Though I like to post about a variety of topics I am passionate about, at my heart, I am a tech guy.

I work for a public school district as the Director of Technology. This job affords me the privilege of "trying things out" whenever I get a chance to see how they might fit in our ecosystem.

I saw an article the other day that boasted NetRunner Blackbird as being one of the most attractive Linux alternatives to Windows 7 and 10. Let's just forget Windows 8 ever existed if you don't mind...

Typically, when I need to install some form of Linux I gravitate towards Ubuntu. That is my go to distribution for whatever I might have going on. I guess it would be fair to say I am partial to Debian variants as that is what NetRunner is based on as well.

In preparation for this post, I jumped over to Distro Watch to grab my choosen flavor of Linux. If you have never been to the site before, there is a drop down in the upper left hand corner where it says "Select Distribution". After a bit of scrolling through the list, I finally found NetRunner.

I am not sure how clear this screen shot will come out, but the landing page gives you quite a bit of information on NetRunner. The specify this as being a distro for beginners, which is great because although I have been using Linux for several years, I still consider myself a beginner.

When I install a Linux server, I never install a desktop. It just takes up space and it forces me to use the command line which I feel is a great learning experience. More often than not, I find myself searching Google for the specific command I need, but there are a few here and there that I consistently remember. Now if I could just remember all of the switches for the "tar" command, that one gets me every time...

Be advised, the Netrunner desktop version 19.01 is a pretty hefty distribution. I don't have torrent access where I work, so a direct download took about twenty minutes to complete. For comparison, the .iso for Windows 10 Pro EDU 1803 is just under 5 GB. The .iso for NetRunner 19.01 is Just under 3 GB and the .iso for Ubuntu 18.04 is just under 2 GB.

I am fairly happy with my main Windows 10 install on my desktop, so I decided to install NetRunner in a virtual machine. My product of choice for desktop virtual machines is Oracle Virtual Box.

For reference, my desktop is an i7 8700 3.7 GHz with 16 GB of RAM, an M2 drive for my OS with a 1 TB mechanical drive for data. Additionally, I have a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti installed, so I was pretty confident the virtual machine would run pretty flawlessly.

At the time I created the machine, I didn't realize NetRunner was a Debian variant so I simply chose "Other Linux (64-bit)". I gave the virtual machine 4 GB of RAM and created a virtual hard disk on my 1 TB drive.

Since I was just demo'ing the OS, I felt that 80 GB would be more than enough for the hard drive.

With my machine created, I started it and pointed the optical disk file to the .iso that I had downloaded the day before.

On boot, I excpect to see the option to install NetRunner, but that wasn't there. Instead, I selected the top option and hit "Enter".

After a quick boot process I was presented with this desktop. According to the distrowatch site Blackbird is a highly customized version of the KDE desktop. I remember the first time I saw the KDE desktop. I was back when Novell partnered with SUSE and they gave out free copies of their Linux desktop OS to Novell customers.

Even then I was blown away by the look and feel of KDE. It was so different from Gnome which was more utilitarian and in my opinion unappealing back then. It was the first time I saw the potential for Linux to be usable by standard end users.

NetRunner Blackbird is no exception. The customized version of KDE is very pretty and elegent when you first see it.

Not wanting to run the OS from the .iso file, I double clicked on the "Install NetRunner" icon.

Setup was pretty typcial, pick your language...

and your time zone...

What kind of keyboard you are using...

and how you want the drive setup.

I was then presented with the prompt to create my user account and the option to login automatically.

Finally, it had me verify all of my settings before I initiated the install.

At this point the install got to about 23% before it stalled there for about five minutes or so. Eventually, it jumped to the 90% you see here before it finally finished.

Upon seeing this screen, I clicked "Done" and got ready to start digging into NetRunner.

It wasn't to be though... After many scrolling screens of errors and failures, the machine froze at this point. I let it run for a while and started thinking about how I could turn this post into a "failed attempt to install Linux" story. Eventually, I got tired of waiting and I did a reset of the machine via the Virtual Box menu.

Imagine my surprise when I was eventually greeted with this sight after several minutes of blank screen. I thought for second maybe it had just booted back into the live .iso image again, but then I noticed that there was no "Install NetRunner" icon on the desktop, so I figured I must be running the actual OS.

As I said before, it is clean/elegant and I really like the look and feel of it so far.

It comes with the "Synaptic" package manager which is a real plus for beginners like me. Looking back at SUSE I remember how awesome it was to have a graphical interface for "YUM" I think it was. No more using the command line to try and find/install software. All of the dependencies and everything were taken care of for you by the application. That is a huge game changers for newbies to Linux.

Finally, here is a view of the main menu. After using NetRunner for a short time, am I going to throw out all of my Ubuntu installs and switch over? Probably not. If however, you are a new user to Linux and you want something that gives you that "Windows" look and feel without being too foreign, NetRunner might be for you. It is intuitive and attractive enough that I think many Windows diehards could switch over to it and not have much issue.

Another thing to note... NetRunner Blackbird comes pre-installed with version of Flash and Java runtime. These are programs that are commonly left out of Windows installs these days and some of the Windows browsers no longer support them. The problem is, some sites and proprietary interfaces (think HVAC systems) require those plugins. I could easily see installing this version of Linux on a laptop so our maintenance director has access to the necessary controls.

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