Snowlinux 4 XFCE Review: The Smoothest one but very very bland!

Lets begin with a note of thanks to the Snowlinux developers - each one of their distro I have tested and/or used, are very stable and give amazing performance. However, I never really liked the themes they use, if Crystal was bland, Glacier is blandest with everything - wallpaper to panel, in white. In Glacier series, the less you speak of the default wallpaper (the Push to Start one), it is better. It is really bad.

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Anyway, my assessment involves more than aesthetics and delves deeper into the operating system's performance. Snowlinux 4 XFCE ISO is about 727 MB, quite smaller in size compared to average Linux ISOs these days. I used Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 Ghz Core i3 processor & 2 GB RAM. Though the machine is 64 bit but given limited RAM, I used the 32-bit ISO for installation and evaluation. My evaluation involved using it for 3 days for all purposes.


Snowlinux 4 XFCE is based on Debian Wheezy, which I guess will be released sometime in February 2013. Linux kernel used is 3.5 and desktop environment is XFCE 4.10 with Thunar 1.6.2 as the file manager. Hardware recognition is good, detecting display, sound, Wifi, Lan and touchpad. No issues encountered there. Amazing how Linux has evolved over last 3 years. I recall 3 years ago, I used to really happy if a Linux distro was able to recognize hardware accurately - it meant at least 1 day of effort saved! And now, it is quite normal for majority of the Linux distros to work out of the box!

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Snowlinux 4 hash the Glacier theme - totally white. But, it looks very very bland. So, I went for a major facelift by changing the wallpaper, installing xcompmgr to get the composite running & adding it start up, making panels transparent, installing cairo dock and a conky to make it look more attractive. At times I wonder why the developers can't provide these things which are actually very basic and pretty simple to do!

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Applications
Snowlinux 4 XFCE is moderately rich in applications with a few notable omissions. The major applications are:

• Office: Abiword, Orage Calendar, Orage Globaltime
• Internet: Firefox 17, Thunderbird 17, Pidgin chat client, Transmission
• Graphics: Shotwell photo manager, Simple scan
• Multimedia: Brasero, Totem Movie Player 3.0.1, Rhythmbox
• Accessories: Application Finder, Root terminal, Bulk rename, Snow mount, XFCE terminal

Notable omissions are a spreadsheet application like Gnumeric, archive manager, document viewer to view pdf files, multimedia codecs, and Adobe flashplugin. All these are basic requirements and is expected from a Debian/Ubuntu spin. Also, a photo editor would have been better but it can be downloaded.

Further, there is no package installer as well. Normally all Debian or Ubuntu based distros provide Gdebi along with the distro. A notable omission I would say and it is very much required for power users.

Given it's some dubious choice of applications, Snowlinux 4 gets 7.63/10 for applications - the breakup is given below:

Snowlinux 4 XFCE	Score
App – Office	3.50
App – Internet	10.00
App – Graphics	7.00
App – Multimedia	10.00
Applications	7.63

Installation
Installation takes about 30 minutes of time and has a quite simple step by step approach. It requires information on language, location, keyboard type and keyboard language, location to install the OS, select partition, user login and password, and location to install grub.

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Possibly one good improvement to the installer will be to do away with the grub install location option and like Ubuntu installer or Anaconda, it can be automated without requiring any user input. A small improvement like this can go in a long way to simplify the installation process for a newbie.

Repository
Snowlinux 4 XFCE sources applications from the rich Debian Wheezy repository. As such given the Wheezy version is frozen till release, the latest LibreOffice suite (3.6.4) may not be available there. I guess, every latest app will be available once Debian wheezy is released. Also, adding Linux Mint 14 or Ubuntu 12.10 ppa's will add the latest applications.

Synaptic is the default package manager and it opens as root here. I couldn't open synaptic by clicking from the menu entry. I could open it from terminal using Sudo. The root issue apart, Synaptic works well. I could install VLC media player, Adobe flashplugin, multimedia codecs, cairo-dock, conky, gdebi package installer, etc.

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Already I mentioned that a local package installer like gdebi is not present in the distro. So, I had to download it to install packages like Skype 4.1.

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Performance
Snowlinux 4 XFCE doesn't have a system monitor or a task manager. Even htop is not there. I downloaded both htop and system monitor to actually check if these two differ in system usage. Even I thought htop is a lighter and better option than system monitor but both gave same results here. Snowlinux 4 XFCE uses about 1-5% CPU and 87-90 MB RAM with system monitor or htop running.

From Snowlinux 4 XFCE

Qualitatively, I haven't used any XFCE distro lighter or smoother than Snowlinux 4! It runs practically on so low resources than even an Openbox desktop will be proud to sport! Buttery smooth and very stable - typical Snowlinux! A resource usage comparison with the leading XFCE 4.10 Linux distros shows that Snowlinux 4 XFCE has the least resource consumption of all. I used the same system (Asus K54C) to record the resource consumption and under the same condition (desktop with system monitor/task manager running).

XFCE OS	Desktop	CPU	RAM
Snowlinux 4 Glacier XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	90 MB
Bridge XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	130 MB
Mint 14 XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	140 MB
Manjaro 0.8.3 XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	160 MB
Xubuntu 12.10	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	160 MB
Sabayon 10 XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	180 MB
Fedora 18 XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	180 MB
Manjaro 0.8.2 XFCE	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	200 MB
OS 4 13.1	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	200 MB
Voyager 12.10	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	200 MB
ZevenOS 5	XFCE 4.10	1-5%	220 MB

Overall
Even with Glacier, Snowlinux has delivered! Snowlinux 4 XFCE is definitely the smoothest XFCE I have used. It is definitely high on functionality, though there a few notable misses in the applications provided. Aesthetics is pretty bland but XFCE being a very customizable desktop environment, users can actually modify it as per their taste.

In overall, Snowlinux 4 XFCE gets a rating of 9/10 based on my assessment. Performance-wise it should have got 10/10 - I haven't seen any XFCE distro so smooth! But, some dubious application choice pulled down the rating to 9/10. Given below is score distribution and how I arrived to the final rating.

Snowlinux 4 XFCE	Score	Weights
Installation time	9.00	5%
Installation Complexity	9.00	5%
Hardware detection	10.00	10%
Applications	7.63	20%
Aesthetics	7.00	10%
Performance & Stability	10.00	50%
Overall	9.00	100%

I recommend Snowlinux 4 XFCE wholeheartedly and if you are looking for a good stable XFCE Linux distro, look no further than Snowlinux 4 XFCE. You can download the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Snowlinux 4 XFCE from here.