Technoweb Tricks : SUPERX OS 2.1 "ADA"

ABOUT SUPERX OS

SuperX stands for "Simple, User friendly, Powerful,Energetic and Robust eXperience". SuperX is a Linux-basedcomputer operating system originally developed in Guwahati, the capital city of the state of Assam in India. SuperX uses a tweaked version of KDE and is aimed towards beginners, casual users and business looking for a well supported user-friendly Linux OS.

WHAT'S NEW IN SUPERX 2.1?

SuperX 2.1 “Ada” is a minor update to Darwin and contains mostly performance tweaks and updated software stack. This release is named after Ada Lovelace, one of the pioneers of computing, she is often described as world's first computer programmer. If you have installed Darwin and constantly updating it, you are probably running Ada at the moment as they have updated the packages few weeks ago but no downloadable ISOs were available then.

Minor Release (Continuation from Darwin): Starting SuperX 2.0 “Darwin” ,they adopted a whole new release model which differs fundamentally with previous 1.x releases. They are now going our their way, making a diversion from their upstream distribution. SuperX 2.1 is a way forward to that diversion.

SuperX still use Ubuntu codebase but starting from Darwin release, they only use the LTS versions and development is done on its solid foundation. But unlike other solid, stability concerned Linux OS, SuperX provide the latest user land software. They are keeping their core stable but will provide latest and greatest apps, all tested before its pushed to the users. One note, "latest" here doesn't mean bleeding edge. They provide relatively new versions of apps as compared to Ubuntu LTS provided that they clear all their tests. Tests includes KDE desktop integration, Stability and Usability etc..

User Experience: As an effort of enhancing user experiencing in Ada, they have removed certain software from the default selection that doesn’t play well with SuperX or if they have a very specialized audience which complements SuperX’s goal of being a general purpose/daily driver OS.
Major Applications removed from the default install are:

1. Firefox - Yes it is a great browser, but Chromium plays better with SuperX, especially when it comes to global menu integration.

2. Blender - Very specialized application, showcases the power of open source development. They removed it because the “real” use of this great software is limited to 3D designers/animators only.

Apart from this, they've updated KDE to 4.10.5, the final increment in the 4.10 series. KDE 4.11.x packages are still under testing.

32-bit edition: SuperX 2.0 Darwin was 64 bit only, but they promised to come up with a 32 bit version also. SuperX 2.1 is now available in both 32-bit (PAE) and 64-bit architectures.

WHAT'S LEFT OUT?

They said few weeks ago that they'll make a 'wrapper' script for SuperX that will allow users use package manager commands for non-Debian distros in SuperX. They've postponed it until next release due to some technical reasons.

KNOWN ISSUES

Plasma Theme “whiten” at times: Sometimes Plasma theme “whitens”, the transparency is gone and it doesn’t look good although no impact on performance is noticed. You can fix it by running “superx-theme-refresh” from the Terminal.