Bluestar Linux 5.0.7
Another issue, another Arch-based desktop – and the obvious question in Mayank Sharma’s mind is how is this different from any of the others.
Another month, another Arch-based desktop – and the logical question in Mayank Sharma’s mind is how is this any different from the others.
One of the best things that makes people labour through Arch’s tedious installation process (besides ending up with a streamlined installation) is the availability of bleeding-edge apps and libraries. An increasing number of desktop-friendly distros these days rely on this one feature of Arch to churn out an aesthetically pleasing, fully functional Linux distro that gives them access to the rolling release nature of the underlying base. Bluestar Linux is an experienced campaigner in this field, and its latest edition delivers a beautiful KDE rendition that will appeal to everyone looking for a distro that can be put into duty right out of the box.
Bluestar Linux boots into a Live environment. The desktop comes with a bunch of themes that the developer has crafted specifically for the desktop. It has the folder view, weather and disk use widgets added by default. At the bottom is a Latte Dock that houses quite a few icons for several commonly used apps. Surprisingly, the full Application Menu is tucked inside a panel that’s hidden away from view by default. Notifications also appear in this panel, and can be easily missed, as it’s hidden away by default. Another irritating setting is the default level of transparency for the application menu, which puts quite a strain on the eyes.
Trophy desktop
Besides the modified KDE desktop, the other unique aspect of the distro is its various installation targets. There’s the default Basic option that gets you a no-frills desktop with a small set of essential apps. Next up is the Desktop option, which adds a dollop of common apps. Experienced users can use the Deskpro option that throws in quite a lot of development tools as well. But if you’re a developer, you should use the Developer option which includes a bunch of IDES and other related tools and libraries.
The Live environment doesn’t include all these apps and tools and will rather pull them in during installation – and therein lies the distro’s weak point. Like many of its peers, Bluestar also uses the distribution-agnostic
Calamares installer, tweaked for the project to primarily allow users to select the edition they want to use and install. In addition to pulling in apps for the selected installation, like most distros Bluestar also installs updates during installation. But updating a rolling release distro means there are quite a few updates, which depending on your connection to the net could add a substantial amount to the total install time.
For a faster installation, the installer suggests you fire it up after blocking your net connection and then select the option to install the Basic edition – which still takes quite some time to complete. Despite its name, the Basic edition also installs quite a few apps including Openoffice,
Firefox, VLC, Thunderbird and even the proprietary Skype client. For package management, the distro relies on
Octopi, the popular graphical frontend to Arch’s pacman package manager. Besides the regular Arch repos, Octopi is configured to use a couple of Bluestar ones as well.
Outside of the distro, the Bluestar project itself is fairly bland: it lacks a website of its own and is instead hosted on Sourceforge. The project doesn’t publish release notes, which makes it virtually impossible to track changes and highlights of the current release.
There are also no official forums to speak of, and most of its users interact with the developer via a Facebook page. The developer has expressed his frustration at the lack of donations in spite the large number of downloads, and is all set to scale down the amount of time he devotes to the project.