Emmabuntüs DE 2 1.04
Not a big fan of the kitchen-sink approach, Mayank Sharma runs into one distro that’s put in enough effort to perform surprisingly well.
Not a big fan of the kitchen-sink approach, Mayank Sharma finds one distro that’s put in enough effort to perform well and has a heart of green behind it all…
The fact that this distro which is designed to work with reconditioned computers ships as a 3.3GB ISO image feels a little strange. But then its developers had to take into account the possibility that a majority of its users would not have access to the internet. This explains why it includes virtually all popular open-source apps as well as several commonly used proprietary ones. In our experience, the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ philosophy doesn’t augur well and only ends up confusing the user.
The Emmabuntüs project maintains several editions and the one we are reviewing is based on current stable Debian Stretch v9.9, featuring a customised Xfce desktop. Boot into the Live environment and you’re greeted with a first-boot wizard to help you setup the desktop. One of the objectives of the distro is to make itself attractive for first time users, and it does this by enlisting the help of Cairo-dock. The first-boot wizard helps you switch between three preconfigured configurations of the dock. There’s the default Simple version for new Linux users, a Basic version meant for a younger audience and a Full version that exposes all the bundled apps.
A slightly tweaked version of the wizard shows up after you’ve anchored the distro to your hard disk. This has an additional screen to help you personalise the desktop, with things like changing the wallpaper and switching to Xfce’s Whisker menu instead of the default traditional one. It’s followed by the proprietary software dialogue box, which shows a list of proprietary apps and codecs including Skype and Teamviewer. Except for the Flash plug-in, all the other proprietary apps and codecs are bundled with the distro itself and you don’t need an active connection to the net to install them.
After installing the non-free bits that you selected, the final dialogue box enables you to remove the language packs that you don’t require. By default, the distro installs support for French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and Arabic.
Clever selection
The distro’s applications menu is loaded to the brim and would end up confusing new users. That’s where the distro’s clever Cairo-dock configurations come into play, as they limit the number of apps and eliminate duplicates for a smoother workflow, especially for first time users. In case you still need to flesh out the distro, in addition to binary apps that you can pull in using GNOME Software the distro is also equipped to install Flatpaks.
Another highlight of the distro is its welcome app, which includes various options to help users orientate themselves with the installation. You can also use this app to access common administration utilities like bootrepair, device driver manager, NTFS config tool and more. The custom dialogue has several interesting options such as a button to install the LXDE desktop, and various utilities to configure a printer.
In terms of performance, the distro does well and idles at under 350MB memory used. This means you can technically use it on a machine with less than 1GB of RAM, but expect pretty long start-up and app launch times with that configuration. On a fairly recent machine though, it won’t give you any reason to complain.
All things considered, while it does cater to desktop users it’s unfair to pit Emmabuntüs with regular desktop distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. It’s a niche distro built with a specific purpose, which it serves well. Instead of a random assortment of apps, the distro is a purposeful assembly of the right components, which also makes it a wonderful option for introducing new users to the world of Linux and open source.