Dreamlinux has quite a few users, but must be counted as endangered: it has only one developer and this is the first new version since 2009. The only repositories now available are Debian Testing, so Dream is more of a re-spin than a real distro.

The installer was simple, but it didn’t set the keyboard, timezone, or language. The collection of packages installed was small, although they all worked well: Chromium, Gimp, Inkscape, Smplayer (with all codecs), Shotwell, and Softmaker. The latter is an odd choice: a free copy of the 2008 version of a commercial office suite.

There were problems, however. The dock took up about a quarter of the screen and I could not get it to go away, except by uninstalling the program. The forum shows that others have had the same problem. I tried to install Wine, only to find it’s not in Debian’s testing repository! One could say that the fault is Debian’s, but if you choose to rely on Testing, then either you or your users will have a lot of work to do.

With so many distros that actually improve on Debian, I cannot see any reason to use this one.