Nate Drake finds blue is the colour, after firing up this intuitive and visually stunning Arch-based distro.
Bluestar Linux’s main goal seems to be to provide a user-friendly version of Arch Linux, on which it’s based.
Its SourceForge page puts this in more colourful terms, stating it’s “built with an understanding that people want … a solid operating system that provides a breadth of functionality and ease of use without sacrificing aesthetics”.
We mention SourceForge as, besides a rather active Facebook page, Bluestar stands alone in all the distros we’ve reviewed so far in not having a dedicated website. This is even more surprising given that successive stable versions have been released since 2016.
Still, if you do decide to download the weighty 5GB ISO from SourceForge, you can take the OS for a test spin in live mode. A lack of documentation makes it hard to gauge system requirements, though the ones listed (left) were adequate to run Bluestar in VirtualBox.
On first boot, users will notice that the desktop environment is KDE Plasma (v5.27.10).
We used the Application Launcher to launch the Info Center, where we discovered the OS also uses Qt (v5.15.12), KDE Frameworks (v5.115.0) and version 6.7.6-arch1 of the Linux kernel.
As stunning as the desktop is, Bluestar doesn’t offer a particularly intuitive way to view installed apps. You have to move your mouse to a glowing blue bar at the top of the desktop to view the top panel. However, we did manage to find a shortcut to the Application Launcher via hitting the Super key.
The OS ships with the colourful Latte dock, though as main developer Jeff notes on the Bluestar Facebook page, development on this has been patchy. Luckily, he offers full instructions on how to switch to the more mainstream Cairo dock using the Konsole terminal.
If you do proceed with setup, this is handled by Calamares, which unlike plain Arch, offers a much more intuitive way to automatically partition the hard drive, encrypt the system partition and customise the look.
Once Calamares launches, you are offered a choice of Basic, Desktop, DeskPro and Developer installations. SourceForge
