I installed this on a spare platter drive to try it. It’s running XFCE, but dressed up so nice, you can’t tell. And it has a bunch of sci fi themed backgrounds in /usr/share/backgrounds that add to its flair. Steam games worked so well right off, I spent all day installing and playing them. Windows sits on my lonely SSD, never getting any attention. I have bigger dreams for that SSD, Salient is going on center stage!!!
Check out Silent Robot on YouTube, you will find it there too.
Worth a look in a VM. I like what you said, “It’s running XFCE, but dressed up so nice, you can’t tell.” LOL
Isn’t that the truth with most XFCE installs being pretty dated looking. 
I do like XFCE 4.14, and did not mean to detract from its appearance. I have it on my laptop and it is very nice looking. Salient looks better. I had to inspect to see that it is modded 4.14…
Salient and games and backgrounds all conspired to make me think, this what every OS should be like. Install the OS and your games, armed with Protondb, and you will have a great user experience…
That is why Silent Robot - originally built it as he wanted a Distro fit for his use case. He built it - we bullied him into publishing it and bingo you have an excellent Arch - xfce - distro for gaming and multimedia stuff.
But please remember this is how Silent Robot wants it - not everyone else - not happy with it, move elsewhere. Ask but if he says no - accept it.
Regards Zeb…
Be Kind Whenever Possible… It is Always Possible - Dalai Lama
Linux User #565092
x64 Desktop - AMD Threadripper 2950X - 64Gb RAM - NVIDIA RTX2080Ti 11Gb - 2 x 27" 4k 3840x2160 - 1 x 34" 4k (scaled) 5120x2160
x64 Laptop - i7-7700HQ @ 2.80GHz - 8Gb RAM - Nvidia GTX1050 4Gb - 15.6" HD 1920x1080
I’ll be testing Salient over the weekend on bare metal to see how it runs. Might be a solid alternative to Arch for those who don’t want to do a vanilla arch install (because it can be a pain in the backside to do, even if you’ve done it before) 
Depends if you want function or aesthetics 
I love XFCE, but don’t appreciate the author’s attitude to some of his more flawed design decisions, especially when it’s a glaring issue that other DEs approach in a uniform manner that he decides must be done differently.
In my case it was his attitude telling users to go use another DE if they didn’t like how he designed the treatment of a fullscreen application if it lost focus to another monitor, whereupon the panel on the monitor the fullscreen application was running on would overlay the fullscreen application (be it a fullscreen YouTube video, a running game etc).
If that was fixed so that fullscreen applications would be layered above panels despite losing focus then XFCE would be perfect for me.
I currently use Plasma as a result, because I’m a heavy user of my 2nd monitor, and videos & games were getting overlaid by the panel on monitor 1 all the time.
Plasma, Gnome, Win10, Cinnamon, Budgie etc all behave the same way and keep the fullscreen app on top of the panel, so why can’t XFCE? It’s very annoying IMO 
And the answer is very well!
Replaced my Manjaro installation with Salient, as Manjaro’s stable arm takes a wee bit too long to deliver updates IMO.
Works really well and has a lot going for it right out of the box in terms of apps pre-installed, wallpapers, configuration etc. Really liking it so far!
I bought Wolfenstien The New Order on sale, it’s installed in Salient. It’s a Sci Fi shooter, runs smooth as butter, totally addicting. All the games I have in Steam work, talk about the best out of box user experience, Salient delivers…
Until last night that is!
Installed LibreOffice Fresh using pacman and it kept freezing up at the splash screen. Tried running it from the terminal and disabling OpenCL while I was at it, but no dice.
So uninstalled it and pacman installed LO Still, but even worse it froze on the splash screen then crashed the video driver, leaving me with a screen resembling a lovely colour patchwork…
So it’s gone, and I’ve replaced it with Endeavour OS. And as an aside, LO Fresh installed and ran just fine there, so there’s something up with how Salient is doing or handling things LO does on startup.
Damn shame, because Salient looks like a really nice distro which would be right up my alley, but I really do need LibreOffice for my degree work, so maybe I’ll give it another go in about 3/4 months on a spare SSD, and see how it goes.
Silent has stated he has no need for an Office Suite - so does nothing special to help it along. I cannot see that changing anytime soon.
LibreOffice fresh is working fine here, using a Radeon video card. Not sure why yours locks up Sar
Yeah shame, it’s a really nice distro otherwise. Guess this is the major drawback of a single guy looking after a distro in this way.
Odd. Ah well, it’s nuked now. Going back to Manjaro later tonight with a fresh KDE build, because Endeavour managed to somehow break as well after installing Plasma (sudo pacman -S Plasma) and switching to SDDM. I’d encrypted the drive during install for both Salient & Endeavour, so that may be causing some issues as well, so I might just skip encryption with the Manjaro installation tonight just in case…