BunsenLabs Lithium

Forever grunge Jonni Bidwell is pleased to find a distribution that’s almost as good as the Nirvana song. Almost…

- Jonni Bidwell

Sooner or later you become fed up of seemingly bloated desktop environments and turn to something lighter, be it OpenBox or i3. These are great – a gift in fact – but the learning curve is steep and a considerable amount of configuration may be required to get them into a state that meets your needs and desires. Even then, there’s the temptation to delve into further rabbit holes, be they compositing and transparency effects, or setting up a custom applications menu. And let’s not even talk about setting up Conky perfectly. Now imagine if a distro came with all of these set up out of the box…

Well good news, BunsenLabs does. And the new release is named after everyone’s favourite rare earth metal. It’s based on Debian Stable, so users searching for the latest versions of everything may want to look elsewhere. But for everyone else there’s a lot to like here. New in this release is the adoption of jgmenu, as opposed to Openbox’s native menu. The new system is configurable and works with Openbox pipe menus too, so if you’ve already created the perfect menu system there, then it should be easy to migrate.