Nate Drake puts this distribution through its paces – is Drauger a gaming dragon or just a plain drag?
In Norse mythology, draugrs are undead warriors with a penchant for the blood of the living. Skyrim players will also know they’re a common foe you encounter when dungeon-crawling, so developer Thomas Castleman, a keen player, named this OS accordingly.
One typo later, Drauger OS was made available in 2018. It’s based on Ubuntu LTS (in this case Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish) and is supposedly optimised for gaming.
The main website’s About page is also very clear on what Drauger is not: if you’re thinking of installing Drauger as your daily driver, you’ll be disappointed. There’s no preinstalled email client, office suite, BitTorrent client or any apps you’d need when normally using Ubuntu.
Previous versions of Drauger used the xanmod kernel, which is ideal for gaming, but this iteration apparently uses a version that is compiled in-house. It would be more correct here to say “versions” as Drauger uses kernel 6.2.9 in the live environment but switches to version 6.6.11 once installed.
Post-install, this triggered a kernel panic in our test virtual machine, which we resolved by rebooting and choosing 6.2.9 from Drauger’s Advanced Boot Options.
On first login, you’ll notice Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop environment has been swapped out for Xfce, along with a dark Nocturn GTK3 theme. We were impressed by the Drauger welcome guide, which walks you through various sections of the desktop.
This includes a whistle-stop tour of the panels at the top, left and bottom of the screen. The left bar contains launchers for some of the preinstalled apps, including Steam and the Synaptic package manager. Web browsing is handled by the Flatpak version of Firefox (v110.0.1), which can be launched from here.
In the live environment, we felt this placement was a design flaw, as it eclipsed desktop icons like Home and Trash, but these had vanished post-install.
The bottom panel allows switching between virtual desktops, though we found it hard to distinguish from the default wallpaper. Luckily there are six alternatives. If you are willing to risk kernel panic and proceed with setup, Drauger ships with its own System-installer. The interface
