bill toulas | October 7, 2012

AriOS 4.0 – Persian Perfection!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

When a woGue reader sent an email to us suggesting that we should try AriOS I wasn’t very optimistic. The description was showing the same trodden approach that we saw in so many other projects that is “an Ubuntu based distribution that offers a more ready to use Ubuntu”

AriOS is really not just simply one of those distributions… It is a truly carefully tailored operating system that offers exactly everything you need, combined with elegance and a sense of opulence!

Looks

First of all, AriOS looks fantastic. This Orta Gnome Shell theme with the Faience-Azur icon theme, the elegant conky that shows useful information on the left, the Adwaita X-light window theme and the white cursor give a great first impression to the user. Details? Maybe, but these details show both the pursuit of user-pleasure that the developers have, and their taste for elegance which is very good indeed.

Extensions

There are many extensions that bring the 3.4 version of the Gnome Shell that AriOS is running to a completely higher level of functionality and transform the usability of Gnome Shell to something of a parallel logic and value for anyone.

No extension steps on the way of another as they all harmonically compose a successful attempt to provide users with all they need in the simplest, but also the most natural way. Examples are found everywhere as every corner seems to be filled with exactly what this corner was made to be filled with!

Some of the elements that compose a more “traditional” approach include the Axe menu that replaces the overview when activities are clicked, a settings center extension that brings all the settings under one menu in the user menu, the media player indicator and the show desktop button extension. By default, the desktop is utilized as icons of places are present and the windows use minimize and maximize buttons.

Applications

This is where AriOS shows its wisdom (as unfit as this adjective may sound). It is easy to just overload a distribution with tons of applications and tools that a user may or may not need just in case, and exactly the same easy is to offer one little tool and application in every category that does almost 25% of what a user will probably actually need at some point. What is really difficult is to create a system that will truly offer exactly what most users need, combined with what they will probably need at some point according to reality. Confused?

There is nothing missing here, but at the same time there is nothing that you won’t use at least once a month. You will find a carefully selected set of applications many of which you may not even know about like myPaint, Boot Repair or Gnome Subtitles. Even Satya’s GTK Settings are present!

As the heart of AriOS is Ubuntu 12.04, you can use the super-easy to use Ubuntu Software Center to gain access to any additional application or tool you want. This also gives the ability to run Unity if you don’t like the default Gnome Shell but you will get neither the elegance of a custom DE, nor the sense of a Persian distribution.

Other more “classic” pre-installed applications are VLC 2.0.3, LibreOffice 3.5.4.2, Chromium 20, Firefox 15.0.1 and Virtualbox 4.1.12. Media codecs and java are also pre-installed.

Conclusion

Many times we think about and we judge software and operating systems according to what they really are instead of what they really offer to the user. What AriOS 4.0 is, is an Ubuntu 12.04 with a themed and extended Gnome Shell 3.4.1 as default DE and extra applications and tools included by default. Doesn’t sound impressive does it?

What AriOS offers to the user is that sense of magically achieved perfection that many distributions out there aim for, but very few actually meet. I don’t care about how much work AriOS developers actually put or not into this distribution and it doesn’t really matter to the user. What matters is their choices and touches. Nothing is too much and nothing falls short. Everything is just perfect!*

*Except for the fact that it comes in 32-bit only :(

AriOS Homepage

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  • mehionline

    64-bit version of International version will be released soon! So be :)
    And 64-bit is already out for Persian Edition! https://sourceforge.net/projects/arios/files/4.0/final/IRANIAN/amd64/

  • Salman

    I gave it a try.
    It works pretty well and a really well-organized distro which has come from the hear of Ubuntu.

  • amrihussein

    I’m a Persian user and i was watching the process of completing this distribution. The developers always asked questions about what users wants.
    I’m using Arios right now. As it is a great distribution for every iranian users. Many scripts that was putted into this distribution, just made it easier for us users to use it in our country. As you may know our country is one of the leaders in the internet censorship, So many customizations was just to make it easier for user to access free (as in freedom) internet.

    • http://amirlifestyle.blogspot.com/ HonarDust

      It have the tools to make it easier as default. Like tor or proxychains,
      Plus in the persian version firefox comes with an add-on called
      foxyproxy, which makes it easier to use tor. You just need to open
      firefox and click on the icon that specialized for that. And almost
      every censored sites will be accessible. (Except for google and youtube
      which blocked tor IPs.)

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  • Arindam Sen

    I checked on my 64 bit laptop with 8 GB RAM and Core i7 3rd gen processor. AriOS 32 bit is able to recognize 8 GB RAM and works very well with a 64 bit machine. Please check my review as well at http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.in/2012/10/arios-40-review-polished-attractive-and.html

  • MrSpeaker

    I like that it has bumblebee installed already and it recognises my nVidia card on my laptop. It is a very pretty distro that appears to be well thought out. I shall enjoy test-driving it.

  • dottore

    I’m glad to see such distro from the Orient. Gives some touch of Arabian Nights.