Linux distribution
Nate Drake crunches the numbers with Calculate Linux and finds it earns top marks for its excellent performance and features.
IN BRIEF
CLD makes the Gentoo experience much easier, offering desktop flavours and an intuitive installer. Default apps are thoughtfully selected but you need to be comfortable with the CLI to install more.
SPECS
CPU: 1.3GHz 64-bit Mem: 1GB HDD: 8GB Builds: x86_64
Calculate Linux has been around since 2007. The project website states it’s also backward compatible with its parent OS, which we assume to mean Calculate has full binary compatibility with Gentoo.
The website is, in fact, home to three main editions of Calculate. These include Calculate Directory Server (CDS), which can act as a domain controller. It is also capable of configuring Samba, mail, XMPP and proxy services. Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) is intended for advanced Linux users. It consists of a live CD with a build framework for creating a custom distribution.
Calculate Linux Desktop (CLD) is the workstation/client edition and is the focus of this review. There’s no single official desktop environment; users are offered a choice of flavours with Cinnamon, KDE, LXQt, Mate, Xfce. The system specs (right) are for the Cinnamon edition, which we used. The LXQt, Mate and Xfce editions require only 512MB of RAM.
After downloading the 3GB ISO, we booted the OS, only to hit a snag as we were prompted for the guest password. Luckily this was simply the word ‘guest’, which we entered to load the Cinnamon desktop.
We were particularly intrigued by this latest version of CLD (v20240401), given the announcement in the user forums in early April that the OS would be going release-free. In other words, Calculate’s nightly builds will officially become main releases, following a similar model to Arch Linux and Gentoo itself.
According to lead developer Alexander Tratsevskiy, this approach has a number of advantages, including that any time spent preparing new fixed releases can be better devoted to improving the OS, not to mention bleeding-edge updates. As version 20240401 was seemingly released before this announcement, we concluded it had just escaped this proclamation.
The Calculate Forum also includes links to the official wiki, which provides excellent introductory setup and configuration tutorials. It was here that we also learned that CLD supports installation to both USB drives and hard dis
