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What sets AcademiX apart from other distributions is the EDU software manager. This package manager provides curated lists of educational software, which are grouped by subject and by age range. This package manager makes finding educational software really easy. There is software for astronomy, biology, geography, foreign languages, and many other subjects. While there are gaps in the availability of applications covering various subjects, that is a gap in the broader open source application ecosystem, not something specific to AcademiX. While some of the rough edges I noted with the installation process and the desktop customization make me a hesitant to recommend AcademiX to new Linux users, Educational Technology professionals should perhaps try out AcademiX just to use the EDU package manager to explore various open source applications.

While installing and updating software was easy and basically the same experience as any other modern, Debian-based distribution, the fact that some of the packages come from servers in Romania means that some package downloads can be much slower than downloading from the world-wide network of Debian mirrors. For individual packages and small collections of packages this is not too noticeable, but it is still an issue. The frustrating part is the fact that the speeds are not consistent. Sometimes I was downloading at only 40kbps, but other times it was much faster. I experienced the same issue when trying to download the ISO. One download took about 20 minutes for the 1.7GB image but some other attempts took 4 hours.

Final thoughts

AcademiX GNU/Linux is an interesting distribution, but it has some rough edges that need to be cleaned up. Honestly, I really, really wanted to like this distribution (good distributions aimed at the educational market are always needed), but found it to be merely okay. AcademiX has a lot of potential, but it is just not there yet. DebianEdu/Skolelinux is far more polished while serving almost the exact same niche. However, if the AcademiX team cleans up some of the issues I noted above, especially the installer issues, I think future versions of AcademiX might turn out to be worthwhile. The EDU software installer is well organized and aids in discovering educational software, so that is one solid advantage AcademiX offers, but overall the distribution needs more work and polish before I could move it from "this distribution is okay" to "you should give this distribution a try".

Leszek has pleased to announce the release of the new stable release of Neptune 6.0 on 1th Aug, 2019.

It’s first stable release of Neptune 6.0 based on Debian 10 “Buster”, featuring the KDE Plasma desktop with the typical Neptune tweaks and configurations.

The base of the system is Linux Kernel in version 4.19.37 which provides the necessary hardware support.

Plasma 5.14.5 features the stable and flexible KDE made desktop that is loved by millions.

This ISO contains:

Calamares 3.2.11 (the latest version of our installer)
Kernel 5.2.8
mesa 19.1.4-1
systemd 242.84-1
xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.16-1
XFCE 4.14
bash-completion
broadcom-wl-dkms
We also took care of some bug fixes:

Autologin is working now (if chosen inside Calamares)
Virtualbox detection is working
Powersaving/screen-locking issues are resolved
Added Leafpad as an option to use the editor as admin (not working with mousepad anymore)
A general cleanup
Removed light-locker (was causing issues)