It’s been awhile since I posted anything on my website. We are, of course, still in a pandemic, but I’m in Texas and as of writing Texas is coming out of one of the worst freezes and winter storms in modern history.

This has given me plenty of time to play with my 20 year old hobby: installing Linux distributions.

Linux distributions are a dime a dozen these days. Most are based on somebody else’s distribution. Ubuntu is based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu. Sabayon is based on Gentoo. Manjaro is based on Arch. So on and so on. Some are independently developed, like Gentoo, Red Hat, Arch, Debian, Slackware and so on.

Many distros specialize in certain ways, like for education, penetration testing, being as much “Windows-like” as they can for newbies, et cetera.

Imagine my surprise when I suddenly stumbled on a new distro that’s so revolutionary that I just had to make it my main distribution! It’s called Mabox Linux.

Now, Mabox is based on another distribution – Manjaro – which in turn is based on Archlinux, and it is using a desktop environment that I would never ever have considered making my main DE – Openbox. But let me tell you. Wow.

This distribution is not only wow – beautiful. It’s very functional, very customizable and in every way the perfect desktop environment for an operating system because of the special optimizations they have applied. I’ve included a screenshot of my desktop below. The only thing I’ve added is my own customized conky with the time in hours, minutes and seconds.

Customization is both easy and frustrating. For example, I recently discovered how to add items to my panel and I did add some items. Now I want to rearrange the order the items are in the panel and I can’t remember how to get back to the config file. So it’s a challenge, but wow. Look at the screen and the functionality. Not bad at all for an Openbox desktop environment.

If you’re looking for a Linux distro to satisfy you needs, this just might be the one. So download your ISO today.