Why are some people so keen to write or to make videos about almost nothing? Much Ado About Oreon. It’s summer time. Slow news. Nothing spectacular happens if not for the security issues that are patched. The Linux distros do what they kept doing in the last about 15 years, meaning they die or become irrelevant. The big bucks don’t care about Linux on the desktop or Linux for the gamers. They only care about servers, virtual machines, containers. Sure thing, many distros are usable on PCs and laptops, even the “enterprise-grade” ones such as the RHEL clones.

But Oreon?

A fresh crap.

As the French police stereotypically used to say in some old movies: “Circulez, il n’y a rien à voir!”

From the website:

The operating system designed for anyone.

That’s completely bullshit. Being RHEL-based, it has a lot of limitations, even with RPM Forge and EPEL enabled. Here’s what I had to do to make AlmaLinux KDE satisfactory. Also, with the antiquated 5.14 kernel, it can’t even detect my Wi-Fi!

Oreon doesn’t fucking care to propose ELRepo kernels.

Oreon is gaming ready!

Thanks to the work from our team, we were able to port the proper packages and dependencies to provide full gaming support to Oreon. You may have use WINE or Proton as your compatibility layer for some games, but that’s okay because it works! You can use multiple game launchers such as Lutris, Steam, Bottles, and more.

Oh, by “everyone” they meant gamers.

Oreon is aimed to add all the missing packages and fix all the present problems that other Enterprise Linux distributions have, one of the biggest being WINE 32-bit and 64-bit application support. Try comparing another Enterprise Linux distribution to Oreon side-by-side and you will almost instantly tell a difference.

Oh, because nobody can install or rebuild WINE from upstream. EL9 (hence AlmaLinux) only has an older WINE via EPEL, but Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has WINE 9.0 in its own repos, and WineHQ has wine-staging_9.14~noble-1_amd64.deb if someone needs the latest shit.

As for fixing “all the present problems that other Enterprise Linux distributions have,” I wonder which are those problems, and what’s their list of Enterprise Linux distros. Is Ubuntu LTS an Enterprise Linux? Either way, I’m happy that these problems are fixed in Oreon. Provided that all you need is GNOME. With a Windows-like (or KDE-like bottom panel). I’m sure this fixes all the problems anyone might have had!

Is Oreon just a customized clone of AlmaLinux?

No. Oreon is here to make the Enterprise Linux world better by making it more suitable for home and desktop purposes. This is done with the help of our development team and the way we “port” the packages and dependencies that never were included in RHEL based OSes to Oreon. In simpler words, Oreon lies upon the Enterprise Linux world by making compatibility and usability more flexible for desktop use cases.

It’s a fucking clone, that’s what it is!

From the Download page, a table compares the two editions. Desktop Standard versus Desktop Business+ (preinstalled software):

  • Desktop Standard has Lutris.
  • Desktop Business+ has Docker, LibreOffice, Keylime.
  • Both have: Flathub, Firefox (WTF, how could it not have been?), EPEL (big deal), GIMP, Inkscape (yeah, sure), WINE, RPM Fusion (certainly).

Mamma mia, de jamais vu!

This is ridiculous. “Business” people don’t use Docker; software developers do.

But let’s inspect their sources and their repo. So:

  • A WINE 9.1 build (EPEL has 8.0).
  • A completely useless firefox-115.7.0. AlmaLinux has 115.14.0, because this is the last version of this branch of Firefox ESR. So the Firefox version people should use is the one from AlmaLinux. What the fuck are they doing with their version?! Why did they fork it? Couldn’t they just masturbate instead?
  • GNOME shell customization (to have a bottom panel à la Windows or KDE)
  • Anaconda customizations.
  • Some minor, useless stuff.

Then, it’s completely retarded to have two “editions” just for such minor differences!

Beyond that comparative table, the download page has some Release details, such as:

Nouveau, AMD, and Intel drivers out of the box.

They did nothing for the Intel drivers. Then, I know nothing about Nvidia, but why nouveau? Incidentally, xorg-x11-drv-nouveau existed in EL8, but not in EL9; I wonder why (the Debian/Ubuntu name is xserver-xorg-video-nouveau). I don’t see anything in their repo, so I suppose it’s from AlmaLinux, but I just don’t know the name of the fucking package.

But RPM Fusion offers the (supposedly better) proprietary Nvidia drivers, except that if you need CUDA, you should install the official drivers. And ELRepo also has kmod-nvidia. Literally, if I need a PhD to understand what I should install to use NVidia with Linux (nouveau just worked in Fedora 35, the only time that I tried it), I’d rather not use it. Apparently, amdgpu also comes from the official AMD repo. What a mess. I complained that FreeBSD’s hardware support is almost like in 1996 (mutatis mutandis), but Linux is too as bad as it was in 2006, if not worse.

Full uEFI support.

They did absolutely nothing for that. Everything is UEFI these days, how could AlmaLinux only have supported BIOS?!

NTFS filesystem support.

Oh, my, installing ntfs-3g from EPEL is such rocket science! Also, if the kernel weren’t that old, starting with 5.15 there’s ntfs3 in the kernel (not that I’d recommend it, because I don’t).

What’s this thing good for?

Oh, wait, this download would fail, because the kernel 5.14 cannot detect my MT7663-based Wi-Fi! No problemo, it comes with valuable software.

There are loads of “distros” nobody writes about, et pour cause! Distrowatch only lists about 200 living and 500 dead ones, but there are many more. It’s just that they’re not proper distros, but pathetic attempts at getting the glory of “Look, ma, I made a distro!”

You made nothing. You wasted your time, and not only yours.