14 DAY TRIAL // VeltOS is a new Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that wants to do something that hasn't been tried before, and that is to move the decision process in the hands of the community.
If you're going to ask around, especially around developers, the consensus is that the community, as a whole, doesn't make great decisions. Most of the time there is a constant debate between developers and users from the community. As you can imagine, their views on how an application or an OS should be differs quite a lot.
Now VeltOS wants to promote a system that would allow its users to vote on features. It's not clear just how much the users will be involved in the decisions preceding the vote, but letting people voting sounds like a good idea. In practice, some issues might arise. If something that really splits the community in two is put to vote, and the result is just slightly in the favor one party, the developers will soon have a lot of upset users.
VeltOS is still under development
This can't be stressed enough. I got to play around a little bit with VeltOS and really early to say anything about. From what I've seen, VeltOS is using the Budgie desktop, with GNOME 3.16 packages, the Numix GTK Theme and the Numix Circle icons. There is no installer to speak of, no package manager or store, and the bare minimum. In theory, you could achieve something similar with a regular Arch machine, GNOME, and a few extensions.
"As of now, VeltOS ships with a custom desktop, based on Budgie from the Solus Project, this, combined with LightDM and Numix theming makes for a pleasant computing experience. VeltOS is also shipping with some of the basic software every computer needs, like a web browser, video player, office suite, text editor and more," noted developers in the announcement.
The fact that it's community driver is definitely the main attraction point for this OS, but it remains to be seen just how well it will work. You can download the 0.1.0 version of VeltOS, but it's just a technical preview, and it's highly unstable.
Check out the gallery below!
