Trident 20.02
As the supposed de-facto BSD desktop metamorphs into Linux, Mayank Sharma is intrigued by its promise to deliver the best of both.
As the supposed de-facto BSD desktop metamorphs into a Linux distro, Mayank Sharma is intrigued by its promise to deliver the best of both worlds.
AAlthough Project Trident had its first release only in 2018, its lead developer has been churning out Bsd-based desktop distros for well over a decade. Ken Moore, the author of PC-BSD, which was then renamed Trueos, began work on Project Trident when the popular rolling-release variant of FREEBSD shifted its focus away from the desktop.
Trident was initially based on Trueos. However, despite their years of experience with BSD, the Trident developers noted multiple longstanding issues with Trueos’s underlying FREEBSD base in their project’s blog. The main reasons they cited for moving away from a BSD base were hardware compatibility and package unavailability. Starting with the 20.02 release, Project Trident is now based on Void Linux, which the developers feel is better aligned to their goal of delivering a functional desktop system.
Void Linux itself is the brainchild of a BSD developer, and besides meeting Trident’s requirements of improved hardware support and newer apps, it also delivers features that resonate with the Trident developers. Of note there’s the runit init system that impresses Trident developers because of its speed and ease of management. Void also uses Libressl (that was forked from OPENSSL by OPENBSD), which Trident also used but had to give up after upstream changes in FREEBSD.
The most visible component that Trident inherits from Void is the XBPS package manager. It’s a full-fledged CLI package manager that does everything you’d expect from its more popular peers like apt and DNF. One of its most interesting aspects is its ability to recognise incompatible shared libraries as you use it to install, update or remove any packages.
Also in its bid to do justice to the rolling-release nature of Void, the only download image available for Trident is a minimal netinstall ISO that’ll pull and install the latest packages from the online repositories during installation. Talking of installation, Trident’s installer offers four different installation targets, from a barebones installation to a full-fledged desktop, each of which installs a different predefined list of packages.
While Trident is based on Void Linux and inherits some of its unique features, it also deviates on several aspects in line with its goals. The first of the more pronounced differences is Trident’s use of the ZFS filesystem. Trident exposes two of the filesystem’s most popular features, namely encryption and snapshots, via its installer and custom utilities. The snapshot feature is implemented with some thought as each user gets their own ZFS dataset, which allows them to manage snapshots of their files without superuser permissions. Also if you decide to use a swap partition, Trident will encrypt it as well, along with the rest of the filesystem.
The second visible feature that uniquely identifies Trident is the use of the Lumina desktop environment that’s written by Ken Moore as well. While Lumina, which was originally authored specifically for Trueos, has been ported to Linux and is available in the repositories of several distros, Trident may be the first to use it by default.
But remember that this is Trident’s first release based on Void and it’s still rough around the edges. For starters, the distro lacks Trident’s custom utilities that were originally written for its BSD base and haven’t yet been ported to work atop Linux. We are also not fans of its custom installer’s insistence on gobbling up the entire disk instead of carving a partition for itself. We can’t see this going down well with the large number of multi-boot Linux users.
All things considered, despite its many peculiarities, Trident’s first Void Linux-based release is good for prodding inside the safe confines of a virtual machine.