Customisation
Are they malleable?
all distros in the Roundup offer some great customisation options. While some enable you to change virtually all aspects of the installation, others go a step further and allow you to roll the changes into installable images. The welcome screen in Q4OS offers several interesting customisation options, including the ability to change the default application launcher. There’s also the one-click profile switcher which can be used to convert the default minimal installation into a usable one with a single click.
Bunsenlabs enables you to change the key bindings for operating it. You can tweak and configure different aspects of the distro from the Preferences menu. The distro also bundles several GTK 2/3 themes, wallpapers and Conky configurations, and can be heavily customised to suit your workflow. Furthermore, there are customised links for installing additional software in the categories in the distro’s applications menu.
Antix uses a fair bit of customisation as well, right from offering a choice of desktops and window managers to the individual elements in its custom control panel. In fact, one of the USPS of the distro is the home-grown antix control panel, using which you can modify virtually all aspects of your computer and installation. For example, you can modify themes, menus and wallpaper as well as configure the antix advert blocker, image a partition and more. There’s also a snapshot utility that creates a bootable image of your installation.
In the same vein, one of the highlights of Tiny Core is its
remaster tool, which lets you create your own remix of the distro. On the downside, like everything else in the distro the remaster tool is fairly powerful and feature-rich but it isn’t the most intuitive to use.
Bionicpup is unique in that it runs everything as the root user. The distro’s developers consider this to be a safe option but also give you the option to run your installation as a non-privileged user, although this is currently considered experimental. Interestingly, Bionicpup can also save changes from a Live session to rewritable optical media as well.