Adélie Linux’s beta 6 is about to arrive, just over six years after Beta 1; However, they say that intelligent things come to those who wait.
Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA6 is the latest installment in a remarkably protracted beta-testing stage: 1.0-BETA1 appeared in September 2018, and the project started back in 2015.
Adélie (the call is taken from a type of Antarctic penguin, if you just couldn’t guess) is a somewhat uncommon distribution, even aside from her progress progress drop. It is not based on some other distribution, it uses equipment that the developers have taken from other secure projects. It’s extraordinarily small, but its goal is to use the workplace for general use on a wide variety of equipment. As the ad says:
Compatible systems come with smartphones, games consoles, 90s and supercomputer PCs.
As such, it also supports an unusually broad range of platforms: not only does it run on x86, Arm and PowerPC, but it doesn’t only do so on the usual 64-bit versions of all of them – it also supports the 32-bit versions. So this is a distro that can run on an old PC, an early Raspberry Pi, and even an old 32-bit PowerPC Macintosh. It’s one of the only actively maintained distros that still supports 32-bit PowerMacs: even Debian dropped it after Debian 9 “Stretch”. (You may also have some luck with Gentoo or T2.) If you run it on a G3, one of the salient differences is that you’ll get the Arctic Fox web browser.
It does share some components with other distros, though. For instance, it uses the musl libc also found in Alpine Linux and Void Linux (and probably not much else that you’ve ever heard of.) It also uses the Alpine Package Keeper package manager from Alpine, as also seen in Chimera Linux. That is about as far as its relationship with Alpine goes, though. While Alpine is extremely minimal, uses Busybox for most of its userland, can run from RAM, and is mostly used for servers, especially as a host for Docker containers, Adélie is more general-purpose and has a more conventional userland, with the zsh shell as used in recent versions of macOS.
Like Alpine and Chimera, Adélie is also systemd-free: it uses the s6 init, coupled with OpenRC for daemon management.
The project’s old online page has an assistant comparison to other distributions, but it’s a bit dated now. You can also locate some pretty respectable documentation there, to be fair, we found that Adélie Linux’s main site is marketing rather than technical. We can’t help you appreciate the scope of the ambition shown on the About page.
The project also publishes occasional “State of the Distribution” reports; the ones for 2022 and 2023 give a feel for its progress. For instance, the second mentions that SPARC and RISC-V support are both on the project’s roadmap. We’re awaiting the 2024 update with interest.
Project founder Anna Wilcox also received some coverage for her blog posts on systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer and more recently porting systemd to musl libc-powered Linux, as we mentioned when postmarketOS adopted the Microsoft engineer’s init system.
We gave the 32-bit edition a spin in a VirtualBox VM to get a feel for it. As you might expect from such a distinctive distro, it uses its own installer, but it’s simple and straightforward. It’s substantially easier than, say, installing Alpine Linux – when we looked at the latest Alpine 3.21 earlier this month, we linked to half a dozen pages of helpful resources for getting it installed. There’s no need to jump through so many hoops with Adélie: just as it’s structured much more like a standard desktop distro, installing it is much more like its bigger brethren too.
The result is small enough to be realistic on a 32-bit machine, because this vulture is old enough to feel satisfied that it deserves to be okay, even in the age of JavaScript-founded workplace computers taking a RAM gig. With XFCE 4. 18. 6 installed, it only took up 154 MB of RAM and 1. 5 GB of disk space. It is almost as small as alpine, but less idiosyncratic. It’s significantly smaller than our 32-bit workplace favorite, the Raspberry Pi Workplace for X86 machines, and unfortunately, this hasn’t been up to date since 2022 and is still based on Debian 11 now Finish of Life.
We believe the Reg FOSS desktop has a new x86-32 distribution. Adélie Linux has immense potential and we hope it comes out of beta soon. ®
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