App Grid

On the desktop, which rlxos finally lets you access after completing the tour through the special features, the upper edge remains empty at first. It is only after pressing the button on the far left of the taskbar that the familiar app grid view appears (Figure 5). If you only need the search mask, just click on the three dots bottom left. The bar contains six entries by default. If you have more apps open, it expands to the right and left when you mouse over the first and last visible entries. The system tray is on the far right. Further predefined add-ons can be enabled in the settings in the Extensions menu.

Figure 5: The app grid, which you may be familiar with from Gnome, can be reached by clicking on the icon with the nine dots located on the left in the taskbar.

The offered selection of preinstalled applications is typical of Gnome, although not as extensive as, say, Fedora or Ubuntu. For example, the Gnome Software application manager is missing, but it wouldn't really make much sense here. You will find at least one app for each of the usual application scenarios, such as browsing, music, videos, or image editing. For example, rlxos includes the Web browser, the Evolution mail and calendar app, the Totem video player, and the Shotwell photo manager. In addition, there are the system apps familiar from Gnome. As an init system, rlxos relies on systemd, and it uses kernel 5.8.

App Control

Rlxos has no graphical package manager. The appctl front end is available for the terminal and behaves much like Apt or DNF, accessing a repository with around 800 applications. However, you can also include third-party repositories [7], as revealed in the documentation. For example, you could choose the Nano editor, which is missing from the rlxos repo, instead of the preinstalled Vim. Table 1 lists the most important commands for operating appctl. You can access help for the commands by typing appctl in the terminal.

After installing a fresh rlxos, you will first want to check whether the system can be updated by typing

sudo appctl update

in a terminal (Figure 6). If, unlike my experience, an update is available, then execute the commands shown in the last two lines of Listing 1. You can decide at the next reboot whether you want to start the new or the old image.

$ sudo appctl update
$ sudo mount /run/initramfs/boot /boot --bind
$ sudo update-grub

Figure 6: Similar to updating on Debian, you can trigger an update on rlxos with the built-in package manager PKGUPD via appctl.

Alternatively, to update the system, copy an updated system image from the official website to run/initramfs/rlxos/system/ and then update the GRUB configuration. Even then, you can boot the different versions (all residing in one partition) from GRUB as needed. If you run rlxos as a dual or multiboot system, the osprober package must be installed.

Universal Package Formats

Although the developers claim AppImage is supported, I had some problems with the AppImage format in testing. No matter where the packages came from, they could not be persuaded to start, although I had made the packages executable using:

sudo chmod a+x PACKAGE

There was supposedly an app missing.

After some rummaging around, I discovered that FUSE was not installed. I quickly remedied that by typing:

sudo appctl install fuse3

After a reboot, I could launch the downloaded AppImages. To include them in the app grid, I had to call the appimaged command, which takes care of the integration and includes downloaded AppImages in the future after the first launch.

I had no problems integrating Flatpak. The framework was quickly installed on my disk by typing:

sudo appctl install flatpak

and already integrated Flathub. I then only had to execute the Flatpak reference files downloaded from there. As an example, I downloaded the Atom editor and installed it with the command:

flatpak install flathub io.ato.Atom

After that, Atom was immediately available for use (Figure 7). I did not test Snap.

Figure 7: Installing Flatpaks works like a charm. After installing the framework, the connection to Flathub, the Flatpak store, is already in place.