October is one of the months where new generations of the Ubuntu Linux distro and its cousins like Xubuntu are released. That means by the time November rolls around all the *buntu remixes are released which in many cases are better than the original. For example take Voyager that is based on Xubuntu. It’s been my favorite distro of choice since 12.04. The last time I reviewed Xubuntu I was saddened by some of the features I thought it was lacking. Voyager not only corrects those flaws it surpasses my expectations from an OS.
Since my review of Voyager 13.04 not a lot has changed but it’s still a superb OS. The first major change was that this version has the Plank dock instead of the XFCE dock or the AWN dock. To me this was a major step in the right direction even though I still prefer the Cairo dock. The Plank dock is very no frills which is something I think an XFCE based distro needs.
The other major improvement I noticed was again the speed. Voyager seems to get faster with every version. It even worked well on my older test rig of an Asus EEE Box. The only thing that crushed it was when I went to Google+ but G+ seems to kill any OS on an older computer.
The one thing I didn’t like about the new release of Voyager was the lack of icon choices. A small complaint I know but I was used to the certain way I customized my installation. This was easily remedied by downloading all the icons from 13.04 to a USB drive then loading them back on to 13.10.
Other than that Voyager is my ultimate Linux distro. Not only does it come with the standard applications for everyday use but comes with all sorts of other tools for the ultimate in use and customization. This is a five-star distro.
The Trench Reynolds Report 