Snal Linux - Conclusion
It's with a heavy heart that I abandon this exploration of Snal Linux, because I really like much of which I've seen. Especially the i3 window manager, about which I intend to find out much more.
Eveerything I've seen so far leads me to believe that Snal is no different than any other USB "live" installation. That is, one can install software, and install extensions, and connect to a wireless network, but the next time you start the OS (from a USB key) you need to start back at the beginning and do all the configuration again. There may be some way to make it persistent, but if there is, I've been unable to find it.
A lot of the commands shown on the background (Super+ whatever) simply seem to do nothing, when you're running i3. And when you're not running i3, you can't see those commands. At first, I thought that perhaps they were designed to be run inside a terminal, but that doesn't do anything different. If I use Super+d to launch an app, and filter the list for "install," several choices are displayed, but selecting any of those and pressing Enter does nothing. So, I was unable to install it on my small laptop, despite the wiki's saying that it can be done. (The wiki says the Arch community won't support it, but I couldn't care less about that.)
On a hunch, I bailed out of i3 to a command prompt, and issued the command install --help from there. The result was a couple of pages of options for what seems to be a complex file copier. I couldn't figure out, in a reasonable time, how to express the source and the destination I needed in order to install from the USB key to the SSD in the laptop.
So, I think Snal Linux is an interesting phenomenon, but without being able to establish some persistence, all I've been able to do is start it up and think, "Hmmm ... that's cool." And by now, I've done enough of that.
And clicking on the Support link in the SourceForge project page simply says to refer to the wiki.
