A happy new year to all of you. Health, Peace and personal luck.
I use Linux since 2006. During that time I tried a lot of distros. Very frustrating was Suse to me. I was never able to install a stable version. After a while something in my distribution failed. So I hopped from distro to distro.
Since several month I am on Mabox … and it just work.
Nothing special happens since all these month of using Mabox. Yes, there were some little things. But here in this very active forum it was no a problem to get a quick solution. Beside these the system is stable and it runs.
There is no need to digg deep into different user forums to get things working. From this point of view Mabox is very boring. No surpises after booting up my system. It runs and runs.
Ha, this is being bored in a good way. And that was just my trigger to install plain arch and beginning to implement my “own” system. Maybe I’ll borrow some good stuff from napcok but for now I’m experimenting due to the great distro from napcok.
In fact, there is a lot to learn with Mabox. So much that I even made my own theme for openbox. It’s a lot of fun to work through the configurations. You can really do a lot with this distro. I have invested a lot of time in getting to know Mabox. However, these were all embellishments that I dealt with. The system itself is stable and can be used out-of-the-box. Now that I have set everything up the way I wanted it to be, contact with the system is becoming less and less. There is nothing to repair and everything is stable.
Hi @bootz
How’s the progress going?
I have currently installed Alpine Linux in a virtual machine and I am fascinated by this distribution. I will try to recreate what we have in Mabox. For now, I’m setting up in a bare Openbox… damn, it’s not easy
The long-term effect of my experiment may be to rewrite Mabox tools so that they are useful on other distributions - I am mainly thinking about Alpine and the Arch family of distributions
Well I got what I want for the moment. All the standards like openbox, xdg and finally I got jgmenu very simple looking but functioning great.
I used a script that was posted on Mabox forum for having a different wallpaper for any desktop and I created of course a lock-screen daemon as described in my Mabox forum post.
I added some things to the rc.xml to have some programs moved to a desired desktop number/name and installed some retro emulation things (retroarch, redream).
In between I reinstalled with KDE and GNOME as the desktop but I came back to openbox. For his old iMac with dual core processor and unsupported GPU (using the opensource drivers) it was to heavy.
I got redshift (nightlight) to work eventually with automatic geo location and I’m using powerkit for power things. Powerkit also comes with xscreensaver but I disabled that one.
I use pipewire for audio, scrot for screensaves and thunar for the filemanager. Picom as compositor but sometimes that eats a lot of CPU. I’m still trying to find a nice picom.conf…
For multimedia playback I use mpv and will start to test mpd eventually. Already had it working in a previous install as a user daemon but, although it’s not really needed, I want it to run as a system wide daemon for every user.
Got all the goodies like hibernate and suspend working (hibernation looked to be tough but it wasn’t).
And bluetooth is now working a bit better for my headset (Bose QC45) with a very nice codec. Not done by me, perhaps pipewire is doing that.
I’m forgetting skippy-xd for an overvoiew of all windows and able to schoose between that.
The best compliment I can give Mabox is that for me it has been as stable and usable as Mint. I spent years on and off Mint, distro hopped and landed in trouble but used Mint as my fallback because it always worked. Since moving to Mabox, I’ve had no more hopping and no need to go back
It’s lovely boring, which is exactly what I want!
