Subj : For you SBBS Sysops o
To   : Accession
From : Accession
Date : Sun Jun 30 2024 09:15 am

On Sun, 30 Jun 2024 04:20:04 -0500, you wrote:

 G>> Next time you're bored, spin up a VM with MX Linux (xfce desktop) and
 G>> see what you think.  It's about the only one I like any more.

 A> Thanks for the heads up, I've downloaded the XFCE as well as the Fluxbox
 A> (brings back memories) variants, and will give them a shot in the
 A> morning and get back to you.

Following up on this, both versions are snappy, and installation was a breeze. However (and this has been long-standing), I would have to spend a good amount of time changing themes, icons, window borders, etc. because the stock ones that come with XFCE and Fluxbox are old, plain, blacked out, squared corners and just flat out ugly, to me anyways (always have been).

The Fluxbox version is on an older kernel (6.1 compared to 6.6) than the XFCE version, which they tout as their flagship. I have always had a place for Fluxbox, though. And it looks like now you're able to have a decent dash to dock type thing like Gnome uses in there as well. I've always liked how you can right click anywhere on the desktop and pull up a nice, straightforward application launcher menu. Again, though, default window borders and icons leave something to be desired.

Besides my anal retentiveness on how things actually look, it seems to operate nicely, and that's the important part. If I were to ever go with a GUI on Linux, it would probably either be a slimmed down version of Gnome (if there's still some kind of gnome-light version or whatever) in order to try and keep it fast, or I would have to completely change up the aesthetics of a default XFCE or Fluxbox install.

I still imagine as far as speed goes, you're probably better off installing a base like Debian, or Archlinux, or Slackware, or whatever you're into, and then installing your desktop environment on top of that. That way you control what else gets installed after that, since most of these distros add their own apps and bloatware that you may never actually need. Obviously, people pick these distros to avoid the extra work it takes to do all that, and MX definitely seems to be able to compete with the rest of them.

Regards,
Nick

.... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
--- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:115.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderb
 * Origin: _thePharcyde distribution system (Wisconsin) (723:1/1)
 þ Synchronet þ _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin)

.