Reborn OS 2022.11.13 - Observations, contd.
I used Add/Remove Software (actually, Octupi) to start me off with some essentials, then set out to see whether I could get my setup text files from my NAS. It doesn't look like the file manager is interested anything that might be on the network. I'll try to install Thunderbird, and use it to fetch the content I need from a recent email.
Since the text in the Console was way too small to work with on this 1920x1080 HD screen, I installed Terminology, which usually makes it easy to adjust the text size with Ctrl+mouse wheel. Not so with this distro, though. Holding Ctrl down and moving the mouse wheel does nothing. I was able to adjust settings, though, but at present the text is even smaller than it was on the default Console. A quick check of the Console menu, though, showed me that it's very easy to increase the text size there. I hope the change is persistent. (Added later: no, it's not.)
With /etc/fstab modified, and nfs-utils installed, I created the necessary mount points in /mnt. Then I issued a mount -a command, and the NAS shares were indeed mounted. I listed the contents of the ISOs share in order to confirm that. Yet this file manager-- just called Files -- didn't even list the shares that by now exist, let alone let me access them.
I've mentioned before that my NAS is very important to me, and why that is, but it may not matter to other users, so I'm going to go ahead and make my remaining observations based on that assumption. My NAS will not be needed at all.
This version of Reborn loads and enables only 11 unit files upon startup, which is very respectable. So it loads and exits not quite as fast as Solus does it, but it's very much faster than any other distro I've examined. Except for Solus, 20 unit files has been the lowest number I've seen, and that's rare.
CONCLUSION
Installation and configuration of Thunderbird and Vivaldi proceeded without incident, so I ended up with a virtual machine that I could have used as a daily-driver, at least insofar as email and web browsing is concerned. Reborn OS doesn't include any office applications by default, although I'm sure that LibreOffice could be installed from the repository. I wasn't able to continue with exposing my NAS shares through the provided file manager, but that wouldn't matter to most users. (The file manager was never called anything but Files, so I have no idea which one it was. It didn't look at all like Dolphin, though, the one I'm most accustomed to.)
Overall, Reborn OS is an odd mixture of good and bad features. Themeistas won't be pleased with the fact that Budgie only provides a single theme, and even when the Dark theme setting is turned ON, it does nothing. Everything is very white, like the apps in this image.
Only the Console appears dark, but that's a special case, as it's controlled differently. Yet other features were very well done, in mostly small ways, even compared with Solus. Here's a bit more data from my sysinfo macro.
Overall, I think I could be quite happy if I were forced to abandon Solus and use Reborn OS as a daily-driver. All except for that bit about no dark theme. I don't plan to examine any of the many other DEs that it supports right now, but if I were going to use it for an extended time, I'd want to install it with KDE Plasma. Hopefully, it's on that list of DEs that the installer displays, and the theming there is a bit more sophisticated than what I found here.
This concludes my exploration of Reborn OS. I'm glad that I've had a chance to work with a newer version than the last time. It's fast, responsive, has a huge repository available, and for the most part, it's very well done. I'll keep my VM available for a while, in case anyone has questions about it that I haven't answered here.