I have so much to thank Bill Gates for: introducing me to the baffling joys of consumer computing with Windows 95; teaching me the meaning of fear and dread with Windows 98; leading me to the sunlit uplands of Windows XP; getting me out of Microsoft altogether with the arrival of Vista. I hardly know where to start. And if I hadn’t flown into a high-minded anti-Microsoft, down-with-Bill-Gates fury at the start of this year, would I ever have stumbled upon ZenWalk? I doubt it.
Now, of course, I owe a debt of thanks to ZenWalk. How foolish is this? I’m just a writer who uses his PC for that fundamental trinity of word processing, emails and internet. Listening to music and minding the family photos are the two main additional functions, and after that… How important can an OS be? After all, mine is a stand-alone desktop existence of the humblest kind – once predicated on certain Microsoft assumptions about the way things would pan out in the years to come: some gains, some new inefficiencies, more of everything, especially that excruciating Microsoft paternalism, dragging the sacred material of my life into its folders, its crappy taxonomies, its relentlessly moronic understanding of what My Music or My Photos actually means. And I’d be there right now, except for the fact that Bill announced at the start of the year that he really was going to take us for a bunch of chumps by charging authentically monopolistic prices for a new and only debatably improved OS, just because he could. For this writer, the red mist descended, I got wildly pious about the iniquities of a consumer marketplace where competition has effectively been snuffed out, and vowed, if I possibly could, to live a life without Microsoft from that day forward.
But what do I know about operating systems? I can install Windows XP blindfolded by now, but the alternatives? An encounter with SuSe a few years ago affected me like a rash, but cleared up quickly enough, after which I humbly returned to the known stupidities of Windows. Software is a black art, after all. While I can cobble together the physical bits of a PC easily enough, the animating spirit, the language that makes it work, is as alien to me as Cuneiform, with GNU/Linux the Linear B of the business. Then Ubuntu – friendly, thoughtful, wholly sensible – emerges from the mist, and before you know it I have Ubuntu 6.10 working nicely on my PC. Microsoft is already becoming a shadowy memory, and then, one day, I bump into ZenWalk 4.4.1: which is, oddly enough, and even more than Ubuntu, the real revelation, the real life-changer.
Simplicity is half the reason. After a few months tinkering with OpenSuSe (better, this time), Mandriva (a failure throughout) and different manifestations of Ubuntu, I now know my KDE from my Gnome from my Xfce, and of all these Xfce is the lightest, the brightest, the most discreet, the smartest. And it’s Xfce that greets you in ZenWalk. Then the Zen people give you just what you need to work with, and no more. The excellent AbiWord; a tuneplayer called Audacious, which is the ugliest little bugger I have ever seen, but which works brilliantly; a spartan but absolutely impeccable picture manager called GQview; Firefox and Thunderbird, the usual suspects; and some other things which I, candidly, don’t understand. The package manager is a bit half-baked; but on the other hand, the native screen resolution and clarity are so good, I didn’t even need to hunt down any of those tricksy nVidia drivers when I was installing ZenWalk. Indeed, I still cling to the insane idea that consumer electronics should make things easy rather than hard and that the less I have to do, the better. This then helps me rationalize my Linux ineptitude: the fact that I still can’t get a tarball to come out right; that I’m fingers and thumbs the moment a terminal opens up; that I am never, ever going to compile a program. I am old; I am lazy. ZenWalk just worked, mercifully.
On top of which, it made me realize how much I now loathe the progressive hypertrophy of other operating systems. Mac’s OSX, for instance, can be awfully nice, but I hate it for the way it keeps marketing itself to me, finding interesting things for me to do. Ubuntu is excellent, but it has a way of proffering fresh applications like a nervous party hostess urging you to take yet another canapé. And as for Windows – this has become a leering, gussied-up nightmare, with visual tropes thieved alternately from American automobiles of the 1970’s and a child’s playpen. Does this make ZenWalk’s simplicity somehow retrograde? Because it goes back to a comparatively minimal, unadorned look? No: because OS eye-candy is only there to disguise the poverty of our ambitions. If your musical heritage grinds to a halt with Bryan Adams, iTunes (and by extension, the whole Apple culture) is there to retrieve you, to turn you into precisely that creative metropolitan sophisticate Apple would have you believe is lying just below your surface. The fact that there is a perpetual disjunction between the sleekness of OSX and the banality of much of what goes into it, only increases the tension between what is and what can never be. ZenWalk, on the other hand, is beautifully clear, chasteningly grown up, honest. It deals with what you put in; it can’t make it any better or worse than it already is. For that alone, I love it.
The other part of the equation is, of course, speed. A confession: I beefed up my PC in the expectation that, what with Vista and the onward waddle of progress, I would have to have 2Gb RAM and a x2 processor, or die. Which I now have: I ought to be fast. And indeed, Windows XP briefly revealed a zestiness it never had before; while Ubuntu 6.10 was even quicker. But ZenWalk? Things happens instantly – or at least, as quickly as I can take them in. It works as fast as I can, with none of that perceptible latency you get even on a fast machine, and it’s the first time I’ve ever experienced this on a home computer. Is this because of the Xfce desktop? Because of all the extra debris Zen doesn’t install? Search me. What I do know is that it even spreads this joy to my external HDD. This latter used to be a bit of a drudge, something I used once a day, if I remembered, toilingly to back up whatever I’d just produced. But now it’s as much a part of the process as the internal drive, instantly accessible, puppyishly eager to look for that email address I might have saved, once, back in 2002. Put all this together with the conceptual clarity and lucidity of ZenWalk and you have a small but intense revolution – something genuinely liberating, that sets you free to do whatever you want, as quickly or as reflectively as you please. Less is infinitely more.
What are the snags? Well, if ZenWalk breaks, I’m too dumb to fix it. I’ll have no option but to reinstall completely and hope for the best. In that sense, it still has something of that contingent, seat-of-the-pants quality I nervously remember from Win95. Also, tragically, my defection to ZenWalk does not seem to have brought the Microsoft hegemony crashing to its knees. At present, we must hope that if Dell ships a few Ubuntu PCs in the next year, this will help promote domesticated Linux from the status of a microniche to that of a niche with prospects. But after that? GNU/Linux is so multifarious, with so many scores of competing distros, I’m amazed I found ZenWalk at all. In the Balkanized Linux universe, what chance for the vast majority of everyday users who buy the OS with the PC and only change the one with the other? How are they ever to Walk the Zen? There is just no mechanism to help them. (Parenthetically, can I point out that GNU/Linux fans seem to be, in comparison with the average, stoical PC user, nothing but sleazy, promiscuous slatterns, drifting from distro to distro like so many Edwardian society ladies, sometimes running several distros at once in a menage a trois of competing desires? I only put it in those terms because I’m afraid I might turn into one myself.)
Anyway. We shall see. In the meantime, I’m loving ZenWalk and hoping fervently it will stay around for a while. And, yes, in honor of ZenWalk’s originator, Jean-Phillippe Guillemin, I am proud to announce, Je suis Linuxiste: tendence Zen. Long live the revolution.
For your reference: ZenWalk
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Nice little article there! I quite liked the personal and humble style
And note, the word review is nowhere to be seen. 
I thought the first paragraph on page two was worth the entire article, indeed worth the entire expansive, voluminous, far-reaching, and capacious web site
Any paragraph that combines “Bryan Adams” and “hypertrophy” is OK in my book.
Would it have been terribly difficult to link to “ZenWalk” for those of us who have never heard of it?
Guess its time to hit google so I can at least see some screenshots.
Was thinking the same thing.I wanted to see a screenshot of his system since he was willing to key us in on some of his hardware.
Ever hear of DistroWatch?
Now, a comment on the actual article (about Audacious):
I’m not sure, but I have a feeling the writer just stuck with the default skin (most likely), or is just not into the Winamp-style look to begin with. Personally, I love it–it’s my favorite app–considering I’ve been using Winamp in Windows since around 1997, and I prefer its simplicity over a full-blown media library-style program. If there were no Audacious, my switch to Linux would’ve been much harder.
Its default skin in Zenwalk isn’t too good though; in fact, I barely remember what it looks like (too bright, white and plain, that’s all I remember). I changed it a long time ago (that collection I built up over the years in Windows still comes in handy). But one thing’s for sure: the skin “ArcticAMP” looks daaamn good, nice and clean, good colors, and has been my choice for at least half a year. Looks great with the default Zenwalk theme, although I’ve customized my entire Xfce theme.
Anyone who wants to check out ArcticAMP, here’s a link:
http://customize.org/winamp2/skins/33244
Would it have been so hard to read the second page of the article and use the link provided there?
Should one have read most of the first page and still been left wondering what “ZenWalk” is? The writer failed.
The pagination is silly enough (most multi-part articles here have longer per-page content than this whole article), but not linking to it on the entire first page, much less the abstract/blurb, is just frustrating.
Edited 2007-06-15 06:12
I guess the choice was to mod -1 or say “go f–king google it!1”. I can’t tell which response would be more idiotic.
And OSAlert adds “-“s to words it deems inappropriate, it seems. I did not know that.
Yes, this is off topic. That is a reason to mod down. Nothing in my original comment had such a reason.
I used Arch Linux many years. Then suddenly got tired; too much fixing. I joined the Ubuntu-craze. Everything just worked, and it was almost as fresh as Arch.
However, now I see that I don’t use any features of Ubuntu. I don’t ever start Gnome, DBUS or any other resource hungry bastards. I run Ion3 and do everything in the terminal.
So I would maybe be better off making the switch back to the simplicity (and Zen
of Arch Linux. However, I’ve heard so much praise for Zenwalk (like this funny article), so I might just try that as well.
I personally use Ubuntu with Windowmaker or fluxbox, so as such we’re in kind of the same position. Personally, One of the big advantages with Ubuntu and one of the main reasons I stick to it is the availability of obscure software.
I don’t need much of it, but every time I find myself in need of some obscure software, I tend to find that someone, somewhere has already packaged it for Ubuntu. Perhaps not in the official repositories, but always somewhere.
Then suddenly got tired; too much fixing. I joined the Ubuntu-craze. Everything just worked, and it was almost as fresh as Arch.
Goodness, what on Earth needs fixing on Arch?
What doesn’t?
What I would have liked to read, too, was how his family took the switch in. Anyway, refreshing article and I’m happy that this guy has found a home with ZenWalk (btw, since when is it called ZenWalk? Is this another distro than Zen?).
I guess, he would have found a home with a number of other, more spartan distributions that are just below the public horizon or suffer from an unwarranted reputation of being “hard to learn”.
Very nice, non-geek writing!
He describes well for me at least the awkward position of taking an increasingly severe dislike to both Apple and Windows offerings but not being entirely sure of oneself when it comes to surfacing the hidden depths of Linux: good that he feels happy sailing with ZenWalk.
I’ve been running Zenwalk since version 2.6 and I’ve been enjoying every version that came out since. This distribution is a speed king and speed isn’t its only merit.
By they way, version 4.6.1 is out since a couple of weeks now, which is better that 4.4.1 that is reviewed here in so many things…
Link to homepage for anyone that needs it:
http://www.zenwalk.org/
I have one question I haven’t found an answer to. How compatible is zenwalk with slackware? Or more precisly, if I download a slackware package from linuxpackages.net or some other site, can I reasonably expect it to work on zenwalk?
Yes, you can reasonably expect slackware package to work.
Zenwalk 4.6.1 use same basic lib as Slackware 11.
When you download package from Zenwalk mirror, xnetpkg take care of dependencies for you.
I don’t run into any problems, with the caveat that you still have to ensure the dependencies yourself if you’re not using NetPkg. I have Slack on one partition and Zenwalk on the other, and routinely download packages to one and then install them on the other later. I have also cross-installed programs I’ve compiled myself (Rox-Filer, rtorrent and a couple other little must-haves). They’re both rock-freakin-solid. The only problem I’ve ever had with either is with video drivers. I pretty much have to use the nvidia driver. The Xorg nv driver won’t give me full resolution.
YES INDEED.
To the author: yes, default Audacious is ugly, but you can use Winamp themes on it. Helps a lot. Just drag ‘n drop into the themes list in preferences.
re: dagw
Yes, you can use Slackware 11 packages. I’ve been using Zenwalk since before it was called Zenwalk and it’s always accepted Linuxpackages.net packages nicely.
Or you could use amarok,banshee to name a few
That depends on what you want. Some people just want a little something that plays music, and something like Audacious is just right for them. Some people want a music library, and so Amarok is the thing.
It has a lot to do with personal taste. People develop a very personal relation with their music, and it shows in their choice of a player.
“Less is infinitely more”
Good summary of Zenwalk and Slackware spirit.
Zen 4.6.1 is a very good tool for day to day work.
Zenwalk is a good distro without any doubt… but it’s not for old PCs anymore (I mean, really old PCs as it once was), and you can’t compare abiword with openoffice, nor gqview with digikam, nor you can compare its security updates and availability of packages with a mainstream distro.
So, although Zenwalk is indeed great, it doesn’t fill more than a small niche!
I also have an X2 and 2GB of RAM, but still can’t force myself to run anything heavier than XFCE on Zenwalk or Fluxbox on Slackware (I run Slackware current, so I occasionally find another OS on another partition useful).
I think that both visually and in a what-services-the_OS-runs way, simplicity is better. My wife has a tricked out dual-core Sony laptop, and she puts on all these toolbars and whatnot. Ends up making the computer more difficult to use visually and, being Windows, leads inevitably to system restores and clean installs.
For me, filling my 21″ monitor with one work window (browser or whatever), gkrellm and the Fluxbox toolbar is perfect. All the info I need, none of the useless crap I don’t. Same with Zenwalk and what it offers casual users: all the help they need, and none of the bloat they don’t.
Nice to see a recent convert agree.
I like seeing an OS commentary/review from someone other than an OS geek. Really, the real gauge of the success of desktop Linux is what non OS geeks are thinking/doing. What do writers, truck drivers, waiters, nurses, etc. think. Too many times a review of a distro includes “I dropped to the command line and …”. That is not an option for some people. I write software for a living. I don’t really care a whole lot of what techno’s think of my program (I do care what they think of my code, though!), but what the end users think.
Good going, Mr. Jennings. Let’s see more of that!
First 3 paragraphs do nothing but slam Microsoft with absolutely no references to any problems he’s had nor did he try to seek any help. The first 3 articles had nothing to do with this. Was it too much to ask to just have you start with “I downloaded and installed ZenWalk and here is my experience with it”? Linux users always feel this need to justify why they are running their OS with some type of Microsoft bashing.
Linux isn’t exactly error free either with its updates every few days. I had a custom kernel I compiled and it worked fine, installed ubuntu updates, on next reboot that kernel no longer worked. Kernel Panic.
You cannot take an arbitrary custom kernel, chuck it into an arbitrary Linux distro and expect it to magically work. That is hardly bug.
But my custom kernel did work up until I installed the updates. It worked for a couple of weeks.
That’s not the point. You can’t take a random custom kernel, throw it into a random distro, and then update it normally and expect it to ‘just work’
That’s what the parent is saying.
“You cannot take an arbitrary custom kernel, chuck it into an arbitrary Linux distro and expect it to magically work. That is hardly bug.”
Well, yes and no. One of the strengths of Linux is that you CAN do that. Look on any blog or anywhere on the net and that is touted as one of the biggest benefits. Comments like “If you don’t like the distro’s kernel, just compile your own” are very commonly made. What is not said though is that once you DO plug your custom kernel into the distro’s framework, you can no longer rely on the distro’s updates for any software, without suffering the same fate of the system not booting.
What is not said though is that once you DO plug your custom kernel into the distro’s framework, you can no longer rely on the distro’s updates for any software, without suffering the same fate of the system not booting.
Unless the distro has patched something you don’t like, you should really use the distro’s kernel source and config as a starting point to roll your own kernel. Far less headaches that way.
I’ve done this on some production servers and it works reasonably well, although recompiling after every kernel update is a PITA.
No, it’s not said.
Then again, why would anybody expect somebody who was such a novice to start rolling their own kernel?
Seriously, if I roll my own (especially if I’ve done any amount of reading on the subject) I know that I shouldn’t then do a dist-upgrade from ubuntu, allowing it to essentially overwrite what I’ve done.
Sorry, but if somebody is a novice they shouldn’t be custom compiling kernels on a production system. If anything test it a bit first.
It was a wonderful article. All the bashing was very light hearted and the author poked fun at himself.
But it didn’t bring anything to the article.
Yes it did. It provided some background to explain the motives behind his switch.
Can’t unsatisfied Microsoft customers complain about their products anymore?
And now I’m being modded down for bring up good points about the article and my own experiences with linux. If you don’t want to be criticized then don’t post an article, especially parts that don’t pertain to the subject matter.
No, you’re being modded down because you missed the point. (At least, I hope that’s why you’re being modded down). Furthermore, you make sweeping and obviously untrue statements; if there is any Microsoft bashing, it is in but a single paragraph not the ‘First 3 paragraphs’. By my eye, the second paragraph is more critical of Linux than anything else.
To complain that Linux is unstable because you do unstable things doesn’t seem to do you much credit, either. I’ve been playing with Mandriva One, which was completely stable until I started screwing with the Kernel and drivers. This is my own fault, I chose to take a working product and mess with it. If you try to mod your iPod, and in the process you break it, is this Apple’s fault?
Criticism should be welcomed, but only if it’s intelligent.
Edited 2007-06-13 16:49
And you missed my point. Blatantly bashing Microsoft had no purpose. Like I said, he could have started with saying “ZenWalk is a linux distro that does this for me and this is why I am using it”. Then I was criticized for sharing my own experiences. I never said it was unstable, I said an update caused a working machine to fail.
This isn’t even a review. He doesn’t owe us anything. Why should he explain his issues with MS?
Frankly, if he doesn’t want to tell us, it’s not really our business is it?
Point is, he dislikes Microsoft (if he left that part out somebody would be whining that he was far too biased and wasn’t upfront about his feelings). He had issues. He heard Linux was a proposed solution. Had bad Suse experience.
Tried Zen, really loves it. Gave us, from a normal user perspective, excellent reasons as to why.
…Some people are never happy.
No, you’re being modded down because you missed the point.
I realize this is off topic, but there is no “missed the point” mod option, just like there isn’t any “just plain wrong” option. So as such people shouldn’t be modded down for these reasons.
I’m a Microsoft refugee. I also once or twice installed updates and had a panic; my Windows would not boot! I’ve also compiled a kernel on Linux, and learned that an update can undo your custom compile,yes it’s true! I had to repair my “free as in beer” OS! Linux isn’t error free, it does have security updates every few days instead of one Tuesday a month. Another problem I’m having with Linux is that I can’t seem to find my Linux Genuine Advantage Validation Key!
“Another problem I’m having with Linux is that I can’t seem to find my Linux Genuine Advantage Validation Key!”
Maybe Novell and Xandros will have that “feature” in future versions of their software.
I stepped into that. I was trying to be lighthearted, but regrettably you may be right. I’ve read the arguments about Novell, both pro and con, I feel it was a bad move by Novell and also a bad move by Xandros. Linux has been doing fine without MS as the author of the article discovered. There are reasons why average users like me stay with Linux. It’s more user friendly than MS, and I’m not an expert on buisness, but I think Novell and Xandros will not prosper in the long run.
It doesn’t work in VirtualBox 1.38 on Windows XP.
Which is a shame as I was looking forward to playing with it at work.
http://img14.imgspot.com/?u=/u/07/163/12/Zenwalk.PNG
Nice article and gives me the dejavu feeling i had after having installed PCLinuxOS.
One of the few distros which offers PAE i686 kernels so i can activate the NX bit on my amd64 kernel.although i “only” have 1 GB RAM and the kernel is geared towards 64 GB RAM max.booting with noexec=on noexec32=on gives:NX (Execute Disable) protection: active when i issue: dmesg|grep NX
Awkwardly no other distro exept pclinuxos (at least that i know off) did it.
I’ve not used Zenwalk before but I might just give it a go after reading this.
(Parenthetically, can I point out that GNU/Linux fans seem to be, in comparison with the average, stoical PC user, nothing but sleazy, promiscuous slatterns, drifting from distro to distro like so many Edwardian society ladies, sometimes running several distros at once in a menage a trois of competing desires?….)
That’s too funny. They’re called distro whores for a reason!
He’s realistic enough to admit that if he encounters a serious problem, chances are he’ll have to reinstall the OS because he lacks the knowledge to mend it.
This is indeed a problem with a lot of Linux distros when run by less technically minded users. For this reason, a good compromise imho is to run something like Ubuntu but install and use the XFCE DE. In the event of problems – pretty well inevitable with desktop Linux – you get access to Gnomeish gui tools and all of Ubuntu’s help forums. The same would be even truer of SuSE and YaST (though he’s clearly not a SuSE fan). Frankly, with his PC’s specs he could run pretty well anything and it would seem fast.
Zenwalk is a jolly nice distro in my experience. But there’s no denying that it’s stripped down and is not really aimed at the “2-gig + x2 cpu” crowd. I suspect that the author of this article is short-changing himself to a degree, because he’s not actually getting to try the best things Linux has to offer. Like, erm, Digikam, K3b or Amarok but that’s just my 2 cents. Anyway he’s happy and he has the neat ‘n’ speedy Zenwalk up and running OK so hip-hooray. I just hope that trying to deal with a serious borkage and Zenwalk doesn’t put him off the whole experience.
Edited 2007-06-13 17:51
“But there’s no denying that it’s stripped down and is not really aimed at the “2-gig + x2 cpu” crowd.”
No. Zenwalk is really aimed at modern hardware. The fact that it is so fast makes it a good choice for relatively old hardware as well. I don’t think there’s anything stripped down about Zenwalk anyway. BTW, I’m running Zenwalk on my Core2Duo 1.6GHz/1GB RAM laptop and it feels amazingly fast.
Most people seem to think that if you have a modern high-spec PC you’d better run something bloated on it. Running something as fast as Zenwalk gives a real feeling on what your hardware can really do. The author of the article has realized that.
Nice to see someone enjoying Zenwalk.
But I start to worry a bit when I read this:
I’m not saying that the author is stupid. I understand him (I think), being lazy myself.
However, I feel it’s more about fear than anything else. Working with tarballs, compiling programs, typing a bit in the CLI, it’s all *not* difficult at all. All it takes is a little bit of time, but that investment is paid back tenfold. Usually, all you have to do is read a README file (which you may even skip) and an INSTALL file.
It’s a pity that, apparently, even a Slackware-based distro is not able to inspire its users to educate themselves to do *some* things the Unix way. Which gives so much more power to the user.
It’s understandable, though.
Well, in certain cases it’s easier than others.
On Gentoo, I could easily just compile all these things, because installing programs on Gentoo required having all the necessary header/source files to compile dependent programs; on the rare occasions in Kubuntu where I’ve tried to compile my own stuff I’ve had to grab the required development packages, which has generally required trial and error running ./configure.
It’s a different perspective. Gentoo, SourceMage, and Arch (I think) are designed with compile- (if not source-)-level tweaking in mind; SuSE, Red Hat, K/X/Ubuntu and Zenwalk simply aren’t meant to be used that way.
————-
In the same fashion, I nearly broke MY Ubuntu trying to install a custom kernel on it; I gave up when I realized I’d have to go outside the package manager for so many automatically-installed things (nVidia drivers in particular) to make it work, that I’d start missing security updates, automatic upgrades, and things WOULD break sooner than later.
That was shortly after I switched from Gentoo; once I realized Xubuntu didn’t work that way I was a happier man.
It sounds like this guy is happier, too. With Zenwalk, he may have a harder time compiling his own packages, but at the same time he won’t NEED to bother with that. No, it’s not THAT difficult, but when is it going to come up?
Edited 2007-06-14 03:31
Yes, it’s fear: fear that something will go wrong.
And even if you _can_ untar a file and run ./configure and the rest, then what happens when it doesn’t work? Fear, that’s what.
XFCE Desktop on Linux?
Don’t see much difference here than just running XFCE on any other distro.
Seldom do I see such lucid proses in a technical column. Cuneiform script! Linux is the Linear B of operating systems. You’ve made my day. Thank you.
This article convinced me to download ZenWalk and try it on my laptop. That’s fast, for sure. But then it takes some time to adapt (more than with other distros like Fedora or Suse), and the wireless configuration brought me back two years ago with the first steps of Ubuntu. And that’s clearly a very very annoying problem, even if I just have to solve it once. I need wpa, and can’t have it working yet. And even more annoying, after first boot, not network adapter AT ALL. I had to bring the firmware from my ubuntu to have my Intel 2200 wireless adapter recognized. But I can’t understand why the ethernet one is not working. So at the same time, it’s both very pleasant to use because of the speed, but also extremely frustrating as basically I can’t do anything on it
Sorry about the mix feelings, but the installation is clearly NOT meant for beginners. Then for everyday use, I will need to be able to use it
except i would have suggested linux mint, i have tried ubuntu but now that i have linux mint 3 running on my pc i have put my ubuntu cd in the bottom draw and thats where its staying.
“XFCE Desktop on Linux?
Don’t see much difference here than just running XFCE on any other distro.”
It’s Xfce on a customized Slackware 11 with a 2.6 kernel and HAL/dbus support. It has a package management system with dependency resolution yet still maintains full compatibility with Slackware packages. It is tweaked to run almost as fast and responsive as VectorLinux (another Slackware-based distro) but more newbie-friendly.
I could go on all day, but asking what makes any distro different from all the others will get you the same lengthy response.
But then, you already knew that, didn’t you?
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