Hexagon OS
A sucker for home-brewed apps, Mayank Sharma gets lured into a new distro that’s headed in the right direction, but still has a long way to go.
A sucker for home-brewed apps, Mayank Sharma gets lured into a new distro that’s headed in the right direction, but still has a long way to go.
Generally we steer clear of new Ubuntu-based distros, but Hexagonos appealed to us with its home-brewed apps. After all, it’s logical to assume that anyone who has put in the time to write custom apps must have put in the effort required not to ship just another Ubuntu clone. Hexagonos doesn’t disappoint us for being an Ubuntu clone. We are instead let down by the distro’s liberal use of the 1.0 versioning. Why would anyone want to subject their project to a reviewer’s wrath, knowing very well that their distro is so full of rough edges that it might cut someone?
Hexagonos is produced by a small Italian startup. It boots into a beautifully crafted Xfce desktop that sports the Arc icon theme, with flat icons that look elegant and modern. There’s a smattering of hexagons all over the desktop, from the middle of the wallpaper to the Whisker menu icon, but it doesn’t look out of place or forced. The desktop also has the Plank dock. The developers refer to it as the Hexagonautodock, which apparently solves an issue with Xfce and the Plank dock, but they don’t go into details about the issue and their solution.
Then there’s Ubackup, which is pitched as a simple
home folder backup tool. True to its description, the app only has a single Start button, and simply compressed the contents of the entire ~/ folder into a zip file inside the
home folder itself. It doesn’t prompt for any options, which makes it fairly simple but also very rigid and inflexible, which isn’t how we like our backup apps.
Déjà Dup is our gold standard for user-friendly backup tools that are intuitive for new users and offer enough tweakable options for those who want to do customised backups. Ubackup simple places a zip file in your home folder which is nothing more than a compressed dump of your home folder. Subsequent backups aren’t incremental in nature and will replace the previously created zip file if you haven’t moved it somewhere else.
It gets worse…
The other thing that ticked us off was the lack of any restoration option. There is no option in Ubackup or inside the compressed backup file itself to restore it partially – or even completely, for that matter.
In fact, since it replaces previous backup files, if you happen to take one after accidentally removing a file that file will be lost for good, since the app will overwrite the good backup file. Ubackup might be a work in progress, but it shouldn’t have been placed in a 1.0 release in its current form.
Finally there’s Hexagoncenter, which is the project’s solution to helping new users flesh out their installations. It brings up a list of five app categories, each of which has a number of apps. With a single click, the app installs all apps that have a toggled box.
While its heart is in the right place, the app has a number of implementational issues. For one, it asks you to stop using the computer while it is working on installing the apps. There isn’t any indication of progress, though you get notifications when the installation starts and ends. Lastly, the app also doesn’t give any indication of previously installed apps.
The issues (and our frustration) are compounded by the fact that the project has nothing more than a single page of documentation. We have in the past reviewed distros with non-english documentation, but we don’t downrate them for this reason, thanks to Google Translate. Hexagonos, however, has just committed harakiri by jumping the gun on a 1.0 release, which is frankly loaded with underdeveloped apps that do more harm than good.