One year Spiral Linux, a new release based on "Bookworm"

[wendy-lebaron]

Thank you @GeckoLinux for the new release of Spiral Linux based on Debian "Bookworm".

If it weren't for Spiral Linux, I would have never touched GNOME or Budgie, and I wouldn't have known any better about many other things. Like the Snapper scheme. I need to find an SSD which is large enough and able to boot an operating system into it, to be able to enjoy that.

Topic title: One year ago I discovered Spiral Linux as an "easier" Debian. Now the KDE edition is my daily driver, and I have installed it at least 10 times with every desktop.

I noticed this in the list of ISO releases on main Distrowatch page, on top left-hand side. But the downloads are available at Sourceforge.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

There's already another "release" of Spiral Linux. I hope they fixed the problem with detecting the touchpad on some systems. Although I admit I was trying to use KDE Plasma v5.27 on a 12-year-old Hewlett-Packard laptop. Even so, ordinary Debian "Bookworm", Manjaro, Q4OS and ROSA have not given me any touchpad issues with the same exact Plasma and "libinput". I could get last year's Spiral Linux ISO with KDE and upgrade to "Bookworm" status, and get the touchpad detected but I should have really gone farther with this. What I say is to stay way from the "backports" and even desist going away from Debian's Linux kernel v6.1 series on older equipment that isn't going to see much Internet anyway.

The news now on Distrowatch:

Distribution Release: SpiralLinux 12.231001 (DistroWatch.com News)

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

distrowatch.com

 

[GeckoLinux]

Hi there @wendy-lebaron , what Distrowatch announced last week was their mistake, that was just a development upload not yet ready for release.

Regarding your touchpad, it's definitely worth trying the new release as it now uses libinput, whereas before it was using synaptics.

Regarding Backports, it should be noted that both the Debian Stable and the Debian Backports kernels are both installed on the SpiralLinux ISO, and the Backports repo can be easily disabled by users that don't need it.

 

[darry1966]

Just started using the builder edition which uses Icewm and have to say really liking it. Some nice spins available.

 

[kc1di]

Regarding your touchpad, it's definitely worth trying the new release as it now uses libinput, whereas before it was using synaptics.

I like synaptics better for the fact that it allows me (when running x11) to disable the touchpad when and external mouse is plugged in something that libinput does not allow at the moment. But that being said some machine require libinput to beable to use the touchpad at all. So for dev's it's a catch 22 type thing. JMHO

 

[arochester]

There are "Derivatives" and there are "Derivatives",

Some Derivatives have their own Repository/ies so they are clearly something else e.g. Kali Linux.

Some Derivates do not have their own Repository/ies and only use the Debian Repository/ies They are nearer "Customizations" rather than Derivatives.

SpiralLinux is a selection of Linux spins built from Debian GNU/Linux, with a focus on simplicity and out-of-the-box usability across all the major desktop environments. SpiralLinux serves as an alternative live installation method for a highly reliable customized Debian system using only official Debian package repositories.

Similarly, wattOS.

I like wattOS. It's lightweight, but includes the bits I would normally install in Debian. It easily updates from Bullseye to Bookworm.

Derivative? More like Debian with knobs on. Pick the bits you want...

 

[GeckoLinux]

So for dev's it's a catch 22 type thing. JMHO

Yep, exactly. The main problem I was seeing on my hardware and also from user reports is that the functionality for automatically disabling the touchpad while typing wasn't working with Synaptics despite the option being enabled in the desktop environment's mouse settings GUI. It was still possible to enable the feature with Xorg conf files, but I prefer for the GUI to work as expected. So that pretty much required moving to libinput to make laptops usable.

 

[GeckoLinux]

Just started using the builder edition which uses Icewm and have to say really liking it. Some nice spins available.

Glad you like it!
Just a note about the Builder edition: Unlike the other SpiralLinux editions, Builder is not intended for usage as a final product. In my opinion Icewm does not make for a usable system for typical users, and there is almost no polish to the GUI presentation layer in Builder. Only the less obvious low-level SpiralLinux system configurations and packages are in place by default. Builder is basically intended to offer the bare minimum level of graphical functionality needed to open the Synaptic package manager and install a full desktop environment and customize it as desired in a visual / GUI manner. I also used the Builder config recipe myself as a base for other SpiralLinux editions with different desktop environments.

 

[kc1di]

I can live with either one.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

There's a new release of SpiralLinux. What might be of interest to some people with newer equipment is the "backports" now features the Linux kernel from the v6.5 series instead of v6.4.

Release SpiralLinux 12.231120 release · SpiralLinux/SpiralLinux-project

Download from: https://spirallinux.github.io ⚠️ Important note: Rufus, LinuxLive USB Creator (LiLi), Ventoy, and Unetbootin are NOT recommended by SpiralLinux for creating the bootable USB device ...

github.com