Synex

Reader supplied reviews for Synex Average rating 8.9 from 9 review(s) What are your thoughts on Synex? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 26.08.1713-u11 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 13-u11 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-08-09 Country: Spain Votes: 0 I've been using Synex on my laptop for several weeks now, and it's definitely one of my favorite distributions. What makes Synex interesting? (In my opinion.) - Debian-based: Synex is based on Debian. This gives it access to a huge ecosystem of packages and a very mature foundation. It also offers both a stable Debian-based version and a semi-rolling release. - It’s minimalist, as it doesn’t come with much pre-installed software. - Different desktop environments: There are currently editions with KDE Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, MATE, LXDE, Openbox, IceWM, and COSMIC. - Older hardware: XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, or IceWM can be good options for a PC with limited resources. - Proprietary tools: Synex includes its own tools and repositories. For example, its Synex Package Manager features recommended applications with one-click installation and support for Flatpak. - Wizard for installing NVIDIA drivers. - Server: Synex also offers a Server edition with easy administration and support for ZFS, EXT4, XFS, and BTRFS. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 13-u7 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-23 Country: Argentina Votes: 2 I have tried many distributions that call themselves minimalist, but most of them are not really minimal in practice. They either include too much by default or remove so much that the result becomes inconvenient. Synex felt more balanced to me. It provides the essentials and, more importantly, lets the user choose. I liked the fact that I could decide what additional software to install, or skip it and keep the system lean. A highlight for me was the NVIDIA helper. I tested it with an RTX 2070 and it worked very well. That made setup much easier than on many other distributions. I also installed Synex on an old Core i3 machine with 8 GB of RAM, and it performed better than I expected. The system was responsive, stable and perfectly usable on older hardware. What I liked most is that Synex understands minimalism in a practical way: enough to be useful, but without unnecessary clutter. That is rarer than it should be. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 13-u7 Rating: 10 Date: 2026-04-19 Country: Serbia Votes: 3 Greatest debian distro for me. Beautiful xfce theme, light, zippy and stable. Comes with preinstalled set of utilities that includes Linux software installation, nVidia driver installation and some other goodies which makes life of a newbee migrating from Win to Linux smooth and easy. This is the one that ended distro-hopping for me :P They also make this distro with MATE, KDE, MATE, LXDE, GNOME, and IceWM window mangers. And there is also server version of this distro. Thank you for all your work! Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 9 reader reviews of Synex...