I was talking with a friend of mine about Linux distributions, and he asked me if I had ever heard of Titan Linux, to which I said no. He told me that he recently read an article about it, praising it for being a great custom build of Debian Stable… so I had to try it out for myself!
When I got to the site’s homepage, I found it nice to look at and well organized, with the various download options easily noticeable. Getting your hands on the ISO was easy. I also loved the inclusion of their linked GitHub and GitLab directly on the front page.
So within minutes I had my handy USB drive ready to go and I was ready to get started in the live environment.
My specs:
- Ryzen 5 3500X
- 32GB DDR4 3200Mhz
- AMD Radeon 6900XT
- 2x 1080P Display + 1x 21:9 1440P Display
- Audio via DAC/Amp combo unit plugged in via USB-C
So I booted into the live environment, but then got a long phone call and walked away from my PC. When I came back, I forgot I hadn’t installed yet, and started clicking, exploring, and testing things…and even on that little unnamed 8GB thumb drive from 10 years, the system flew so fast that I didn’t notice until I saw the install icon on the desktop…oops.
Facility
Installing Titan Linux uses the Calamares install utility, not the one you usually find in Debian – and I think that’s great. Calamares is my favorite OS installer to date, and it worked as well as usual for me this time around. It was just a few moments to choose the drive I wanted, and to replace the existing Ubuntu installation that was there, and the installation began. I will say that the installation took a few minutes longer than some other systems I’ve used over the past couple of years; but it wasn’t too slow or anything, maybe 10-15 mins max to install on this SSD.
Software and features included
When I was browsing the menu items in Titan Linux, I was surprised at how minimal it was, and it thrilled me. Another interesting thing to note is that although Titan Linux uses KDE Plasma for its desktop environment, not all installed applications are the KDE tools you would expect. For example, the image viewer is LXImage, from LXQT. However I support these changes as they seemed completely in line with the theme and style of Titan Linux and it felt very much like a custom setup that someone spent time finding good choices for the system rather than just rely on faults or old-faithful ones.
Another interesting and really impressive feature of Titan Linux is the “Titan Toolbox” menu item. Inside are various utilities and tools that I’m sure many will find useful. Some examples are:
- Button to restart network service
- Button to clear swap (first time I’ve seen this so readily available, and something more in distros should include a button out of the box I think!)
- Terminator app (turns your mouse into a skull and crossbones killing app. Click and POOF)
- “Extra Software” application that opens a terminal application with easy access to web browsers, Office, encrypted DVD support, hypervisors and AppImage launchers, all easy to install without needing to open the app. ‘Discover’ app store included with the system.
- Titan Tweak Tool with the ability to modify the aggressiveness of your swap.
- Many, many others.
Performance
This system was extremely fast, but used a bit more resources than expected – but next to nothing.
With Firefox open with three tabs (Ghacks, Google, Titan Linux homepage), LibreOffice Writer, LXImage open in white, Dolphin open, and System Monitor open, my CPU averaged 4-6% but spiked randomized up to 12% quite frequently, and I was using 3GB of RAM.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I love Titan Linux and think I could use it for a while. I haven’t used Debian in ages, and this custom setup with a nice mostly KDE environment and some powerful tools created by the devs (there are only two of them, so kudos to them) really impressed me, so I’ll see how I like it as a daily driver for some time.
NOW YOU: Have you ever used Titan Linux? What about Debian? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Summary
Article name
A look at Titan Linux — Custom Debian Stable
The description
A review of the Titan Linux distro, its features, and general thoughts on the distro.
Author
Mike Turcotte-McCusker
Editor
Ghacks.net
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