Extix 19.3
The promise of a user-friendly distro lures Mayank Sharma into testing one based on beta software – and then suffering the consequences.
The promise of a user-friendly distro lures Mayank Sharma to test one based on beta software and then suffer the consequences, forgetting that never an early adopter be!
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
Despite using a lightweight desktop, the distro needs a good amount of resources to perform adequately. The boot menu gives you an option to dump the entire system to RAM, which will improve performance. You’ll need at least 3GB of RAM for this task, after which you can yank the USB. There was a noticeable difference on some machines with 4GB of RAM, while on other, betterendowed machines, the distro performed equally well irrespective of where it was running from.
The distro is also perhaps one of the first to be based on the recently release Linux kernel 5.0. Linus Torvalds points out that the kernel doesn’t do feature-based releases, which means that while the new version brings lots of changes, the primary reason for the departure from the 4.x series was that the number of point releases was getting out of hand. One of the highlights of the new kernel, however, is improvement to the performance of graphics hardware, particularly that from the AMD stable. If you use the distro on a machine with Nvidia hardware, it automatically enables the pre-installed v418.43 proprietary driver.
Inside the desktop, the distro packs in an interesting and unbalanced collection of apps. While some categories such as Multimedia have redundant apps, others are conspicuous by their absence. For instance, while the distro includes the Kodi 18.2 media centre with several popular add-ons pre-installed such as one for Netflix, there’s no office suite, no email client, no download manager and no backup utility.
We’ve never held a distro guilty for bundling too few apps, but it’s a cardinal sin for a distro that bills itself as the “ultimate” Linux. There’s Synaptic to help you flesh out your installation and then roll it into a distributable ISO with Refracta – but here again, the distro falls short of its promise. While the developer suggests Refracta will work both on an installed instance of the distro as well as the Live environment when used on a system with adequate resources, it failed to produce a usable image in either environment on all our test machines.
Extix 19.3’s case isn’t helped by the fact that the distro failed to boot straight into the graphical login manager on all physical as well as Virtualbox- and Vmware-powered virtual machines. The release notes casually mention that users should startx into the graphical desktop if it fails to come up on its own. With all its missteps and lack of any support avenues, Extix 19.3 writes itself out of our list of recommended distros.