Hymera Open review

“Installation: Hymera features a very beautiful graphical
installer. It is a slightly retooled version of a pre-5.0 Debian
installer. Most aspects of the installer are automated. While that
makes the installation process faster, it has its drawbacks. For
example, you can’t choose your keyboard layout and timezone. That
wouldn’t be such a big deal if the installer accurately detects
them, but it does not. GRUB is the boot loader, installed by
default in the MBR. No option to install it anywhere else

“Per disk partitioning, the installer offers two options –
Guided Partitioning and Manual. If you opt for Guided Partitioning,
the installer creates one main partition, /, and a partition of
about 1.5 GB for swap. The default file system for / is ext4. Other
available journaling file systems are ext3, reiserfs, jfs, and xfs.
There is support for soft-RAID, but not for LVM and disk
encryption.

“Desktop: GNOME is the preferred desktop environment. This is
not one of those bland configurations of the GNOME desktop
environment that you find on other GNOME-based distros, but the
most beautiful desktop configuration (GNOME or KDE) and design I
have ever seen on any Linux or BSD desktop distribution. The
artwork is very professional, stylish, and very, very visually
appealing. The visual is further enhanced by the placement of
screenlets to the right side of the desktop. Screenlets, like
SuperKaramba, are small, interactive applications written in
Python. They provide basic information about your PC and allow you
to perform very simple tasks on your desktop. They are also eye
candy.”

Complete
Story