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Tux Machines
Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Aug 21, 2023
MiniOS seems to do what it sets out to accomplish, being a live desktop distribution with a variety of editions in different sizes. It provides a portable, desktop flavour of Debian which can be quite minimal or fairly robust. While I found MiniOS wasn't able to boot on my laptop, it did a fine job in a virtual machine and offered a smooth experience with no surprises. With this in mind, it's tempting to declare "mission accomplished" and give MiniOS a gold star.
On the other hand, MiniOS's website says the project has been around for over a decade (in one form or another) and, to date, there is very little in the way of useful documentation or infrastructure. There is almost no documentation on the distribution's concept of modules or setting up a configuration file. There is very little in terms of explaining what these optional modules are or why we would want to use them compared to other package/service formats. The discussion forum is almost empty, which feels weird for a project claiming over a decade of experience.
The current release (at the time of writing) is still based on Debian 11 which means the most up to date software in MiniOS is about three years old. This might not be a problem, exactly, but it does make the distribution look dated compared to some other live desktop distributions.
None of these concerns I mentioned is a critical problem, the distribution still accomplishes its core goal. However, it feels like there are some pieces missing - user support, documentation, newer hardware support - which could make running the distribution go from merely usable to a powerful, customized experience.
I'd also like to acknowledge that it seems the project quietly publishes new ISO files semi-regularly. There have been a few updates in the week I've been writing this overview of the project. So it looks like development is quite active. It's not always clear if the new snapshots are offering complete new versions of the distribution or minor fixes as there do not appear to be any release notes. However, I am hoping this activity indicates there were be more improvements and refreshed documentation in the future.
Read on
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