Venom Linux 2.1
Trying to punch above his weight, Mayank Sharma finally finds a sourcebased distro that’ll satiate his need to run a source-based distro.
Mayank Sharma finally finds a sourcebased distro that’ll satiate his need to run a source-based distro.
Outside of the usual candidates, it’s pretty difficult to find actively maintained distros designed for the experienced Linux campaigner.
Venom is one of the few that’s built from scratch and helps users assemble a streamlined and agile Linux desktop. While the distro is designed for users willing to let go of the usual conveniences like firstboot wizards, and custom graphical configurators, it’s still more pragmatic than some of its peers that take the KISS principle to an extreme level.
Venom is designed for the x8664 architecture and uses a sourcebased packaging system that helps users compile programs that are optimised for their computers. While on the downside, building individual packages takes a lot more time than installing binary packages, the upside is a noticeable leap in performance from the tools optimised for your hardware.
Unlike a majority of its barebones peers that boot into a command-line interface (CLI), Venom boots into a Live environment that sports a minimal Openbox windows manager. Another thing that helps Venom distinguish itself from its peers is its relatively easier installation mechanism. The distro is for advanced users, so don’t expect a graphical partitioner. But unlike some of its peers that even ask the user to compile the kernel during installation, Venom relies on a ncursesbased installer that takes users through the various installation steps.
For partitioning, the distro enables users to choose between the two popular CLI utilities, cfdisk and fdisk, to set up the disk. The distro supports both the older MBR and the newer UEFI-based systems, and several file systems including Btrfs, ext2/3/4, Reiserfs, and XFS. Venom uses SysV as the init system instead of systemd.
Source of power
Venom’s highlight, though, is its scratchpkg package manager. According to the developer, scratchpkg’s package building script uses the port system like in Arch’s makepkg and CRUX’s pkgmk. One of scratchpkg’s handiest feature is its ability to automatically resolve dependencies, which makes compiling packages easier.
The distro relies on four repositories, of which only one, named main, is enabled by default. The developer admits that the distro has a relatively smaller collection of programs as compared to its more established peers. That said, you’ll still find all the popular open source applications including several fully fledged desktop environments, from lightweight ones like Mate and Xfce to heavyweights like Gnome, and KDE in the main repo, that can be installed easily thanks to scratchpkg’s dependency-resolving capabilities. Furthermore, if you enable the repos named multilib and non-free, you’ll have access to popular proprietary Linux tools including
Google Chrome, Steam, Bitwarden, Dropbox and others.
Again, for an advanced user distro, interacting with
scratchpkg is fairly straightforward. You can upgrade the installation, check for broken packages, search and install new ones, with relative ease. For instance, a single command ( scratch install mate ) is all you need to search for dependencies for the desktop environment, download the code for all the packages, and even compile, and install them.
Venom Linux has enough documentation on its wiki to help you familiarise yourself with its peculiarities, and encourages users to engage with its community via IRC, Discord and Telegram. Overall, it’s one of the most approachable advanced-user distros that can help even average Linux users take advantage of a source-based distro without any of its associated complexities.