First Pure Lebanese Linux Distro (XeroLinux)

TechXero

Hey all !

I have been maintaining an Arch based Linux distro called XeroLinux for past almost 3 years. I thought I would share it here. I am from here, Beit Mery to be exact. I love it coz it's better than Windows in every way.. Freedom to do whatever you want !

Link here
https://xerolinux.xyz

Try it online to see what it looks like
https://distrosea.com/select/xerolinux/

Joe

This is very cool TechXero!

I ran a live CD on QEMU. Tried to run an install, it asked for more RAM. I'll give the install a shot after work.

At first sight, the distro is very polished, it looks fantastic and the UI is very consistent. The community seems pretty active and it looks like the distro is moving fast.

Even on a live CD I could appreciate a few very nice touches:

Consistent themes and visual identity. It even has a custom theme for GRUB
Nice logo. It's pretty, but also conveys that it's just Arch
Default background image is gorgeous
First boot immediately opens with a big fat button "QEMU/VMWare Resolution Fix"
The systeminfo dump when opening a terminal is very pretty
KDE seems to be working fine

In general, I get the feeling that a lot of solid work has gone into the visual identity.

Off the bat, what I don't like as much:

Very resource hungry. It wants a lot of RAM. It also seems to be geared towards GPU users, gamers, and other high performance use cases.
By default the bash rc files (bashrc, profile and others) do too much. Worst yet, .bashrc actually aliases some of the trusted unix utilities

That 2nd one is a bit of a turn off for me. If I want to run exa, I run exa, not ls. If I type wget I don't want to run wget -c. It feels like the distro is sneakily trying to change my expectations, which may come off as a QoL improvement, but also may end up creating troubleshooting sessions from hell in the future.

All in all a very nice effort, looking forward to attempt an install later.

Joe

Oh I also enjoyed the inclusion of Flatpaks. We need more flatpaks.

TechXero

@Joe

Thanks buddy, but a few things.

1- It's not targeted to newbs, with it being based on Arch an more "Technical" base some knowledge is needed.
2- I set it require a minimum of 3gb of RAM for a reason, KDE is not the lightest out there. Targeted for customization.
3- The aliases can be modified, I included them for convenience, it's easier to remember 'update' vs `sudo pacman -Syyu`
4- I just finished Wayland+nVidia support for next release. Also not necessarily for gamers it's for everyone.
5- Support is limited to things I included, anything related to Drivers, Hybrid setups is on the user to basically RTFM..
6- Consitency is the name of the game, all my rices are like that, you can choose others.. Just read github first.

exa is dead replaced by eza BTW.. Still my aliases work, for now. If you hate them just remove them, so far after 3 years no one has complained, on the contrary they all loved them.. It's a preference thing..

Thanks for the mini review though, we also have Gnome n XFCE spins available for a donation or can build for free using my tool if you are on Xero already.

P.S : If you install it do as the installer tells you to, as soon as you land on installed OS update and reboot, you will have at least 2gb worth of updates since ISO was released on the 2nd, and if you encounter any issues, there's always discord, link on the site. Also know that the packages I offer in my tool are but a handful, to see all and if you want a GUI package manager choose the one you like from the tool, under Package managers.. I recommend either Bauh or Pamac.. You already have Pacseek on the ISO run it from the tool, it supports Arch and AUR, for flatpaks you will need one of the 2 GUI I mentioned.. Enable Flatpak from settings/preferences..

Spins:
https://spins.xerolinux.xyz

Joe

Very interesting, glad you're moving to Wayland. And yes, KDE is a resource hog, I agree.

Still my aliases work, for now. If you hate them just remove them, so far after 3 years no one has complained, on the contrary they all loved them.. It's a preference thing..

Let me explain my issue with aliases.

I don't mind if my distro includes quality-of-life aliases. In fact, including things like this is actually useful.

alias ytv-best='yt-dlp -f '\''bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio'\'' --merge-output-format mp4 '

This is the type of aliases that add value to me. My issue is when aliases replace commands that I am in the habit of using every day. Looking at my shell on a live CD here are some of the main culprits I found:

alias cat='bat '
alias df='df -h'
alias free='free -mt'
alias info='sudo pacman -Si'
alias man='tldr'
alias wget='wget -c'

All of those are utilities that I use every day. The distro modifies them (worst is info, which traditionally in Unix refers to a very different utility than Pacman).

The workaround is simple. Users can either:

Remove the aliases from bashrc (and go hunt down all the different places in rc files where aliases might be defined)
Prevent alias expansion by using a backslash in front of the command name

These aliases aren't necessarily blockers. They're easy to work around. However they reveal a design philosophy that bothers me. The distro will liberally change the habits that I take for granted. I want a distro that gets out of my way and it seems to me like XeroLinux doesn't really prioritize this.

I was curious enough to check bashrc and found those aliases. What if I hadn't? What if I didn't know? What if I just ran df / and I kept getting sizes in human-readable format? I'd be googling furiously "HOW TO GET BINARY SIZES WITH DF", not realizing that my distro has aliased the executable.

It begs the follow-up question: what else has been modified? What am I really running? Philosophically, am I running the good ol' Linux that I know and love, or are there different things hidden under familiar names?

Distros are a very tricky thing. You know a distro does a good job if it gets completely out of your way. If I have to go hunt alias definitions, it's not out of my way, it's all up in my face.

Anyway, this is just my feedback as a very long time (grumpy) linux user. This is a small thing that bothered me. XeroLinux is definitely not the first distro to do stuff like this, and I guess a lot of users don't mind. And to be clear, I don't mean to take away from the effort and care put in this distro. It looks and feels fantastic and I am genuinely excited for the work you're doing on it. Keep it up and I'm excited to see what's coming next.

Joe

Another thing I appreciated is you using the website to advertise issues with latest packages integration (currently advertising an issue with Pipewire, good job).

here's always discord, link on the site.

I clicked on the website, "Invite Invalid". I'm not sure how Discord works (I'm really an old fart), but I didn't manage to join the server. Would love to, though :)

TechXero

While your feedback is welcome, that's exactly what makes "Custom Distros" well, custom, with choices made by the maintainer, in this case me, adding quality of life modifications. One has all the right to prefer other things or modify to one's liking. And with it being based on Arch, such curiosities are expected. So as you so eloquently put it, easy to modify, just delete bashrc file stock one will be re-created.

I made my own choices, and Xero reflects those. I hate typing n remembering full commands, I am old too 43 going on 44. So memory ain't that great. Also I am not a developer. I use what I learn from others. That's what I love about Linux, freedom of choice.. It's fun. If you are a Unix purist and knowledgeable enough you can always tweak Xero to fit your needs without issue. If you read the first page on the site it does state "It's not for everyone".. Setting expectations, also with the blurb on the download page. I would prefer it if newbs stayed well away, Xero is not a Distro that was made to hold everyone's hand, they are expected to know tuff and customize themselves to their liking. It's just a well optimized KDE base to start from, with enough tools to get up n running.

That being said, I tried Discord invite link and it works for me. You need to have an account and logged in.. Otherwise there's always Fosstodon (Twitter like but for FOSS) link too is on the site.

Just some FYI : Xero gets around 4000 Downloads/month if not more, cannot count Torrents.. No one had any issue with Aliases so far... As I said they love it..

yasamoka

Genuine question regarding aliases:

Should I expect, by default, a script that would run normally on every other distro that doesn't use aliases to common tools to end up breaking here? If so, do you expect developers to write scripts that work out-of-the-box on your distro?

TechXero

I have no idea what you just said. Everything runs normally on XeroLinux. Nothing is affected by my Aliases.

Joe

@yasamoka: it will depend on how you execute the scripts. Yes, if the scripts source the XeroLinux bashrc, they might break.

This being said, the existing aliases are not very likely to interfere with existing scripts:

info and man are interactive and unlikely to be used in a script
cat and ls will likely break, but again, should probably not be used in a script to begin with
wget -c is only changing the behavior of wget in case of previously interrupted download, also unlikely to be something used in a script

The only immediately problematic ones will be df and free, which will give you human-readable sizes when you may be expecting size in bits.

So statistically, you may go a long time before coming across an actual failure. On the other hand, when something statistically unlikely occurs, it makes it that much harder to troubleshoot.

To work around this problem there are 2 solutions:

Put backslashes in front of your commands in your script. That's a good practice that I've seen many do.
Execute your scripts from a non-interactive environment. The aliases in XeroLinux are defined in the bashrc which is only sourced by bash when launched in interactive mode

TechXero

Thanks for the information. all are valid points. Again since it's Arch one should have some Knowledge, aka not a complete n00b, so one should know that in that case they can either be modified/fixed or bashrc can be deleted stock one will be re-generated. So far in 3 years no one complained of any breakages..