German Linux PC provider’s own operating system now public • The Register

Tuxedo OS 1 is Ubuntu 22.04 optimized for the proprietary kit, with KDE instead of GNOME, a natively packaged Firefox, and Flatpak instead of Snap.

As we mentioned when we covered the launch of Tuxedo’s Pulse G2 laptop, the company has its own in-house rebuild of Ubuntu, as well as a deployment tool called WebFAI. Now it releases this custom distribution as Tuxedo OS 1 to the general public.

German Linux PC vendor Tuxedo Computers might not be a household name – and we suspect System76 gets the most spotlight in the US – but where Registration number FOSS Desk is located in Central Europe, its name comes up regularly as a sponsor of openSUSE and various conferences and events.

With the release of its operating system for general use on other companies’ hardware, Tuxedo Computers follows in the footsteps of US vendor System76, which developed its own customized version of Ubuntu and then released it as an independent distribution, Pop!_OS .

the reg FOSS Desk was clearly underpowered by Pop!_OS 21.10, which made our test laptop unbootable. That being said, the version that followed, based on Ubuntu’s latest LTS, was a much smoother ride.

The default Tuxedo OS desktop is clean and simple… and yes, at 1024×768, the company logo is cropped at the corner

We’ve tried Tuxedo OS in VirtualBox (both versions 6 and 7) and on hardware, and it has to be said that like Pop!_OS 21.10, we’ve encountered some rough edges.

Tuxedo’s OS boot menu is oddly truncated on a BIOS machine

One is right in the boot menu. Most Linux distributions will show one of these, as sometimes certain features need to be disabled to work on certain hardware. The Tuxedo OS start menu is as follows:

Boot from USB / HDD: TUXEDO OS  
Boot from DVD / VM: TUXEDO OS  
WebFAI Notebook; Wired LAN and  
WebFAI Desktop Installation; W  

UEFI Firmware Settings

We didn’t shorten the text: at least in VirtualBox in standard BIOS mode, the menu items are truncated as shown. More text is visible on physical hardware or at UEFI boot:

Boot from USB / HDD: TUXEDO OS 1  
Boot from DVD / VM: TUXEDO OS 1   
WebFAI Notebook; Wired LAN and TUXEDO Hardware needed!
WebFAI Desktop Installation; Wired LAN needed!

UEFI Firmware Settings
Detect EFI bootloaders

Reboot!  

Booting into UEFI mode shows a higher resolution screen and more text, making the options easier to understand.

That leaves us with questions.

One is easy: What is the difference between the first two entries? To this vulture, “boot from USB” and “Boot from DVD” appear to indicate that the computer boots from removable media and “HDD” or “VM” from its internal hard drive, so we don’t understand why they are two different entries acts . Of course we tried both. The first one always doesn’t start for us and leaves us at a (initramfs) prompt. The second entry actually boots the VM from the Tuxedo OS installation media.

Worse still, on our proven test Thinkpad W520, both entries stop at (initramfs) Command Prompt so we couldn’t install the distro on Bare Metal at all. For the record, it booted successfully on a UEFI machine, but since it already had an operating system installed, we couldn’t try it.

Additionally, we feel that offering a choice of UEFI firmware settings on a BIOS computer is confusing. It doesn’t work – selecting it throws an error: error: can't find command 'fwsetup'.

WebFAI is a custom Linux deployment tool – the name is short for fully Aautomated IInstallation. This process requires a special USB stick, which can be provided by the company or made by yourself, and a wired network connection. So far, so good; What we don’t know is why its menu items appear on the Tuxedo OS startup key, since WebFAI is a separate tool that can also deploy openSUSE, several Ubuntu remixes, and Elementary OS.

The operating system was installed in a VM without any problems. On first boot, the installer runs automatically and asks for locale and keyboard information—but it doesn’t install yet. It then reloads the desktop, displays a warning about installing on non-Tuxedo hardware (in slightly broken English), and then restarts the installer.

If you install Tuxedo OS 1 on your own kit, there is a warning that it “has limited functionality”.

Once installed, Tuxedo OS works flawlessly. It’s Ubuntu 22.04.1, with KDE Plasma 5.24.6 instead of GNOME. The operating system has completely removed Snap support and Firefox is installed from a native Debian package. Flatpak is installed instead, but no Flatpaks are pre-installed. The Start menu contains a Tuxedo group with two custom applications installed: Tuxedo Control Center, a system monitoring app, and Tuxedo WebFAI Creator. The Control Center also runs as a panel applet by default, although you can easily disable it.

Aside from these small additions, Tuxedo OS 1 is very similar to a standard installation of Kubuntu, just with custom startup and shutdown screens and wallpapers. Just like the first version of the System76 distribution we tried, we suspect you won’t see any problems installing it as the sole operating system on a fairly modern UEFI machine. The glitches are mostly cosmetic and forgivable on a version 1.0 product.

If you don’t care about snap packages and prefer a more traditional Windows-like desktop over GNOME – both perfectly reasonable choices – Tuxedo OS 1 seems like a solid option. ®