Spaced Linux: Where Devuan, Compiz and MATE Meet

Spaced Linux: Where Devuan, Compiz and MATE Meet

Contents

• What Spaced Linux Is

• How Spaced Linux Works in Practice

• The Current Release, Its Packages and How to Get Involved

Every so often a distribution turns up that refuses to pick a side in the great "easy versus powerful" debate, and simply insists on being both. Spaced Linux is one of those projects. Built on a Devuan foundation, dressed in the familiar MATE desktop, and animated by the endlessly configurable Compiz window manager, it sets out to welcome newcomers without ever talking down to the people who like to open a terminal and actually understand what their computer is doing. It is a small, independently developed project with a clear identity, and it is well worth a proper look.

What Spaced Linux Is

Spaced Linux describes itself as a polished, systemd-free desktop, and that single phrase carries an awful lot of the story. Rather than building on Debian directly, the project uses Devuan Ceres, the rolling "unstable" branch of the Devuan project, which itself exists specifically to keep the classic SysV init system alive as an alternative to systemd. Devuan strips systemd out of the equation entirely, replacing it with sysvinit, and Spaced Linux inherits that entire philosophy wholesale. For anyone who has ever wanted a modern desktop that still boots and manages services the way Unix-like systems have done for decades, this is precisely the appeal.

On top of that Devuan base sits MATE, the desktop environment that continues the GNOME 2 tradition of a conventional panel, a proper application menu, and windows that behave the way people expect windows to behave. MATE has long been a favourite among users who want something dependable rather than experimental, and Spaced Linux leans into that reputation rather than fighting it. The application menu itself is handled by Brisk Menu, a searchable, categorised launcher that keeps navigation simple even for someone who has never used Linux before.

What genuinely sets Spaced Linux apart, though, is its treatment of Compiz. Many distributions that still support Compiz treat it as a legacy curiosity, a nostalgic nod to the wobbly-windows era of the mid-2000s, with a safer compositor doing the real work underneath. Spaced Linux does the opposite. Compiz is the primary window manager and compositor here, not a decorative afterthought bolted on top of something else. It handles workspace switching, window rules, accessibility features, keybindings, and the overall visual character of the desktop, with the lightweight Marco window manager kept in reserve as a fallback for GPUs, virtual machines, or workflows where Compiz genuinely isn't the right tool. The project's own documentation is explicit that this is a deliberate design choice rather than a leftover: the workspace cube, the animated transitions, and the compositing effects are treated as core desktop behaviour, not eye candy for a screenshot.

That combination of "easy to begin, powerful enough to keep" runs right through the project's messaging, and it is a genuinely useful way to think about who Spaced Linux is for. On one side, there's a beginner-friendly package: a conventional single-panel layout, a graphical Calamares installer, working networking and audio out of the box, and coordinated visual themes that change the whole desktop's look with a single click. On the other side, there's a transparent, inspectable base for advanced users: no systemd dependency, plain-text configuration for package groups and overlays, deep Compiz tuning, APT alongside Flatpak, and a fully reproducible live-build workflow that anyone can clone and rebuild for themselves. It's rare to see both audiences addressed with equal seriousness in the same project, and Spaced Linux clearly wants to be judged on managing that balance well.

The project is entirely independent, maintained without the backing of a large vendor, and it says so proudly rather than apologetically. Its stated aim is a "practical desktop vision rather than a large vendor's appliance ecosystem," and that independence shows up in small but telling ways throughout the system: a coherent visual identity across boot screens, installer, and desktop; a first-party application store; and a willingness to remove features, such as the Plymouth boot splash in the most recent release, when they get in the way of a leaner, more dependable result rather than keeping them purely for polish's sake.

The distribution's own tagline sums the whole idea up neatly: "Spaced. Polished. Agile. Compiz. Efficient. Devuan." Each word does a bit of work there. "Polished" points at the coordinated theming and attention to visual detail that runs through every screen a user sees, from the boot menu right through to the login prompt. "Agile" and "Efficient" nod to the lean live-image philosophy that keeps the ISO small and the base system uncluttered, favouring optional Flatpak delivery over pre-loading every possible piece of software. And naming Compiz and Devuan directly, right there in the tagline, tells you exactly where the project's technical heart lies, long before you ever boot the ISO for yourself. It's a distribution that knows precisely what it is trying to be, and communicates that clearly rather than leaving newcomers to work it out from a features page.

How Spaced Linux Works in Practice

The experience of actually running Spaced Linux begins the moment the ISO boots. A dark, understated GRUB-style menu appears with the Spaced "S" motif curling across the background, offering a standard boot entry, a safe-graphics option, a verbose boot for diagnosing hardware issues, and a shortcut into the live utilities. 

From there, the live session drops straight into a MATE desktop themed in the project's signature charcoal-and-silver palette, with icons for the computer, the user's home folder, an "Install Spaced Linux" launcher, and the trash sitting neatly in the top-left corner.

Installation is handled by Calamares, the same graphical installer used by a great many independent distributions, and Spaced Linux's implementation will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has installed a Linux desktop before. The wizard walks through language and locale selection, keyboard layout, partitioning, and user account creation, before presenting a clear summary screen that spells out exactly what is about to happen: the timezone and locale it will set, the keyboard model it has detected, and precisely how the target disk will be partitioned, typically a small FAT32 EFI system partition alongside a larger ext4 root partition. 

Once installation completes, the "All done" screen offers an immediate restart, and the machine returns to that same branded boot menu before dropping the user at a LightDM login screen carrying the project's own identity, complete with a session-type selector that lets a user choose between the default Xsession, a GNOME/Cairo-Dock arrangement running under Compiz, or plain MATE.

The very first thing a freshly installed Spaced Linux user meets after logging in is the Welcome application, and this is where the project's beginner-friendly instincts are at their clearest. The Welcome window opens with a short introductory message, "Keep the base system lean, add SpacedBazaar and suggested apps whenever you like," alongside three prominent buttons: one to install a curated set of suggested applications in one action, one to open SpacedBazaar directly, and a third dedicated specifically to setting up NVIDIA graphics drivers. 

Beneath those buttons sits a plainly laid-out list of the suggested applications themselves, each with a one-line description and a note on where it comes from. SpacedBazaar appears first, described simply as the tool to browse and install further applications. Voice2Text AI follows, billed as private, on-device speech transcription and AI tooling, a nice example of the project's interest in keeping AI features local rather than cloud-dependent. 

Two small games round out the first-party offerings: Cards With Cats, a card game built specifically for the distribution, and Brutal Chess, a classic 3D chess title packaged for Spaced Linux with a clean, neutral marble-style board. 

Spaced Update, the project's own combined updater, is listed too, described as a tool that keeps APT and Flatpak applications in sync together rather than treating them as two separate chores. 

The remaining four entries are well-known third-party favourites delivered through Flathub: Audacious for lightweight music playback, the Brave browser for privacy-conscious web use, the full LibreOffice suite for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and VLC for video and audio playback. Clicking "Install Suggested Apps" works through that whole list automatically and reports back once everything has been installed successfully, which is about as close to a one-click "get me set up" experience as a Linux desktop can reasonably offer.

SpacedBazaar itself, once opened, presents a categorised software-store interface with browsing tabs for Explore, Library, and Search, plus quick-filter buttons for browsers, video, music, office tools, PDF readers, calendars, messaging apps, paint programs, VPNs, torrent clients, and emulators, alongside a set of larger themed tiles for trends, mobile apps, games, productivity, science, and interface tweaks. It is, in other words, a proper application-store experience layered on top of Flatpak and Flathub, giving less experienced users a familiar shopping-style way to find new software without ever having to think about package managers directly.

Spaced Update, the companion utility for keeping the system current, takes a similarly calm approach: a single window with tabs for Updates and OS Release, a straightforward "Select all" checkbox, and a clear count of how many updates are currently selected, all sitting above a simple "Check for Updates" button. It is designed to make the sometimes-intimidating idea of "updating your Linux system" feel exactly as routine as updating an app on a phone.

Beyond the welcome flow, the desktop itself rewards a bit of exploring. The Appearance Preferences panel offers a genuinely impressive spread of coordinated themes, ranging from a moody Spaced Linux Dark default through deliberately nostalgic options styled after Windows 3.11, Windows XP, and Windows 11 in both light and dark variants, an Android-inspired look, a Linux Mint tribute, a macOS-style arrangement, and a distinctive "GeoWorks" theme that nods to a much older era of graphical computing. Selecting any of these changes far more than a colour scheme: GTK widgets, icon sets, wallpaper, panel layout, and even the Compiz workspace-cube presentation all shift together, which is a genuinely satisfying thing to watch happen in real time. 

Under the hood, tools like the Control Center gather every settings panel a user might need into one place, from display and keyboard hardware through to the CompizConfig Settings Manager for anyone who wants to dig deeper into window-manager behaviour, plus a dedicated NVIDIA driver installer for the times a discrete GPU needs proper attention.

Safety net features are handled with the same unfussy practicality. Spaced Linux automatically creates a Timeshift snapshot labelled "Fresh install" immediately after setup completes, giving every user a restore point before they have even had the chance to break anything. Timeshift itself runs quietly in the background afterwards, ready to roll the system back to a known-good state if an update or experiment goes wrong, while the project is careful to note that this protects system files specifically and that personal data still deserves its own separate backup routine. 

For anyone who wants to see what is actually happening under the desktop's surface, terminal tools such as fastfetch, btop, and inxi are readily available and give a clean, informative readout of the running kernel, desktop environment, window manager, package counts, and hardware, which is a small but telling sign of a distribution built with technically curious users in mind.

The Current Release, Its Packages and How to Get Involved

The version examined here is Spaced Linux 8.26.9, released at the end of August 2026, and it represents a fairly mature and deliberately lean point in the project's development. According to the project's own release notes, this build restores what the developer calls the "lean live-image design" after a previous release had crept close to GitHub's 2 GiB size limit for release assets by preinstalling the SpacedBazaar Flatpak alongside its GNOME runtime, locale data, and associated codecs directly into the live image. That approach added roughly 616 MB to the compressed ISO for comparatively little benefit, since most of that payload sat unused until a user chose to install additional software anyway. The fix was straightforward and sensible: move SpacedBazaar and the optional Flatpak runtimes out of the base image entirely, and let the small native Welcome application install them after the system is up and running instead. The result is an ISO of roughly 1.6 GiB, comfortably back under the size limit, without losing any hardware support from the base operating system itself.

That same 8.26.9 release also tidied up several other loose ends. Spaced Update was corrected so that its OS Release information tab correctly displays the installed Spaced Linux version rather than showing "Unknown," a small but useful fix for anyone checking their system details. The Plymouth boot splash and its associated artwork were removed altogether, in favour of a quiet, hidden-cursor default boot with a verbose GRUB option kept available for anyone who needs to diagnose a startup problem. The project's own verification notes for this release describe passing source and packaging checks, a clean build from Devuan Ceres, SHA-256 checksum verification, a filesystem audit confirming no leftover Flatpak runtime objects or Plymouth content had crept back in, and a successful KVM boot test reaching a complete desktop within twenty seconds.

Looking at the package inventory tracked independently by DistroWatch gives a good sense of just how conventional and dependable the underlying system really is, once you get past the distinctive theming. The release ships APT 3.3.1 as its native package manager, Calamares 3.4.2 for installation, Compiz 0.8.18 across its full family of core, plugin, and configuration-manager packages, MATE 1.28-series components throughout the desktop, Marco 1.26 as the fallback window manager, LightDM 1.33 with its GTK greeter for login, and Flatpak 1.18 for sandboxed application delivery. The system runs on Linux kernel 7.1.10, uses sysvinit-core and sysv-rc rather than any systemd component, and includes a broad set of everyday utilities: GParted and Timeshift for disk and system safety, network-manager for connectivity, cups for printing, bluez for Bluetooth, and a comprehensive spread of firmware packages covering Intel, AMD, Realtek, Broadcom, and Nvidia hardware. Interestingly, the package list also shows a handful of KDE Frameworks and Qt6 libraries present alongside the MATE and GTK stack, most likely supporting individual applications such as Dolphin or GParted's newer interface that draw on Qt components even within a predominantly GTK desktop. Altogether, DistroWatch records just over a thousand packages in a full installation, a figure that reflects a genuinely complete desktop system rather than a minimalist or stripped-back spin.

It's also worth noting, in the spirit of the project's own transparency, that reaching 8.26.9 wasn't a perfectly straight line. The GitHub release history shows several point releases along the way explicitly marked "Broken" by the developer, covering issues such as a stray serial-console setting that left real hardware stuck on a blank screen, and a lightdm-to-MATE handoff problem that briefly affected boot reliability. Rather than quietly overwriting those releases, the project has left them visible in its release history with plain, honest descriptions of what went wrong and how each issue was subsequently fixed. For a small, independently run distribution, that kind of openness about failed releases is arguably just as reassuring as a long unbroken string of successes would be: it shows a maintainer who tests thoroughly, documents problems candidly, and fixes them quickly rather than letting them linger.

For anyone who wants to go beyond simply using the finished ISO, the entire project lives openly on GitHub under the crhy/spaced repository, released under the MIT licence for the project's own build configuration and scripts, while the many upstream packages, artwork, themes, and fonts it pulls together naturally retain their own original licences. The repository contains everything needed to rebuild the exact same release image from scratch: a live-build configuration, the package selection and overlays, branding assets, and a Makefile with clearly named targets. Cloning the repository and running make deps followed by make release on a Debian- or Devuan-based build host reproduces the ISO, while a separate make iso-test target boots the result straight into QEMU for a quick sanity check. This kind of transparent, reproducible build process is exactly the sort of thing that turns a distribution from a fixed product into a genuine platform for further tinkering, whether that means swapping out artwork, adjusting the package set, or forking the whole project into something new entirely.

The project also welcomes outside contributions directly through its GitHub issue tracker, with bug reports, documentation improvements, Compiz refinements, theme work, hardware testing, and accessibility feedback all explicitly invited. Given that Spaced Linux is developed independently, without corporate backing, the project also accepts donations through Bitcoin and Venmo to help cover hosting, build infrastructure, testing hardware, and the ordinary costs of keeping an actively maintained distribution moving forward. It is a modest, transparent way of supporting a project that clearly has a strong sense of its own identity and is not shy about asking for a little help to keep that identity alive.

A Final Word

Spaced Linux is a genuinely characterful project: a Devuan-based, systemd-free desktop that treats Compiz as a serious primary window manager rather than a museum piece, wraps it all in the dependable familiarity of MATE, and adds a thoughtful first-run experience that makes getting started feel almost effortless. It won't be to everyone's taste, and its small, independent nature means it moves at the pace of one dedicated maintainer rather than a large team, but for anyone curious about a systemd-free desktop with genuine visual personality, it is well worth a look in a virtual machine or on a spare drive.

Disclaimer: Spaced Linux, Devuan, MATE, Compiz, Calamares, Flatpak, Flathub, LibreOffice, VLC, Brave, and Audacious, along with any other product or company names mentioned above, are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, and their mention here is for identification and informational purposes only. This article has been researched and written in good faith from publicly available official sources, and every reasonable effort has been made to ensure it is accurate and up to date at the time of publication; however, open-source projects evolve quickly, and readers are encouraged to verify current details against the official project channels before making decisions based on this content. As always, please use open-source software responsibly and in accordance with its licence terms and any applicable local laws.

References

• Spaced Linux official website

• Spaced Linux source repository on GitHub

• Spaced Linux release notes and changelog

• Spaced Linux donation information

• Spaced Linux version 8.26.9 technical package listing, DistroWatch

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