I recently installed and tested a relatively new GNU/Linux distribution called SuperX “Darwin”, originated in India. It is based on Ubuntu and has a KDE interface. The live image started with an impressive boot time. And the installer was simple.

Here begins the real story. After a reboot I was greeted with LightDM. For those who aren’t aware of display managers(dm), lightdm provides a simple, fast and yet very customizable login manager. Using lightdm instead of KDM is undoubtedly wise if speed and simplicity is the prior concern.

I logged into the KDE 4.10 desktop with a soothing welcoming tune inspired from Indian folk music and was amazed to see an uncluttered and polished KDE desktop after so long time. And within a few moments I found it was not any other normal KDE desktop but a highly customized one. The usual KDE launcher was replaced with the SuperX Application Launcher with bold icons and a few KDE customization options were locked by default.

I went into exploring the launcher and found SuperX had a bunch of essential softwares and tools pre-installed. Libreoffice, vlc media player, xchat IRC client, GIMP(Advanced Image Editing), Blender(3D Animation) are to name some. I also found Firefox and Chromium web browsers come out of the box with SuperX along with all the essential browser and media plug-ins. Also native Indian language support comes out of the box, nice.

Unlike many other Ubuntu based distributions, SuperX has it’s own software repositories(along with Ubuntu repos) and thus the SuperX Application Center is rich with more than 30,000 softwares ready to be downloaded and installed with a single click.

SuperX provides a Global Menu on their KDE desktop. Also the icons/shortcuts on the Desktop and on the launcher are renamed to better guide the new users. Like Chromium has been renamed Google Chromium, Kate(Text Editor) has been renamed Note Pad, nice idea.

I must also mention that the SuperX artwork team has done a brilliant job with all the SuperX branded wallpapers along with the branding in Libreoffice(this was one of the surprises).

The overall look and customization is impressive. I also found that xchat connects to the SuperX channel when you first launch it.

Finally, I give SuperX a high five for their effort to make GNU/Linux distributions a bit more NooB Friendly and easy to use. Cheers.