Mabox Linux 20.02
Having convinced himself that the days of striking one-man distros were over, Mayank Sharma is pleasantly surprised when he finds one.
Having convinced himself that the days of striking one-man distros were over, Mayank Sharma is pleasantly surprised when he finds one.
Manjaro is one of the best renditions of Arch Linux for the desktop user and you can experience its goodness through about a dozen desktop environments. Mabox is a Manjaro spin that’s based on the Openbox desktop, which is rather strange since Manjaro already has a community-supported Openbox edition. However, not only does Mabox predate Manjaro Openbox, the project also does a wonderful job of adapting the Openbox desktop.
For starters, Mabox doesn’t use as many Xfce components as Manjaro Openbox, which makes it even lighter. Secondly, the distro has several home-brewed tools and utilities that help it distinguish itself and present a streamlined desktop.
The distro is available as an installable Live CD, but only for 64-bit machines. Mabox, like Manjaro, uses the Calamares installer that’s intuitive enough for all kinds of users. The distro ships with the 5.4 LTS kernel, though of course you can easily switch to another kernel using the kernel tool from its upstream distro. Another useful feature it borrows from Manjaro is the ability to run with either free or proprietary drivers.
Made to order
One of the highlights of the distro is the Mabox Control Center, which is an all-in-one program to configure all aspects of the installation. The tool brings together all the available configuration tools in the distro, be it from Manjaro, from a third-party or from its own stables. The tool has a tabbed interface and can be used to tweak the appearance as well as the behaviour of Mabox.
Another highlight of the desktop are its applications menu and side-panels. The stock Openbox doesn’t have an applications menu and Mabox uses a custom one created with jgmenu. The new applications menu in this release enables you to search for programs, which is a feature usually restricted to the menus in mainstream desktop environments.
Besides the applications menu, the desktop also has two side-panels on either sides of the screen that can be triggered using the mouse or via keyboard shortcuts. The left side-panel is designed to ease navigating the filesystem. It’ll also display the bookmarked locations from the file manager and can be used to open the terminal in any location. Similarly, the right side-panel is meant to be used for quickly accessing various system settings and software management functions. In addition to these menus, Mabox has also used jgmenu for its new screenshot tool and for the logout dialog.
One of the key tools that Mabox has borrowed from Bunsenlabs is the theme manager. The distro ships with several themes by default that are a combination of the Openbox theme, the wallpaper, the tint2 panel and the conky applets. You can use the program to switch to one of the existing themes or rejig the components and save the arrangement as a custom theme.
In addition to these specialities, Mabox retains all of Manjaro’s favourite features. For instance, package management in Mabox is handled by Pamac, which is a graphical front-end for managing Arch’s pacman. You can also optionally use it to access the Arch User Repository (AUR) as well as install Snap packages.
Mabox uses Manjaro official repositories and one of its own for its home-brewed packages. Just like its upstream distro, it’s a rolling release and so you can expect a constant flow of updates. Overall, Mabox is a well-rounded distro that makes good use of its reliable and versatile upstream distro. Together with a decent support infrastructure, it brings Manjaro’s famed user-friendliness to the lightweight Openbox desktop by adding a pinch of its own customisations and customised tools.