from the Does-it-require-flux-capacitors? dept.
MX Linux Fluxbox Respin Officially Released for Raspberry Pi - 9to5Linux:
The MX Linux team announced today the release and general availability of the MX Linux Fluxbox Community Respin for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.
Initially announced in January 2021, the MX-Fluxbox Raspberry Pi respin is MX Linux's first release for the tiny Raspberry Pi devices. As its name suggests, it uses the ultra-lightweight Fluxbox window manager by default and, just like MX Linux, it's based on the stable Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" software repositories.
[...] If you want to run MX Linux on your Raspberry Pi computer, you can download MX-Fluxbox Raspberry Pi "Ragout" 21.02.20 right now from the release announcement page. Meanwhile, you can check out my first look article to see it in action and learn about what works and what doesn't.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Monday February 22 2021, @03:32PM (3 children)
I think I'll give this a try. Last time I used MX Linux, it was a pleasant experience. This sounds like a nice balance. Fluxbox isn't the greatest experience for desktop users who are used to windows/apple or even gnome/kde, but it's very light on resources. Which is a very good thing when we're talking about the RaspberryPi.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday February 22 2021, @10:30PM (1 child)
Yeah, plus it’s a true silent PC. Not to mention the power savings. No need for fancy $200 80Plus Platinum to squeeze out the last watt of savings.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday February 22 2021, @10:41PM
Silent, unless you slap on one of these [thepihut.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:11AM
I have a Pi 400, and since it's a self-contained PC and keyboard combo, I decided to set it up to be primarily keyboard driven just for fun. The idea is to make it be a usable device that only needs power and a display to connect to to be useful. With that in mind, I went with a tiling window manager instead of a mouse-driven one, and it's been a pretty good experience so far.
I don't like the typical dynamic tiling WMs, though, so I usually stick to Notion [notionwm.net], which is a lot like using screen or tmux except that the frames can have tabs as well. This time, however, I decided to give i3 a try. Behaviour's not quite the same but it's still flexible, just in a different way (using scripts to send messages via i3-msg instead of Notion's Lua-based scripting). Seems to have better default handling of some common issues like application dialogues, so I've had to do less manual tweaking which has been nice. RatPoison [nongnu.org] is another one I've thought about trying but haven't yet. Tiling WMs seem to universally be lightweight so they make a good choice for constrained environments like the Raspberry Pi, and they work well on smaller screens which can be a bonus on them as well.
Another good option for a lightweight mouse-oriented GUI is WindowMaker [windowmaker.org]. It's an old-school WM that's been around for ages, was never particularly bloated, and hasn't really gotten heavier over the years so its footprint is TINY now compared to modern hardware. Even on something weaker like a Raspberry Pi.
None of these options have the eye candy of modern KDE or GNOME but on a Raspberry Pi that's probably a good thing. I guess if someone wants lightweight eye candy they could try Enlightenment, which is still around. Always felt a little wrong/weird to me, though I do use its terminal emulator (terminology [enlightenment.org]) because I like its ability to view images directly in the terminal. The way it does it is non-standard and theming the damn thing is a pain in the ass, but it's still basically the best option for it because sixel [wikipedia.org] support is still practically nonexistent in terminal emulators. :/
(Score: 4, Informative) by bart9h on Monday February 22 2021, @05:18PM (7 children)
It's also worth mentioning that MX Linux is systemd-free.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Monday February 22 2021, @08:10PM (4 children)
It it? Or does it always ship with systemd and you have the choice of using either full systemd or SysV init with systemd-shim.
Perhaps you're thinking of MX's sister distro Antix?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 22 2021, @10:50PM (1 child)
Sounds like they're going with the option of, more choice is better.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 22 2021, @11:00PM
Here's the missing link from my post above: https://mxlinux.org/blog/about-mx-19-and-systemd [mxlinux.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday February 23 2021, @01:17AM (1 child)
You're right, you have the option to install systemd on MX.
But I would still call it not infected (as it's not mandatory and not even default) and systemd-free (since you are free to choose not to install and use it).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Tuesday February 23 2021, @08:52PM
It appears systemd is always installed on MX so that it's libs are available for any apps that want them. You just get a choice of whether to use it or SysV for init.
So MX is still infected, users just get a choice whether systemd is injected directly into its brain or whether the disease is just lurking somewhere in its bowels, ready to metastasise.
(Score: 4, Funny) by epitaxial on Monday February 22 2021, @08:39PM (1 child)
Typing devuan into google made me realize how they picked that awful name. Google keeps asking me if I really meant debian. I thought about trying Arch on my main desktop but those jokers can't even write an install script. Might as well manually untar every package too. The last sane distro is Slackware and that's what I settled on.
(Score: 5, Funny) by corey on Monday February 22 2021, @10:28PM
> Google keeps asking me if I really meant debian
I’ll keep asking you if you really meant DuckDuckGo. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @12:51PM
I run the slackware on the 4gb version, no gui, its awesome.