Sparky Linux 5.7
we’re very much fans of Sparky here at LXF Towers. “Yes, you had it on the disc four issues ago!” we hear you cry. Ah, but that was the Debian Stable, Lxde-based one; this is the Debian Testing, Lxqt-based one, and we haven’t had it on the disc for 11 issues. So there!
Because Sparky is smaller than your average distro, we’ve included both 32- and 64-bit incarnations of the full-fat release, as opposed to the Minimal GUI or Command Line versions. It’s worth noting that a couple of special Sparky editions exist: Gameover, which features
Teamspeak, Lutris and several pre-installed games, as well as everything you need to get
Steam up and running; and Multimedia, which has tools for video, audio and web production. We couldn’t fit these on the DVD, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth checking out.
The LXQT desktop is the spiritual successor to LXDE, forged in the fires of unification with the Razor-qt project back in 2014. It takes advantage of Qt5 to produce an impressivelooking, modern desktop, yet it also uses the Openbox window manager to keep resource usage low.
If you want to make it hypermodern, you can use KDE’S Kwin window manager and its Breeze theme. KDE and its frameworks are sufficiently
decoupled to allow this without installing the whole Plasma desktop. Since this edition of Sparky uses the Testing repos, you’ll see new versions of not just desktop componentry, but everything else too.
Sparky comes pre-packed with all the multimedia codecs you need, and with access to the considerable Debian repos, anything else you need is within easy reach.
32-bit support generally is on the wain, Mint has committed to 32-bit support at least until the end of the Mint 19 support period – that’s 2023, by which time we’ll wager a lot of it will have gone to silicon heaven. Debian, being the Universal Operating System, shows no signs of abandoning i386 either. But with Ubuntu (and all of its flavours) no longer producing 32-bit install media, and several other distros abandoning i386 altogether, the tide has very much turned.
The main problem is that even when a distro installs successfully on older hardware, there are some applications that require processor extensions, particularly SSE2, which aren’t present on older CPUS. This is particularly an issue for web browsers at the moment. We’re glad that readers still have old hardware ticking along, and that distros like Sparky still support it, but to paraphrase a certain TV programme, “32-bit winter is coming”.