Releax OS review

by Jordan (sysdfree community member)

Finally I managed to setup a Releax OS usable installation, thanks to the support of the dev, a very nice and helpful guy.

First look: very beautiful, colorful xfce desktop, the system is based on openRC as init, elogind and glibc. Just another distro? Maybe, but at least it has its own package installer with a front-end (a software center called Bazaar) and an unusual specific path where apps are installed (the “apps” folder, something like Gobo Linux). However, this distro still needs lot of polishing.

The installer is buggy, I chose US English and my time zone but I ended up with an Asian localization and IN English as default language. On every reboot lightdm tried to add a new user, the suggested fix was to reinstall the desktop manager. A lot of broken symlinks are scattered everywhere, I just managed to fix one (unsurprisingly, “localtime” file in /etc). Another unpleasant detail is a broken rendering of unicode symbols: the bottom dock-like panel icons shows a preview thumbnail with an unicode box instead of the “X” close button.

Thunar was unable to mount ntfs partitions, even after installing ntfs-3g, the dev told me that I had to create a specific symlink to get it working. Finally, the choice of the packages in the software center was kind of questionable: the Chinese commercial office suite WPS, spyware like Steam and Discord…not to mention the presence of WSL files in their downloads page.

Only time will tell if releax os won’t just be a short-lived funny student’s experiment, but some current choices would definitively cut out the most hardcore Linux users, though I understand that they could help a more graceful transition from Windows.