Siduction 21.1.0
Jonni Bidwell is once again seduced by the dark side of the Linux Distribution community, or at least the Debian Sid side.
Jonni Bidwell is once again seduced by the dark side, or at least the Debian Sid side.
The Siduction project has been dormant for three years, so we were pleased to see this “C-blues” release pop up on Distrowatch. The lead developer, it seems, has gone AWOL, but the other four members of the team have taken up the mantle. And what they’ve created might just pique your interest.
Siduction is available in seven flavours; we went for the flagship KDE edition. But if you prefer you might choose Cinnamon, Xfce, LXQT or LXDE. And if you like things light there are minimal GUI and Gui-free barebones editions. You can also install Gnome or MATE, but there’s no ready-to-roll install medium for those.
Because it’s based on Debian Unstable (referred to as Sid, hence the name), there may be a few glimpses of the future if you’re used to more conservative distros. The barebones editions, for example, feature Intel’s inet
Wireless daemon (iwd) rather than the traditional, slightly long in the tooth wpa_supplicant. You can enable this on the desktop versions too, using the website’s easy-to-follow instructions.
More than a sum of its parts
The distro is based on a snapshot of Debian Sid from February, but it’s much more than said snapshot plus a desktop. If you have ever tried to use Sid (Debian’s rolling branch, from which packages eventually get promoted to the stable branches) you’ll know that things often break overnight. But our experience with Siduction was entirely positive. Unlike Debian, non-free wireless firmware is included by default, and the Calamares installer worked a charm. The release notes say you shouldn’t trust Calamares in some elaborate situations, so we tried to install use it in an LVM, and sure enough it crashed. Ah well. Can’t say they didn’t warn us. On the desktop, besides the install icon, there’s a shortcut to the Siduction chatrooms where, if you ask nicely, someone might help you with your install woes.
Once installed you’ll find an overly comprehensive selection of applications, but we’re not sure if people really need three music players (Dragon Player, JUK and
Elisa) and as many video players. Most of the KDE Applications suite is included, as is the new and not-soimaginatively titled System Monitor, which will replace the venerable Ksysguard.
On the whole the install is a little on the heavy side, but this might introduce you to some new software. The initial install occupied over 8GB though, so some people would call this unnecessarily bloated. A manual is available on the website, and we mentioned the IRC support as well, but for the most part the Debian documentation should cover any issues you run into
We liked the dark theming, splash screen and overall the look and feel of the desktop. The transparency in the terminal and application menus was a nice touch, and it’s KDE so you can tweak or get rid of that as you see fit. Updating the system with Discover (KDE’S graphical package manager), worked fine, but of course some Debian fans will prefer to do this at the command line.
If you’ve had experience of the Testing and Unstable branches of Debian before, then this might be a ray of sunshine for you. Despite the small development team, there’s a sense that a lot of effort has gone into making this useable. There are a few rough edges, but we look forward to seeing them smoothed off in the future.