MakuluLinux LinDoz
Always on the hunt for distros that can help him reel in users to Linux, Mayank Sharma finds one that matches his sensibilities.
Always on the hunt for distros that can help him reel in users to Linux, Mayank Sharma finds one that matches his sensibilities.
MakuluLinux’s LinDoz is an interesting edition of the Vietnamese project. It sports a customised Gnome desktop that’s tweaked to feel familiar to users coming from Windows.
The distro argues that it takes this approach to enhance the experience of someone switching to an alien operating system. At the same time though, they want to give the users all the power and dexterity of the underlying Linux base.
The Gnome 3 environment underneath the Windows-lookalike desktop has had a lot of its default functionality overwritten to suit the developer’s vision of the workflow that he feels will work best for long-time Windows users.
Desktop appearance is a major aspect of LinDoz and the distro offers some interesting options to help users tweak their installation as per their requirements. The distro’s theme manager bundles about 20 cursor themes and some 14 colour themes. Clicking any changes them on the fly, which is a nice touch. The colour themes change the colour of the buttons, highlights, selections and icons.
Another LinDoz characteristic is the Conky-powered desktop clock, which as well as the time, displays weather information, system information, updates from the project and random quotes.
Instead of fumbling for these custom tools in the application menu, LinDoz offers them from the rightclick context menu on the desktop, which is another of the distro’s specialities. The context-menu has options to help first-timers easily access the custom interfaces for managing all aspects of the desktop including the wallpaper, clock, themes and more.
Doozy of a distro
The previous editions of the distro were based on Ubuntu Focal Fossa and sported a tweaked Cinnamon desktop. Starting with this release however, LinDoz is powered by a new hybrid Debian base, which is a cocktail of Debian and its own custom repos.
LinDoz ships as a Live installable distro that boots straight into a full screen introductory video to orient new users with the customised desktop. Installation is handled by the distro-agnostic Calamares installer, which does its job pretty well.
Like all good desktop distros, LinDoz boots into a first-boot wizard called the Setup Manager that takes users through a series of key steps including setting up Btrfs filesystem snapshots. While the functionality is called Snapshot in the first-boot wizard, it’s provided by the Timeshift utility, which is how it’s listed in the application menu. The naming irregularity is a usability break for new users in our opinion, as the clueless expats from the other universe would be left scratching their head trying to find the snapshot app in the menus.
As a desktop distro though LinDoz takes the pragmatic approach and has no qualms about mixing proprietary software with open source ones. In addition to all the usual desktop apps, the distro also includes fully configured instances of Winetricks and PlayOnLinux to help users install their favourite Windows-only tools on top of Linux. Package management is handled via Gnome Software that’s equipped to install both Flatpaks and Snaps as well.
To the distro’s credit, despite this mix of repos and all sorts of packages and configurations, it remains reliably solid and performed without fail on virtual as well as on real hardware.
All things considered, the best thing about LinDoz for us are its custom tools that to a great extent manage to match the Linux desktop user experience with the expectations of first-timers.