GolinX the newest distro i am playing with. I must admit that this the very first distro that has got me impressed, as in impressed.
Lets start with installation. Its a live-cd that boots cleanly ( more or less ). There is a small utility GoInstall that will install the system to a hard drive partition you choose in a matter of 2-3 minutes. The good thing is that it comes with all necessary applications and a handful of window managers namely Fluxbox, KDE, Window Maker, Enlightenment-16 and XFCE, all packed in a 330 MB cd ! You wont find development packages, its not really meant to be development platform.
Right from boot time you realise that this distro has a personality of its own...a custom carefully desinged look that is consistent across all UI that you will see including GTK, Qt themes, icon sets, splash screens, bootsplash...and even things like application makeovers like for Gaim they have changed its icon set to match the overall theme and the Gaim main window image. Gkrellm, a system monitor that resides on the desktop has some good custom made themes too. This is called attention to detail.
You may feally dreary initially of the colors used ubiquitously, shades of orange, yellow and red and even the iconset. But once you are a bit accustomed to the kind of look they want to create it feels very appealing. And believe me they sure know how to design the looks when Goblinx has prestigiuos affiliations like DeviantArt.com and it shows, everywhere. The wallpapers are very DeviantArt types except for one.(the fluxbox default wallpaper, it is artistic but obscene...things like this shouldnt be put into something like an OS distribution when it is so public)
It has its own style of installing software in form of modules, .mo files. Originality and creativity is seen in every nook and corner of this distro. Even the console mode has a designer look. Beauty seems to be their primary concern and that is well understood from their motto "Because beauty is basic...". KDE Desktop has been changed to an extent its not recognizable...thats very cool. It uses a Karamba theme called K-tower that has been made specially for GolinX.
It comes with finest variety of games you can find packaged with any distro. Though am not a game fanatic, not even a intermittent enthusiast, i found the games pretty cool particulary Abuse and Cube, it feels so nice to see such kind of graphic rendering on Linux platform.
Overall GoblinX is a desinger distro and they have a lot of room for improvement and i am expecting some outstanding work in their future releases.
Somethings that i would want in GoblinX are...
- A GTK theme switcher which is missing.
- A generic theme switcher...which can change themes across all toolkits, be it GTK Qt or something else.
- A central configuration manager.
- A sleeker theme with colors admirable by common users.
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