Bluestar Linux 6.0.12 Plasma - Conclusion
Obviously, my plan to use the Bluestar VM for at least the rest of the day didn't survive my first meeting with the enemy. Sadly, I'm going to pack it in now, but first I'll leave just a few more comments.
The Desktop
There was a huge novelty factor when I first saw it, and I was impressed with how many features were installed on the desktop itself. But that turns out to be a hassle when you try to use an application full-screen. With most KDE installation, especially when Guest Additions are installed, I can use an application at virtually full-screen, while still keeping the host's bottom panel visible at the bottom of the screen. Not so here. And obviously, using an application full-screen blocks all those fancy buttons, panels, and everything else. I couldn't even change from one virtual desktop to another without leaving full screen and moving the application.
Speaking of virtual desktops, the real reason I decided to discontinue this exploration is because I could click again and again on the desktop where Vivaldi was (so I could access the forum from there), but nothing happened. I was stuck on the desktop where I had been using Thunderbird. Those tiny desktop squares aren't very functional.
I'm sure, since it's KDE, that I could have somehow removed all that debris from the desktop, put a panel at the bottom, and made it look more like Solus Plasma, but that promised to be a lot of trouble.
Performance
When I was able to get to where I wanted to be, the system performed very well. As with Solus VMs, it was subjectively very "snapppy." In the VM, most things I did -- email, browsing, games -- appeared to perform nearly as well as they would on the laptop host, itself. That's what I'm accustomed to when I use Solus and a few other distros.
Bloat
As I mentioned earlier, there were 28 entries in the Internet sub-menu, and other categories were quite full as well. Someone must have worked hard to get all that software into the installer! From my virtual media manager:
Finally
Overall, I saw a lot of possibilities for this distro. Alot of its features were impressive, but that default desktop really sucks. There's no better way to put it. A desktop shouldn't be designed so as to make it hard to work with. Now, by special request, I'm going to include a neofetch image with this exploration.
