Oreon Lime R2 blends AlmaLinux with a bunch of extra tools and repositories, plus some helpful tweaks for the GNOME desktop. It's sort of akin to an LTS version of Fedora 34.
Amid legions of Debian, Ubuntu, and indeed Arch derivatives, the Oreon Project offers something different: A desktop-focused distro based on AlmaLinux. The result is a slightly odd mixture of older components and some helpful desktop tweaks and adjustments. If you have modern hardware and want the latest software, this isn't for you, but if you want to install and forget for years at a time, without doing much in the way of manual adjustments, it might appeal.
Being based on an enterprise distro inevitably means not having all the latest components, but we feel it's fair to expect that a meta-distro is at least based on the latest version of its upstream. Unfortunately, Oreon isn't. Oreon Lime R1 was released on the first day of this year, followed about six weeks later by R2, followed by updates in March, April, and May.
R2 is based on AlmaLinux 9.3, which appeared in November 2023, and back in April we looked at the beta of AlmaLinux 9.4, which was released a few weeks later. The underlying distro here is dated, and a fresh install needed 229 updates.
Saying that, the project has announced a big update that should be coming next month. Although it will apparently still be called R2, the announcement mentions kernel 6.10, which makes the September update sound like no mere point release. Such big changes would eliminate much of the appeal of an established, stable, RHEL 9-based OS. It seems to us that updating to the basis of AlmaLinux 9.4 should be the first priority here.
Oreon Lime R2 offers AlmaLinux and GNOME with a bunch of helpful additions and tweaks – click to enlarge
For now, though, after a full update we found kernel 5.14, GNOME 40.4.0, and Firefox 115.7.0 – which was released back in January. GNOME Shell is configured to run on Wayland, and comes with a few extensions pre-installed for a more Windows-like experience: Dash-to-Panel, Arc menu, and Blur my Shell.
The downloads page offers two different editions: Desktop Standard and Desktop Business+. Both come with Firefox, both GIMP and Inkscape, and WINE 9.1 preinstalled, plus Flatpak support. Both have the additional EPEL and RPM Fusion repositories enabled, which offer additional components, drivers, and other restricted extras. The Standard edition adds Lutris for gaming support, while the Business+ edition replaces Lutris with LibreOffice and Docker, and the rather odd addition of Keylime for TPM-based security. The choices are a little odd. We don't feel that Keylime is an especially useful extra, or that there's really sufficient demarcation here for two distinct editions; a single one could do both just fine.
- Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'
- Ubuntu 24.04.1 will be late, but fresher kernels are coming
- Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that
- Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works
The gaming support seems out of place for a stable distro based on old, tried-and-tested code. We also suspect that gamers will have more recent kit than what the now three-year-old kernel 5.14 will support well. They'd be better off with Fedora, or perhaps the gaming-focused Fedora remix Nobara. We looked at this in early 2022 and hit some glitches, but those were its early days and it's still in active development.
We tried Oreon Lime 9.3 R2 – we're not sure why the lengthy name – on VirtualBox. Mouse movement was sluggish and jerky until we installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions, after which all was smooth. By default, the disk is partitioned with Linux LVM, and the root partition is formatted with XFS. These things might make dual-booting tricky. The installer also configured a dedicated swap partition as well as ZRAM support. Simply enabling compressed swap would work better, we suspect. With DKMS support and the hypervisor tools, it took 8.3 GB of disk space and used 1.2 GB of RAM at idle.
After a full update, you still get GNOME 40 – but cutting-edge components are not what to expect from an enterprise distro – click to enlarge
In our opinion, Oreon's desktop layout looks much better than plain unaugmented GNOME. There's nothing here that you couldn't achieve if you started with any of the RHELatives and judiciously added repositories, drivers, GNOME extensions, and other components to get things working – and the end result might be a little more current too. However, knowing how to do that is the key part: It was being easier than Debian that led to Ubuntu's success, and subsequently, having a more familiar desktop than Ubuntu that led to Linux Mint thriving.
The core concept of Oreon is solid: Take a stable, long-term supported enterprise distro, and selectively add extra components to make it a more pleasant, and more usable, desktop OS. However, it seems to us that the project's developers have yet to agree on what audience it's targeting – or even on a coherent version numbering scheme. We are unconvinced by its efforts at gaming, security and development tools, Windows app support and so on.
Other, longer-established distros do such things better. We think Oreon would be better served by focusing on providing a minimal base desktop OS, and on top, adding much more current internet clients than the underlying enterprise distro offers – perhaps via Flatpak packages. We suspect that could appeal to folks who want familiar tools, current apps, plus a slow release cycle and nearly a decade of updates – in the Red Hat ecosystem and beyond. ®