Sparkylinux 5.14
Thanks mostly to Debian 10 being supported until 2024 there are still a few Linux options left for 32-bit systems. One is Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) which we’ll be featuring again soon. But we were sufficiently swayed by a reader’s enthusiastic comments about Sparkylinux – which they’d used to resurrect an old netbook – to include it instead. Debian by itself is a great operating system and in many cases is ideal for making 32-bit machinery useful. Where it perhaps falters is as a day-to-day desktop machine. If you want proprietary software, you’ll have to add custom repos, and the default desktop configurations shipped with it are a little, um, vanilla. Ideal for those who like to start with a blank slate, but slightly irksome for those that just want to get on.
Sparky is intended for intermediate users, and while it’s lightweight it still offers what you’d expect from a modern desktop. We’ve gone with the LXQT version here, because we’re big fans of that project (if you want a desktop analogy then LXQT is to KDE as MATE is to Gnome). And having a lightweight Qt5-based desktop used to be the stuff of legend. The VLC media player (itself a Qt program) is bundled and so are Firefox, Libreoffice and everything else that’s de rigeuer in a modern desktop. If you like Debian’s approach to free software, you can use the Aptus tool to purge your system of non-free software. too.
Debian’s conservative release cycle means that if you stick with the Stable release you’ll be stuck with older versions of applications than you’d find in Ubuntu or the like. This isn’t to say those applications don’t see security and bug fixes, because they do – they just won’t see new features until the next Debian release. But on 32-bit hardware we figured this wouldn’t be much of a concern. For 64-bit users there’s also a semi-rolling release, based on Debian Testing. We’d love to have included it on the DVD, but it was just too big to fit. So we’d encourage you to check that out for yourselves.
If you’re running this with less than 1GB of RAM then you’ll need to use the advanced installer. This is because the default Calamares installer, though smooth and intuitive, is quite demanding. You might also want to check out the Minimalgui (based on Openbox) or Xfce Sparkylinux offerings. On the other hand, if you have RAM to burn try the Sparky’s boot-to-ram option. This will copy the live medium’s filesystem to memory, so that it boots more quickly and runs more smoothly.