The Elive distro’s integration of the Debian Linux base and the Enlightenment desktop is a powerful combination. Together, they offer a unique computing platform that is powerful and flexible.
Elive is not like most Linux distributions today. It does not have a team of workers supporting multiple desktop offerings cranking out frequent upgrades each year. It also does not have a thriving community.
In fact, Elive is one of a few Linux distros that aggressively asks for donations in order to download the installation ISO file. You can get the download without donating, but the process requires you to verify your email address and wait for the download link.
Elive first appeared in January 2005. The second stable version came in 2010. Eight years later the third stable version arrived, version 3.04.
Developer Samuel F. Baggen announced the release of version 3.05 on April 29. It is based on Debian 7 “Wheezy,” with a customized Enlightenment 17 desktop.
The customization is key to what gives Elive the edge over the few other distros running the latest version of Enlightenment, which is E22. However, this latest Elive version is likely the last update in the Elive 3 series.
The developer is focused on the next release, which will be based on Debian 10 “Buster.” That release could be well in the future, though, because donations from users have not been sufficient to support the developer’s continued efforts so far.
The silver lining is that this latest Elive release is updated with some of the internal improvements Baggen developed for the next version of Elive. So this latest release provides an early look at what may be coming next.
Elive is a fast and very configurable Linux OS that has an unusually pleasing appearance. It is designed to run fast on older computers with more modest hardware specs. It is blazingly fast on newer computers with more memory and better graphics circuits.
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Elive is very light on resources, and pretty fast on my Dual Core HP laptop. Beside that, it has a beautiful interface. So far so good for me.
Thank you! I really enjoyed reading this very well made review! 🙂 🙂
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. Linux is a great OS, but there are too many fly-by-night distros promoting themselves, or some of their users are promoting them, as the next big for "new" users. I think they are also manipulating Distrowatch’s page hit system to make their distro seem more popular than it really is. They all seem to have their own desktop environment also, which is usually just a slightly unsupported tweak of GNOME. They claim their distros are "easier to use", but really they are just inflicting their narrow view of what "easy" is on their users. They are making switching to Linux confusing and harder, not easier. We as a community need to call these guys out and get them to quit. I would NEVER recommend an Enlightenment based distro to a new user. I would also never recommend a distro that limits what a new user can do with their system. New users need "training wheels", not unnecessary restrictions. I dislike Elementary, BTW.
You are certainly right about DistroWatch. The ratings there are as manipulated as the movie equivalents on IMDb. Worse still many users, especially new users who are unaware about how Google works think DistroWatch is some sort of official Linux body. I quite liked Elementary but only the past versions where you could easily unlock the closed features and add Elementary Tweak and the Super Wingpanel although I never found Pantheon to be that stable. The fact no other distro uses this is probably why. No doubt there must be some community spins with this DE but these are likely to be as stable as a Sunday jelly.