Linux distribution
Nate Drake discovers the new kid on the block, SDesk, including shiny toys such as Wayland and a brand new browser.
S Desk is one of the newest versions of Linux we’ve ever reviewed. The current edition (2024.01.26) is only the second stable release since December 2023.
Still, it has some impressive credentials, given that its creator Steve is also the author of the Blue programming language. According to the main website, Blue is “cross platform, portable, memory safe, small and reliable, with a fast and efficient compiler”, so we expected great things from SDesk.
As we were browsing the site, we were impressed to see that there’s a basic setup guide, as well as more information on Blue and the Swirl browser. However, we struggled to find any information about SDesk’s system requirements. In the end, we used trial and error with our virtual machine settings to land on the specs you can see on the left.
SDesk is based on Arch Linux and uses the Gnome desktop. Given that most major distros are only taking their first tentative steps with Wayland, we’re delighted to see that SDesk defaults to Wayland sessions.
No live performance
Booting up the 2GB ISO, there’s only an option to install SDesk rather than try it in live mode. Fortunately, setup is handled by the intuitive Calamares installer.
This is covered in the SDesk online documentation but more experienced Linux users can carry out more complex tasks, such as manual partitioning. There’s also support for encrypting the system partition.
The install process took less than three minutes, and upon checking, we found SDesk’s footprint was surprisingly light, taking up less than 8GB.
The email client is Geary, while productivity is managed by the latest LibreOffice version. The default Dash also contains Gnome’s Music and Calendar.
The default web browser is Swirl, an original creation of Steve’s, the main developer of SDesk. On firing it up, we noted that it seems to be built with privacy in mind, given that it uses the DuckDuckGo search engine by default. It also has features for blocking tracking cookies and naturally incorporates incognito mode.
The SDesk website describes Swirl as “lightweight, powerful, fast and beautiful” and says it
