I
own a Raspberry PI since
two years but I used it as headless server from the very
beginning. I have, almost, never seen its window manager apart
from some remote desktop experiment. I so learned only recently how
latest
Raspbian released are shipped with a new lightweight desktop
environment: Pixel. More recently I also learned
that Pixel has been released for X86 “common” computers I decided
to test how it runs on my EEEPC 900 netbook.
First
impressions
I
downloaded Pixel ISO disk image from here
and prepared a bootable USB disk. Raspberry page suggested using
Etcher to prepare the boot disk but
UNetbootin did the job as
well as usual.
The
boot process went smooth and quite fast, and Pixel here is my very
first screen-shot of Pixel.
Needless
to say Pixel user interface is a traditional “no-frills” one,
with panels and a big application menu. Pixel unique icons and fonts
are combined into a default theme of good readability even on the
small EEEPC display.
Software
packages provided with Pixel reveal this distribution vocation for
education: together with the most classic Libre
Office suite …
is
shipped a good selection of lightweight programming IDEs …
to
be noted also the choice of Chromium
as default browser.
Conclusions
Pixel
is a great lightweight desktop environment, it's snappy-fast both
while booting than while working with it. From a very subjective
point of view it looks to me faster than other lightweight desktops,
like XFCE or LXDE, I tested
before.
I wish I had an even older PC to test Pixel on it. On the other hand
Pixel, at least its X86 release, is still very unfinished I couldn't
manage, for example, to configure mouse-pad click-with-a-tap even if
other features, like double-fingered-scroll, worked from the
beginning without need of configuration. Pixel might not be ready to
replace my XFCE installation but they are only at the beginning after
all!
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