Helwan O.S: Egypt’s All-Purpose Linux Distribution

The FOSS Force Distro of the Week

The folks who develop Helwan O.S say it’s “designed by devs for devs and creators,” but our Larry Cafiero says it’s a distro that it would probably fit about anybody.

Helwan Linux — Screenshot of the default view of the Cinnamon desktop in Helwan O.S.

Quick, give me the name of a Linux distro made in… Egypt.

Give up?

You would be correct if you said Helwan Linux, but if you didn’t, that’s OK. In fact, Distrowatch does not even have the distro listed yet in its top 100 distros, but that’s with good reason.

Officially, it’s Helwan O.S – that’s not a typo; there’s a period between the “o” and the “s” but not after — and it touts itself as a developer-based distro based on Arch’s rolling release. The developers say it is designed by developers for developers and creators, and we took the Helwan Linux Al-Amal Cinnamon Edition version for a spin this week.

Helwan O.S Drip theme on Cinnamon desktop. — “Drip” theme on Cinnamon desktop environment.

Installing the Distro

For simplicity’s sake, the Arch-based distro runs under the Cinnamon desktop, which took a little getting used to (truth in advertising: I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool Xfce guy for years, maybe even going on a decade), but it was a minor hurdle to adapt to Cinnamon’s clean look and feel. I did take the liberty, though, to change the desktop’s theme to one of a wide variety of choices offered called “Drip,” since it seemed to be the smoothest in texture.

The hardware requirements suggest that Helwan Linux runs best on a 64-bit CPU — sorry, 32-bit folks, you’re out of luck — with at least 4 GB RAM, and more than 32 GB storage. However, in a pinch, you can get away with 3 GB RAM and 16 GB storage, according to the documentation.

One of the features of Helwan Linux is its range of available languages. As an Egypt-based distro, its main language is Arabic, but the distro is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.

To be honest, the download time of the 3.7 ISO took a little more time than what I am used to, and seemed to be fraught with English translations from Arabic. However, to be fair the amount of software that comes with Helwan Linux makes up for it, because there is a lot of developer- and media-based software that comes with it.

This includes a vast assortment of software for developers like Geany (an IDE), VS Code (a coding editor), Python-PyQt5 (to build GUIs in Python), and the community version of DBeaver (a database management platform). Also for developers are the following: Git, Perl, Python, OpenJDK, PHP, Node.js, Go, Rust, Lua, SQLite, MariaDB, along with the standard fare of system utilities like GParted, MTools (to access MS-DOS disks), and Pamac, the GUI-based package manager used by Manjaro.

Helwan O.S, VLC Media Player — The VLC media player in Helwan O.S.

For those of us mere mortals using our computers for day-to-day fare, there is standard issue software available, like Firefox, the LibreOffice suite (the entire suite, which is a plus), VLC for watching videos and listening to music on CD (or if you prefer, Audacious is also installed), and if talking on IRC is your thing, there’s HexChat. The weak link here is the default e-mail client, Geary, and after trying it out, I opted for the only addition I made, which was to add Thunderbird as the e-mail client.

The many programs that are available on this distro ran flawlessly and without hesitation. Even trying out those specific developer programs I would never use, each one opened and closed quickly and cleanly.

Conclusion

If you develop software or are a TikTok/YouTube/whatever social media maven, Helwan gets high marks and might be a distro for you.

But let’s say that, like me, you’re neither of those two. Let’s say that you’re an average user looking to do your fair share of e-mailing, web surfing, video watching, and the occasional game or two. Even in this case, Helwan has got you covered with adequate and responsive software available and a more-than-adequate package manager in Pacman to add or remove whatever suits your fancy.

Helwan is a well-balanced Linux distro offering much to both developers and online-media types, as well as to the average user.

Next week, Larry’s going to be looking at BunsenLabs Linux.

Helwan Linux’s pluses…	Where Helwan Linux needs improvement…
Large amount of software. Language offerings and support, especially in Arabic. Wide variety of software for developers. Cinnamon desktop environment is clean. The Package Manager Pamac is very responsive.	Long download time due to the amount of software. Download screens and original desktop artwork look a bit archaic. A slight learning curve for Cinnamon desktop. Default e-mail client Geary is too basic.