Well, Beta 2 of the controversial hobby Linux OS was recently released to the public although the Beta 2 was previously released exclusively to the Patreon users in which Beta 2 had tons of progress going on. Unfortunately, there were mishaps occuring on me when using Beta 2 on the virtual machine on Virtualbox and VMWare.
On Virtualbox, the Live DVD mode partially worked with the Installer mode not having whatever UI problem whatsoever but on VMWare, the Live DVD worked with blank screen. On Beta 1, the eXtern OS' own desktop environment worked in Live DVD Mode but that was when I used it on VMWare hypervisor software.
At the time, I was like customizing the whole eXtern OS Beta 1 that was installed to the VM HDD to have the package list match the one from the other Linux distribution including PureOS 9's. I went through tons of troubles in customizing the Beta 1 although I still have some remaining troubles like the eXtern OS Live Session account is missing by default that I'm not able to login when booting up in Live DVD mode and I did the same things to the Beta 2 by customizing the customized Beta 1 build even further to make its package list match the one from the Beta 2 build of the OS which required that I installed KDE Neon on the Beta 1 virtual machine as well as putting the data files from the eXtern OS Beta 2 Live DVD into it. Of course, there will be no guarantees of the web data working correctly embedded on the virtual machine but the funny thing was, while customizing things, I sort of ran the eXtern OS desktop app from the Lost & Found menu which opened its own taskbar and desktop wallpaper after setting up the correct path. Of course, the data was from Beta 1 when I test-opened like that.
The system requirements are more or less changed and especially for the EULA which is absent in Beta 2. Other initial impressions are that you should be able to install Beta 2 of eXtern OS officially as well as access Terminal easily. In Beta 1, you should be able to install provided that you have the Linux distribution setup app like Ubiquity but that was an unofficial way and even then, in-place upgrades from Beta 1 to Beta 2 are NOT available. In theory, you should be able to upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 but, Ubuntu 16.04 to KDE Neon? That seemed impossible to me that I would have to do a clean install or some sort. Last impression is that there's even Over-The-Air update or some sort in Beta 2.
The end result was that the customized ISO of eXtern OS Beta 2 I did had lesser file size than the original ISO's file size which is 3GB+ compared to the Beta 1's 1GB+. I don't know if the controversy regarding data collection is gone in Beta 2 or not but this is one Linux operating system that you should keep it in check. Also, another concern is that eXtern OS has a bunch of stuffs that required paid licenses for implementation which the author had paid for as they don't seem to make it open-source.
