SoylentNews

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

The developers that make Calculate Linux have a release announcement for us. The list of changes is significant and this release, coming half a year or so after the last rather than two years as the previous one did, looks like it may mark a change in how much work is going into this interesting distro.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Calculate Linux is Gentoo-based with optional binary packages^*, a distinct lack of all things systemd by default, an intriguing templating system^** for conf files of all sorts, and an installer that is not even remotely like the typical Gentoo install procedure^***.

Being Gentoo-based, it is of course rolling release. Its update system is Portage based with the standard tools but it does come with a couple wrapper scripts to make your life easier like 'cl-update' which is a single-command utility to update the system, 'cl-setup-video' for picking which video driver you prefer to use, and 'cl-kernel' for building customized kernels.

I found this distro about nine months ago and it took me about a month to decide that every bloody Linux box in the place needed to be running it. They have been ever since. I've no complaints and heartily recommend it over any systemd distro (yes, even Arch), over Slackware, over Devuan, and even over vanilla (if there is such a thing) Gentoo.

To be clear, this is a personal endorsement not a SoylentNews endorsement. If you have the room to spare, I highly recommend giving it a try in a VM for a while and seeing if it tickles your fancy. Installer images for it are available in the usual place.

^*Using the BINHOST feature of Portage and automatic or manual mirror selection. If you don't customize a package away from the default build options, you'll get a binary version for most packages. If you do or find a package without a binary build, it's typical Gentoo.

^**I've used it a few times but haven't remotely scratched the surface of what it's capable of, so I can't really go into detail on it.

^***It has a noob-usable GUI and takes maybe five minutes of your attention and half an hour with a decent network connection to download any updated packages instead of installing the ones from the image and then updating them.

Original Submission