Stunned and amazed by Zenwalk Linux

Sometimes you find perfection where you least expect it.

Just recently I had returned to using Crunchbang, after the release of 9.04. I’m a big fan of Crunchbang, and the new release is very solid. But I have to say, I don’t know that I like it as much as the 8.10 release. Although you can tweak any Linux distro to suit your needs and desires, I tend to get nit-picky over the little details of a distro, as to how it operates right out of the box. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a Mac user for so long — if there’s a company that really pays attention to the details, it’s Apple. Despite my (very few) annoyances with Apple and Mac OS X, nobody does it better than Apple. This is very subjective, I realize. Different people expect different things from their OS.

There are just certain things that have to work for me, right from the word “go”, for me to really feel at home with a system. I’m not opposed to configuring things, but mostly I just want things to work. After all, I went through the steps to install Arch Linux, but the repeated issues with wifi connectivity made me leave it behind.

If a system can do what I want it to do, with a minimum of hassle, and be really fast at the same time, well, it doesn’t get much better than that. With the issues of speed, stability, and usability in mind, I decided to give Zenwalk Linux a try. Based on Slackware, I had read several good reviews of Zenwalk, and those three issues appeared to be areas in which it excelled. Although I have tried Slackware, and really liked the speed, stability, and bug-free loveliness of it, I had some issues in the ‘usability’ department, centered chiefly around roaming wireless access. I’m sure I could have resolved these issues and been very happy with Slackware, but I don’t really see Slack as an ideal choice for a laptop OS. Even the folks I know that run Slackware on the desktop, tend to run things like Ubuntu on their laptops. On my Thinkpad, Ubuntu, Mint, and to a certain extent even Debian (using Gnome), were all too intolerably slow. Crunchbang and sidux were both much faster, but there are little things with Crunchbang, and a couple of major things with sidux, that keep me from using them over the long term.

So, Zenwalk. I’m simply shocked that it does everything I need it to do, it does it fast, it’s rock-solid (so far, anyway), and there are absolutely ZERO little annoyances that I can find. Both wired and wireless work as they should, and they JUST PLAIN CONNECT, without the need to tell me with a little notification window that it’s now connected! Multimedia works, even Apple Quicktime videos. I’m actually using Icedove (Thunderbird) as an email client, rather than my usual Sylpheed, because it’s actually FAST in Zenwalk! Even OpenOffice is fast; I usually end up using Abiword because OO is so slow in most distros.

I even find the overall default appearance of Zenwalk so agreeable, I have hardly changed anything. It took me a couple of days just to get around to changing the wallpaper, which is usually one of the first things I do. The “one mainstream application for each task” is well chosen and implemented. So far, I have only added the web browser Midori to the default setup, using the simple network package management tool, netpkg. While Iceweasel (Firefox) is faster than in most other distros I’ve used, it’s still not quite fast enough for my liking. Midori fits the bill nicely, here.

I had thought of doing a blog series entitled “30 Linuxes in 30 Days,” in which I would chronicle the testing of 30 different distros over the span of a month. Hell, I almost do that, anyway! I would take a specific set of criteria, and see how well each distro stacks up against it. But now, I’m so thoroughly impressed with Zenwalk, I’m not sure I want to do that. I’m a firm believer that with Linux, it’s largely a matter of finding the right distro for your particular hardware setup, and needs. I’m going to give it more time to see if anything breaks, but it would seem that I have found the right distro for me.

Zen, indeed.