In a rather curious turn, the Raspberry Pi foundation has released an x86 PC port of its PIXEL+Debian Linux desktop environment.
PIXEL (which is a clunky backronym for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is an extensively modified version of the LXDE X11 desktop environment. It was originally released in September for use with Raspberry Pi single-board computers, but now it has also been packaged up for x86 PCs. You can boot your Windows or Mac PC into the PIXEL desktop environment right now, if you so wish.
In the words of Eben Upton, founder of the foundation, PIXEL is "our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment [...] Put simply, it's the GNU/Linux we would want to use." To that end, PIXEL is both clean and modern-looking, but more importantly it is useful, with a wide range of productivity software and programming tools pre-installed. PIXEL doesn't eschew proprietary software, either; it even comes with the Adobe Flash browser plug-in.
Can any PIXEL users comment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:15AM
The screenshots look like my xfce4 configurations -- if I were using a fugly font from 1999. What limitations were there?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:39AM
I'm guessing font anti-aliasing and hinting is not being used? Most fonts look awful without those. Terminus is one of the few that still looks good.
Font anti-aliasing and hinting really slow down a low power computer. Turning that off made a big difference in speed-- on a 133MHz Pentium laptop from the 1990s. Raspberry Pis are more powerful than that, but not by much.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday December 25 2016, @03:22AM
Raspberry Pi 3 is a 1.2 GHz quad core.
Way faster than your Pentium.
And the hinting doesn't seem slow it down much at all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.