SparkyLinux 5.9 is now out to the world and I’m really excited to share my experience trying out this distribution. Honestly, I have never tried using Sparky in the past. But now that I have got this account on Medium and am willing to post articles about Linux, I believe it is a good time for me to take a look at various Linux distributions and share my experience with all of YOU!
There are two ISOs available in their website. One is based on the stable branch of Debian and the other, as they call it as Semi-rolling is based on Debian Testing. I downloaded the stable version. Again, there were two desktop choices — LXQT and XFCE. I went with XFCE version since that is my Favourite Desktop Environment.
INSTALLATION
SparkyLinux uses the Calamares installer. So the installation procedure should be familiar to you if you have installed Manjaro or Debian Live. Everything went as it would in Calamares until the stage came when I had to input the password to be used in the system.
I use a short and simple password on my desktop computer because it will just sit at home and no one other than my brother uses this computer. So I have no issues relating to privacy in that regard. So I just set up a simple password which is easy to remember and type.
I am sure that Calamares does not have such restrictions as how Sparky mentions. For SparkyLinux, you are required to type in a strong password. It needs to be a complex one and not something that is very easy to crack!
This is the only thing I find annoying about SparkyLinux. There is literally nothing else as annoying as this in the whole distribution. But if you don’t mind this, then good for you.
First Look
As I have mentioned earlier, I downloaded the XFCE ISO of SparkyLinux. Right off the bat, we get a very limited set of applications but really useful ones like Firefox, Full Libreoffice Suite, Thunderbird, Transmission, Bleachbit, Synaptic Package Manager, etc,. So we are pretty much ready to work out of the box.
Sparky is like Arch for Debian. We get to choose which applications we want to be installed on the system and have full liberty in choosing our packages. Due to this, the ISO image of SparkyLinux also tends to be really small when compared to other heavy-weight distributions.
System
I was not surprised to see why SparkyLinux is so lightweight. Htop was not installed by default, so I had to install it by myself, and it is not a tough task to do considering that we are using a Debian based distribution.
Right after boot, the system consumed about 350 MB of RAM out of a total of 4 GB. So it is definitely on a lighter side when compared to other distributions which use XFCE like Manjaro (which on my system uses about 600 MB of RAM after boot).
SparkyLinux uses the same kernel as Debian 10 Buster (4.19.0–6-amd64) and the XFCE version is 4.12 although the latest release is 4.14. Since Sparky is based on Debian, it also inherits Debian’s stability and repositories (which is great).
So that is pretty much all there is to say about SparkyLinux.
Conclusion
SparkyLinux is a great linux distribution for minimalists as it does not come preloaded with a bunch of software. It lets you pick what you want to install. So the choice is yours just like how arch does it. It is fast, stable and of all, it is very functional. I have not experienced a single problem with SparkyLinux after 2 days of use in a virtual machine. So it is safe to say that SparkyLinux does not get in your way. I do highly recommend this linux distribution!
