SharkLinux 4.10.................
Jonni Bidwell at last finds a distro that caters to his selachimorphaphile tendencies. But does it bite back? Time to get into hot water and find out…
Jonni Bidwell at last finds a distro that caters to his selachimorphaphile tendencies. But does it bite back?
Shark Linux’s motto, “Do Linux differently”, isn’t just a poke at Apple’s famous “Think different”. Scanning the website ( that’snothow youreviewdistros–Ed) it’s quick to point out its “100 per cent cloud compatible desktop” and “support for virtual environments of all shapes and sizes”. Our interest was piqued.
Obviously, we’ve seen cloud-focused distros before, and we’ve played with remote desktops, but marrying the two together? That seemed wild and slightly crazy. Linux done differently indeed. It’s hard work tricking a headless machine into sending graphics down the wire, so on the one hand it’s great that this is all set up for us.
On the other hand, it’s debatable how useful running a full-blown desktop remotely is, or if it’s just a waste of precious resources. Shark Linux (no relation to SharkOS, the defunct Gentoo-based project) is certainly not just another Ubuntubased distro.
On first boot ( bite?–Ed) the user is greeted with a welcome screen that invites them to install or set up many things, including DropBox, Thunderbird or extra desktops. The base install is really a fairly threadbare Ubuntu 16.04 with a cloud compatible Mate 1.16 desktop and some slightly questionable theme-ing decisions. Through the extra desktops option, one can switch to the popular DeepIn desktop, or SharkLinux Edge that features Mate 1.18. Also on the welcome menu, the user is urged to install the SharkLinux Expansion. Without it, we’re cautioned, one misses out on many of Shark’s unique features.
The expansion includes all the tooling and frameworkery to enable Shark to pull, build and install packages straight from their upstream sources. This provides the user with a single click path to software that would otherwise require some wrangling, including but not limited to Grive (the Google Drive client), TeamViewer (the proprietary remote access tool), and (shudder) Microsoft’s Powershell.
Bells and whistles
With the expansion pack enabled, a number of cloud and virtualisation tools also become available. Some of these seem terribly niche, such as the DevStack installer and a utility for setting up and administering Vagrant images. There are other tools for managing Juju, Docker and LXD images. Virtualisation gurus we are not, but we suspect many who are would rather set this up themselves, and not do so on a machine that’s running a desktop environment with all sorts of other bells and whistles installed.
Besides the serious cloudy business, a number of games ( seeleft) come with the expansion pack. This seems vaguely incongruous, but the inclusion of Dope Wars, the, er, BusinessSimulator, from the late nineties, made us chortle. A one-click install of the upstream Wine release is also available, for those wishing to do battle with Windows games or other software.
There’s a lot to like about this release, the convenient passwordless sudo set up, the easy access to upstream software, the prefab shortcuts to common commands. But it all seems like a bit of an ad hoc collection, the entirety of which no one could possibly be interested in. Of course, the lone developer (Marcus ‘rhymes with SharkOS’ Petit) sees a use case here and we can’t fault (and sincerely applaud) his efforts getting such an eclectic collection of tools in one place.