The Hackers Manual 2016
The Hackers Manual 2016
For those who need stabilisers.
elementary OS “Freya”
This distro has little in common with its
base distro, Ubuntu. It ships with its
own home-brew Pantheon desktop and
has several custom apps, including a
Mac OS X-inspired dock. The distro
places great emphasis on design and
its Apple fixation is evident from the
tools it supplies, such as Snap, a
webcam app, which is similar to Apple’s
Photo Booth. The distro supplies a
number of custom tools, such as the
Korora 22
Korora is based on the mainstream
Fedora distro and ships separate
Gnome and KDE-based live installable
editions. In contrast to Fedora’s
blandness, Korora ships with a heavily
customised desktop. The distro has
also enabled some Gnome extensions,
by default, to iron out some of its
navigation issues and includes the
Gnome Tweak Tool for more
customisation. The distro has full
Pinguy OS 14.04.2
Another desktop that attracts new
users with its intuitive design is
PinguyOS. The customised Gnome
desktop features a lively dock at the
bottom and the Application menu
brings up a categorised list of apps, and
includes both the Gnome and Ubuntu
Tweak Tools. The distro is chock full of
apps and even includes the Plex Media
server. Besides the best general
Verdict Beginner-friendly distros
All three of the desktop distros we’ve rated,
above, have put in a great amount of effort to
polish the underlying components of their
base distro to a high finish. All three feature
incredibly good-looking desktops that are
intuitive and functional as well.
Of the three, elementary OS has perhaps
put in the most amount of effort into building
custom tools and libraries. Everything from the
window manager up to its apps is crafted to
adhere to its design principles. The one
disadvantage with the distro is that it isn’t as
usable straight out-of-the-box as the others.
Then there’s Korora which has turned the
clean slate of its Fedora underpinnings into a
fully functional smart-looking desktop. The
distro is a wonderful starting point for anyone,
and its strength lies in its customisation and
applications. The distro’s weakest point is the
Anaconda installer inherited from Fedora.
In contrast, Pinguy OS offers the best mix
of form and function. Its pleasing desktop
environment gives access to its vast number of
applications. But make sure you use it only on
an adequately specified machine – all its
customisations consume a lot of resources
and you’ll only be able to enjoy Pinguy OS on a
machine which has at least 4GB of RAM. On a
system with memory lower than that it’s best
to stick to elementary OS.
multimedia support, and enables thirdparty
repos, such as RPMFusion,
Google Chrome and VirtualBox.
Korora also packs in popular apps
and its Firefox browser is equipped with
useful extensions. The distro has some
specialised tools as well, such as the
Audacity audio editor, OpenShot video
editor and Handbrake video transcoder
etc. For package management the
distro ships with both Gnome’s
package manager and YumExtender.
purpose and specialised open source
apps, it includes several popular
proprietary ones, including TeamViewer,
Spotify and Steam for Linux.
There’s also Wine that you can
manage with the bundled PlayOnLinux
front-end. If you need more software, it
has Ubuntu Software Center as well as
the Synaptic package manager. The
distro uses its own repos besides the
ones for Ubuntu and Linux Mint Debian.
Geary Mail, Scratch text editor and
Audience video player, which are
designed to assist inexperienced users.
The distro even uses its own custom
window and compositing manager
called Gala, which consumes less
resources than some of its peers.
However, elementary OS doesn’t offer
many apps out of the box and doesn’t
include proprietary codecs or ship any
non-GTK apps which is why it doesn’t
include the likes of LibreOffice.
The verdict
he abundance of open source
operating systems proves that a
community of open-minded
developers can do great things, which
are worth at least trying out on your
home PC. We don’t insist that you
eventually switch from Linux to another
OS, as we love Linux but almost all of
them are more or less capable for
desktop computing.
PC-BSD is the winner overall with
very good performance in almost all the
tests we threw at it. The OS is fast,
reliable and able to recognise nearly all
hardware components and peripherals.
It may be missing the live mode, which
could garner it even more attention
from open source enthusiasts, but the
desktop experience with PC-BSD is
nearly the same as we’d expect in a
decent Linux distribution.
Haiku is a smart OS and really unlike
the other OSes. There are builds made
with an ancient GCC 2 compiler, which
can still run the original BeOS
applications together with relatively
modern Qt4 apps. Haiku development
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