Since the introduction of Ubuntu around 2005 I have been a Linux user of various distro's, most of them based on Debian and Arch.

In 2017 I had my first taste of SparkyLinux but I was not too impressed with the distro at the time. Two weeks ago I gave the distro another try and I must admit that my experience was a lot better. For this review I installed version 5.13 XFCE. I was actually quite impressed by the straight forward installation process, the clean startup and slick desktop.

Sparky is not too packed with tools and applications, but everything is there to get the average and more advanced user started. In this respect, Sparky is somewhere between bare-bone Debian and MX Linux, a very balanced and favorable position in my opinion.

I installed Sparky on several 3 to 8 years old laptops with 1.4+ GHz CPU's without any problems. In contrast, the latest Manjaro got stuck during installation on a few Lenovo's apparently due to graphics driver problems, which was one of the reasons for me to try Sparky.

The XFCE desktop may seem somewhat outdated to some, but it is highly customizable and with the Window compositor turned on it can still be a very attractive working environment. Add to that the modern look of the Sparky6 appearance and window theme and you have a firm Windows 10 competitor.

On some of the laptops I replaced Windows 8 and it was a relief to see how much faster Sparky booted and shut down. Performance was much better also compared to Windows 10.

Having been a Linux user for some 15 years, I know from experience that almost no distro is without problems; sooner or later you will run into some issue, often hardware related. That said, in my experience Debian and Arch based distro's usually do very well relatively speaking. SparlyLinux is another good Debian based example with the Contrib and Non-Free repositories turned on by default, which allows for a very nice and balanced Linux experience.