Centrych

Centrych is an open source distribution of Linux based on the world’s most popular operating system, Ubuntu, and built around the modern KDE Plasma desktop environment. It was heavily inspired by the centrist philosophy.

Distributed as 32-bit/64-bit Live DVDs

The distro can be downloaded via Softoware or directly from its official website (see link above) as two Live DVD ISO image or approximately 1.5GB in size, deployable on either 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms.

Boot options à la Ubuntu Linux

Besides the fact that it uses a custom logo, the boot prompt on the Live DVDs is identical with the one on the official Ubuntu release. It is engineered to automatically start the live environment with default boot options.

However, the user can access the boot menu by pressing any keyboard key during the 10-second timeout, from where he or she can start the graphical installer to permanently install the OS on a local drive, check the integrity of the bootable medium (only if using a CD media), run a memory test or boot from the first disk.

Beautiful and modern, yet traditional and familiar desktop environment

By default the Live DVDs will boot into the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which has been designed in such a way that it looks like a traditional graphical interface with a single-panel layout.

Default applications

Default applications include the GIMP image editor, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Kopete instant messenger, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Clementine music player, VLC Media Player, Kid3 audio tagger, K3b CD/DVD/BD burning software, Audex Audio-CD ripper, and LibreOffice office suite.

Bottom line

Originally designed as a Debian-based small office server, Centrych is now an easy-to-use and very stable desktop-oriented operating system that offers a unified look and feel, supporting both GNOME/GTK+ and KDE/Qt applications under the same roof.

What is new in this release:

• This release upgrades the desktop to Xfce4 4.10.2+ and includes the 4.11 versions of xfwm4 and xfce4-session, both of which have been modified with the oxygen theme.
• The Centrych desktop profile gets a customized notification theme and both profiles now use whiskermenu as the default.
• The GNOME and KDE services are no longer started on default, which provides additional RAM savings and shortens login time.

What is new in version 12.04.2:

• LibreOffice 4.0.6 This is the final update of the 4.0 release
• GIMP 2.8.6 This version is a backport of the release included with Saucy
• Clementine 1.2.0 This is the most recent upstream release
• Linux kernel 3.2.0-55 The current Ubuntu updates version