User experience

Will you enjoy working with them?

As always we’re testing the distributions across many different categories to determine the winner. But even top scores in all the tests isn’t going to be enough if putting it to work leaves the user battered, bruised, and looking for an alternative.

For a normal distribution, the number of applications it bundles has a direct influence on its usability. But a distribution meant for older hardware is more than the sum of its applications.

This is why the user experience, which is a culmination of all the different factors, such as performance and eye candy, is so important. We want an easy-to-use distribution that’s completely usable out of the box. The distro will get bonus points if there isn’t too steep a learning curve.

Emmabuntüs 8/10

Emmabuntüs’s welcome screen proudly identifies the distribution as aimed to refurbish old computers and help you familiarise with Linux. To that end, the welcome screen provides quick links to Tutorials, Tools, Settings Manger, etc.

Its Xfce desktop has traditionally been thought of as plain or vanilla, but Emmabuntüs’s choice of Cairo dock makes the desktop pop. The vast selection of applications ensures that the distribution will appeal to a vast section of users. It’s also incredibly easy to customise the distribution to your liking, whether it’s changing the desktop elements such as the dock or installing additional software.

The dock features many different applications, as well as categories of applications such as Maintenance that house different applications. The entire experience is quite polished, but only if you can scrounge at least 4GB of RAM.

Feren OS 8/10

We like working with Feren OS. It presents a bright and cheerful desktop. Unlike the other distributions, however, its greatest drawback is that the project will cease to support 32-bit machines beyond 2023. But that’s still a few years away.

The project advises at least 2GB RAM, but if our tests are any indication 4GB is preferable for optimum performance. The distribution will appeal to experienced users as well as novices, who will appreciate the welcome screen with its ability to install packages, such as restricted codecs, and recommend additional useful software.

The distribution also supports installing Snap packages and will let you enable desktop effects and configure hot corners. The partial rolling-release nature of the distribution can also serve as a soft introduction, to enable you to move to true rolling-release distributions down the road.