Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up
Remarkably compact, remarkably cross-platform, remarkably long beta period
Beta 6 of Adélie Linux is arriving, just over six years after Beta 1 – but they do say that good things come to those who wait.
Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA6 is the latest installment in a remarkably protracted beta-testing stage: 1.0-BETA1 appeared in September 2018, and the project started back in 2015.
Adélie (the name is taken from a species of Antarctic penguin, if you couldn't guess) is a somewhat unusual distro, even aside from the slowness of its development progress. It's not based on any other distro, although it does use tools the developers have taken from some other projects. It's unusually tiny, but it aims at general-purpose desktop use on a surprisingly wide variety of hardware. As the announcement says:
Compatible systems include smartphones, game consoles, '90s-era PCs, and supercomputers.
As such, it also supports an unusually broad range of platforms: not only does it run on x86, Arm and PowerPC, but it doesn't only do so on the usual 64-bit versions of all of them – it also supports the 32-bit versions. So this is a distro that can run on an old PC, an early Raspberry Pi, and even an old 32-bit PowerPC Macintosh. It's one of the only actively maintained distros that still supports 32-bit PowerMacs: even Debian dropped it after Debian 9 "Stretch". (You may also have some luck with Gentoo or T2.) If you run it on a G3, one of the salient differences is that you'll get the Arctic Fox web browser.
Adélie is unique in a lot of ways, and that includes the installation program – but it's easy enough – click to enlarge
It does share some components with other distros, though. For instance, it uses the musl libc also found in Alpine Linux and Void Linux (and probably not much else that you've ever heard of.) It also uses the Alpine Package Keeper package manager from Alpine, as also seen in Chimera Linux. That is about as far as its relationship with Alpine goes, though. While Alpine is extremely minimal, uses Busybox for most of its userland, can run from RAM, and is mostly used for servers, especially as a host for Docker containers, Adélie is more general-purpose and has a more conventional userland, with the zsh shell as used in recent versions of macOS.
Like Alpine and Chimera, Adélie is also systemd-free: it uses the s6 init, coupled with OpenRC for daemon management.
The project's old website has a useful comparison with some other distros, but it is a little dated now. You can also find quite respectable documentation there, although to be honest, we found the main Adélie Linux site marketing-heavy rather than technical. We can't help but admire the breadth of ambition shown on the About page, though.
The project also publishes occasional "State of the Distribution" reports; the ones for 2022 and 2023 give a feel for its progress. For instance, the second mentions that SPARC and RISC-V support are both on the project's roadmap. We're awaiting the 2024 update with interest.
Project founder Anna Wilcox also received some coverage for her blog posts on systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer and more recently porting systemd to musl libc-powered Linux, as we mentioned when postmarketOS adopted the Microsoft engineer's init system.
We gave the 32-bit edition a spin in a VirtualBox VM to get a feel for it. As you might expect from such a distinctive distro, it uses its own installer, but it's simple and straightforward. It's substantially easier than, say, installing Alpine Linux – when we looked at the latest Alpine 3.21 earlier this month, we linked to half a dozen pages of helpful resources for getting it installed. There's no need to jump through so many hoops with Adélie: just as it's structured much more like a standard desktop distro, installing it is much more like its bigger brethren too.
The result is tiny enough to be realistically usable on a 32-bit machine, as this vulture is old enough to feel Linux jolly well ought to be, even in this age of Javascript-based desktops that take a gig of RAM. With Xfce 4.18.6 installed, it took a mere 154MB of RAM and 1.5GB of disk space. It's nearly as small as Alpine, but rather less idiosyncratic. It's considerably smaller than our previous 32-bit desktop favorite, the Raspberry Pi Desktop for x86 machines – and sadly, that's not been updated since 2022 and is still based on the now-end-of-life Debian 11.
We think the Reg FOSS desk may have a new favourite x86-32 distro. Adélie Linux has immense potential, and we hope that it gets out of beta some time soon. ®