14 DAY TRIAL // Ozon OS, the new Linux distribution developed by Nitrux and Numix that's based on Fedora 20, has just received its first Alpha version.
Ozon OS "Hydrogen" has been in the works for quite some time, and the distro was initially announced back in February. The system of choice for Ozon is now Fedora 20, but they are targeting Fedora 21 as the official base. There aren't too many distros based on Fedora and it will be a nice change to see a new one rise up.
The devs’ aim is to create a gaming-oriented system, or at least this was their initial intention. From what we can see so far, no gaming-related packages have been added to the OS, but this is still an Alpha release and there are many things left to implement.
What's so special about Ozon OS
The operating system looks like it's using GNOME, but that is only half of what you are seeing. In fact, the developers have made their own desktop shell, called Atom ES, which integrates a number of components. They got rid of the regular GNOME launcher and replaced it with their own Atom dock, which has been moved at the bottom.
Most of the packages that you would expect to see in a GNOME environment are there, including the Nautilus file manager and the rest. In fact, the system does not look like something that you must have, although it has a lot of potential.
You might notice that you can't really tweak the desktop, you can't customize the dock, and you don't have the Numix GTK theme by default (the one used by the devs in their videos). You can probably add it easily, but it would have been nice to have it.
Also, it would have been quite nice if the final system used the Numix circle theme, which actually looks very different from everything else.
Where to get it
If you want to test the new Ozon OS "Hydrogen," you can download the ISO from Softpedia. It's a Live CD and you can test it in VirtualBox, but that's not recommended. Fedora with GNOME package doesn’t work well under VirtualBox, so you should use a USB stick instead for much better performance.
Also, it goes without saying that this is a development release and you really shouldn't use it on your regular system or for any kind of production use.
