Today we’ll look at Redcore Linux 2102, codenamed “Polaris.” It’s a Gentoo-based live-installable distribution that aims to bring Gentoo’s power to home users.
Like Gentoo, it is a rolling release, but unlike Gentoo, Redcore Linux provides more current software than Gentoo by using the Gentoo testing repositories as its package base.
Redcore Linux is not a very popular Linux distro, with a small development team behind it. Probably not too many people have heard of it. It’s been around for a while – in November, Redcore Linux will be five years old.
The Redcore Linux devs team is strongly focused on a few goals. They are not trying to be all things to all people like so many other Linux distributions are trying to be.
Instead, they are trying to make it easy to install Gentoo-based Linux distribution that ships by default with the KDE Plasma desktop. Redcore Linux targets casual desktop users and, to some extent, even power users.
Redcore Linux 2102 uses the Calamares graphical installer that most Linux distributions use these days. There is only one difference – the installation does take a while. In other words, the installation process is a little longer than in Manjaro, for example.
Redcore Linux 2102 “Polaris”
Redcore Linux 2102 release is mostly focused on polishing and fixing bugs so that you won’t find many exciting new features inside.
Above all, over 1300 packages have been updated since the previous 2021 “Onion” release, the stable version of which was released earlier this year. On top of that, the Redcore devs also rebuilt the whole repository massively.
The new version ships with the latest Linux kernel, 5.14.10, as default. In addition to, LTS Linux kernels 5.10.71 and 5.4.151 are also available in the repository. Among other things, now the distro also has better Nvidia driver support.
On the desktop side, Redcore Linux 2102 brings KDE Plasma 5.22.5 and KDE Gear 21.08.1 to its users. Furthermore, it’s important to note that Xwayland, a client under Wayland for backward X compatibility, is now a standalone package.
Finally, to add that Chromium replaces Firefox as the default web browser in Redcore Linux 2102.
You can visit the project’s website to learn more about Redcore Linux distribution.
Download
You can obtain the latest release of the installation ISO file from the project’s download page. Users can write the Redcore Linux 2102 ISO to the USB drive with the dd tool or by software such as Etcher or Ventoy.
