition, though, is only available for 64-bit machines.
The editions are all Live-installable and boot to a pleasant-looking Gnome desktop. There’s a Conky monitor applet on the left, and you can create icons on the desktop since the distro ships with the Desktop Icons extension enabled by default. The Gnome 3 Favourites bar is at the bottom, much like a dock, thanks to the Dash to Dock extension.
The list of apps has also been separated from the Activities Overview thanks to another extension. Besides these the distro ships with tons of other extensions: over a dozen are enabled straight out of the box, and quite a few are installed but haven’t been enabled by default.
Voyager 10 bundles all the usual apps you’ll want on a regular desktop distro, and then some. The inclusion of GRUB Customizer, Gnome Tweaks and SMTube are a nice and useful touch. For software management, Voyager uses the Gnome Software app that’s configured to pull content from the official Debian main repository.
CUSTOMISATION GALORE
Besides the desktop there are some other useful customisations as well. The right-click context menu in the file manager has a menu entry that rolls in several useful scripts for various tasks such as changing the ownership of a file, checking the hash of an ISO file and converting images from one format to another – all with a single click. The developers have also equipped the file manager with some plug-ins to help you quickly encrypt files and rotate and resize images.
The highlight of the distro is a custom app called Box Voyager that helps you tweak several aspects of the installation. Besides regular tasks like changing themes and switching wallpapers, you can use the app to enable the easyscreencast extension that simplifies the use of Gnome’s built-in screencasting feature by placing a button in the top panel. Box Voyager also has controls to help you configure all aspects of the Conky monitor on the desktop. You can add more elements or turn it off altogether. The app also enables you do some spring cleaning by helping purge the cache. It can also fire up PhotoRec to recover deleted files and also enable a New Document option inside the file manager’s context menu, with a handful of useful triggers.
But there are some rough edges as well, and the biggest in our opinion is the use of multiple installers. If you choose to install the distro from the boot menu, your request will be serviced by the Debian installer. However, you’ll be greeted by the Calamares installer instead if you choose to anchor the distro to your disk from inside the Live environment. Although a majority of users would fire up the installer from within the Live environment, the duplication of installers isn’t helpful, and we can’t understand why it’s touted as a feature on the project’s website.
“Voyager 10 bundles all the usual apps you’ll want on a regular desktop distro, and then some. ”