Taking advantage of being at home today, I dd’ed my spare pendrive with Evolve OS. To be fair, I’m a bit late in review writing this time. Evolve OS Beta 1 got released on 26 January and I scheduled a trial the same night. However, I got caught up with work and other distractions came along.

Evolve OS is one of the distributions that remain in my loop of trials. Its project leader is Ikey Doherty, the master-mind behind Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). He later created SolusOS but the project got discontinued. Evolve OS came afterwards, built from scratch, picking up the good work of other open source projects along the way. Ikey made Evolve OS mostly for his “own use”, let’s call it a hobby but that’s a pretty nice hobby we could say.

Evolve OS comes with a sleek desktop called “Budgie”. It’s built on the Gnome 3 codebase and retains the old-school environment of having a menu, a task panel etc. I like it that way.

Ikey’s work is always commendable. I like his ideas since the LMDE days, all through SolusOS and now Evolve OS. The desktop looks neat without much clutter.

I tried Evolve OS without installation. The live session was fine for me on my Acer Aspire notebook. I encountered no issues graphic-wise neither any glitches with my WiFi. These are where Linux distros usually hit the most. It neither kicks my battery life like an angry bull. I am happy with a first experience :-)

Its software center is based on the PiSi package management system from the Pardus Linux project.

At the moment of trial the software center didn’t hold myriad of packages but had just the minimum that one needs to be up and connected. The update section notified of 14 packages to be updated including Firefox, GIMP, OpenSSL, Linux Kernel etc.

Until a stable release I’m not sure of putting Evolve OS on a physical machine for daily use but I am definitely putting it in a virtual machine for some bug hunting.