Switcher 2026: Zenclora Linux Tries to Make Sense of Debian ⭐

Intrigued by its promises of Zen-like calm and simplicity, I first installed Zenclora Linux a few months back. The look and feel is minimalist enough for my tastes, but I can't say that I quite understood some of the design decisions, including most obviously its unique package manager and app store, both of which are command line only. But after reinstalling Debian and confronting its curious omissions and limitations, I think I finally get Zenclora, a Debian-based distribution that goes its own way.

For too many reasons to count--Microsoft's release of a text mode-based text editor called Edit, which I love, my ongoing embrace of the Windows Package Manager (winget), my accelerated testing of Linux over the course of this article series, and the release of StoreCLI and far too many other CLIs to count--I've felt the pull of command line interfaces, CLIs, more and more over the past several months. So much so that I took a side-trip researching (again, Googling and watching YouTube videos) whether there were any Linux distributions that booted up into a full screen text-mode CLI instead of a normal GUI.

That kind of thing doesn't make a lot of sense in 2026, I guess. But as I wrote in Switcher 2026: The Zen of Linux ⭐, learning the command line isn't just good, or smart, or whatever, it's one key to understanding how this platform really works. Where Windows is GUI-first, with tacked-on command line functionality, Linux and other Unix-like OSes are command line-first with GUIs built on top of that. I like that, but regardless of your stance on how these things are made, command lines aren't going away. In fact, they're more common now than they've been in decades, at least in mainstream personal computing.

Here's another way to think of this: Everyone understands that keyboard shortcuts can make you more efficient; among other things, you keep your hands on the keyboard and don't need to reach for a mouse or touchpad and then manipulate a cursor or whatever onscreen. Less well understood, perhaps, is that learning command line interfaces, CLIs, will likewise make you more efficient, especially in Linux. It's the "best"--fastest, most efficient, whatever--way to do certain things.

Which explains Zenclora Linux to some degree.
The new minimalism
The Zenclora Linux setup routine quickly establishes its roots, as it is a lightly skinned and customized version of the system that Debian uses. (The default name of the PC is even debian, which seems like a curious thing to not customize.) Given my recent Debian experiences and my complaints about it not giving the default user account sudo rights, I was curious to see whether Zenclora made this same mistake. But it does not: During setup, you are not prompted to provide a password for root, just for your account. So that, at least, was comforting.

When you first boot into Zenclora Linux, it looks much like other distributions. There's a desktop with a minimalist look that's further...