Linux Review / Rant: siduction 2012.1 'Desperado' KDE

siduction is a distro based on unstable Debian GNU/Linux. It seems that siduction was split off aptosid, a very similar distro. I didn´t want to go into details on differences and politics because honestly I don´t care. Right now, I want to get to know this siduction Linux thing...


The homepage reveals that the latest version (4.8.3) of the KDE SC is featured, as well as custom scripts, a custom installer and a "custom patched version of the linux-kernel 3.4-0, accompanied by XServer 1.12.1.902-1". Aside from the release info I found the homepage to be cluttered and not geared towards newbies. Don´t judge a book by its covers, and so I grabbed the 933 MB iso, burned it, restarted and....

Live DVD experience

To show You the boot options I decided to put siduction into the the virtual box:

The default boot options were followed by no boot splash but a verbose boot blah and sadly:

Okidoki. Click OK (what else?) and login screen:

I could type however I wanted but no keyboard input made it into any of the two fields. Enough of this! I burned the iso and this time I tested it on real hardware (Dual Core Athlon 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 3850). Again, I went with the default boot option which brought me this piece of modern art:

Safe to say: the 2nd boot option needed (safe graphics + settings). This worked and the default desktop looks like this:

Note how the symbol on the very left side is not bringing up the menu but is for changing/adding activities. This a bit of a pain in the butt but can be easily changed. You can also see that siduction provides an xdg-browser launcher to launch a Generic Web Broswer. The browser actually launched is Iceweasel (rebranded Firefox). This is a weird bit of customization I must say. I know beautiy is in the eye of the beholder and the icon fits the late 90s video game wallpaper but why not call the kid by its name?



siduction uses the classic KDE menu. Interestingly, it has a sperate 'Debian' menu:

Now K3b, the awesome burning tool, can also be found in the 'Multimedia' menu. Why the redundancy? I don get the idea behind this extra menu.

Next I wanted to check out if Flash & Multimedia worked out of the box (redundant in these days?) but I forgot I was not connected via wireless. Ok, there is this KDE icon for (w)lan connections...NOT:

Ok, the manual is on the desktop ready to help me. Open KDE menu, 'Internet' and there I found this command line program which worked well to configure my wireless adapter:

Now I was connected to the internet but I see no reason to continue this review. There is nothing appealing about siduction to me. Why the hell the name? What is the seduction? The idea of Debian unstable being fast and relatively...ehm...stable and therefore being a good base for KDE is cool. But not executed this way. Given the vast options on Linux distros, I d on´t see why I should care about siduction. Like dedoimedo  said: "But in 2012, why bother."