The promise of a user-friendly distro lures Mayank Sharma into testing one based on beta software – and then suffering the consequences.
From the get-go, everything about Extix is a little eccentric. The project’s approach, from its website to the name of the ISO, is a little different from its peers. Extix has been spewing ISOs for quite a while now, and the latest 19.3 release is based on a snapshot of the Ubuntu 19.04 development branch.
The ISOs are hybrid images and according to the release notes have persistence enabled when used from a USB drive. However, to get persistence to work, you have to use the Refracta installer from inside the Live environment to install Extix to a USB. Transferring the image to the USB via any other method doesn’t enable you to save the changes back to the disk.
Extix uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment. Instead of sticking to the stable Xfce 4.12, the distro uses components from the 4.13 branch, which isn’t a full release but rather a milestone on the road to v4.14. The distro includes some components that have been ported to GTK+ 3, while a majority come from v4.12. Despite this, the desktop feels coherent and stable, and never crashed or behaved unexpectedly in our review.
Light and shallow
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