 Visitor Reviews |
|
Reader supplied reviews for Besgnulinux
Average rating
7.9 from 10 review(s)
Version: 3-1
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-11-11
Votes: 0
|
Sigh. Yes, they've done a great job of making JWM menus and windows look good. Nice graphics.
Too bad many of the "plus" apps and settings simply don't work. Take the global audio Equalizer (ALSA based) -- simply doesn't work. (For that matter, the equalizer built in to Audacious didn't seem to work or work well, either -- but I didn't pursue that further.)
The "change background" app doesn't woirk, and is confusing as hell. It might be that I had to manually run my special xrandr command to set up my "portrait" mode monitor that I have above my laptop monitor in its proper rotation and location. When I entered the command, it worked (of course), but the original Besgnulinux background disappeared. The change backgound app's configuration setup is also very strange, and the suggestion to "swipe the right band" is not at all helpful. I did try installing nitrogen to put up a wallpaper, but for some reason, even THAT app won't work!
There's a graphical front end to the JWM startup code block, kinda like the GUI for startup stuff in Xfce. Super, right? Wrong. It doesn't work. I put my aforementioned xrandr command in there, and it doesn't run at startup.
Many, if not all, of the special JWM app windows provided are not resizeable, which is not great for my eyesight. There's also some strangeness in the way the JWM windowing settings are done, in that say I open a psensor app (after installing it, it's not already installed), it shows up in my top monitor (fine), but if I pull it down to the bottom (laptop) monitor, it won't go back up by grabbing the window and moving it. I did find out I could move it via a right mouse click selection, but that's not intuitive and takes more clicks.
The JWM panel is nice for a JWM panel, but I was hoping I could move it to the left side of the lower monitor in vertical orientation. Can't remember if JWM simply doesn't have that option, but I *think* I remember that being an option in the Besgnulinux panel setting, and it didn't work. I also tried adding a panel widget -- system info -- which I couldn't find out what it did in the first place, but after I added it, I couldn't find out how to remove it, AND eventually, there was a system monitor (?) window that popped up, and which seemed to have a one-minute auto pop-up setting, so it kept pop-up-ulating and I had to kill them all. Since I couldn't figure out how to remove the panel item, I wound up having to set the pop-up timer control to 9999 or some such so at least it would only show up during a limited test period.
When I had not futzed with the monitors (and so my monitor above my laptop was topologically to the "right" of the laptop and not rotated), the "Exit" menu selection showed up on my lower/main monitor and was usable. Once I had manually run my necessary xrandr command to get the proper monitor layout, the Exit menu popped up in the TOP monitor. Fine, but NOT fine! -- when I moved my mouse up to the top monitor to click on any of the selections, once I got into the graphical area, the damn thing simply disappeared! This is all too repeatable.
Lastly, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it's not when compared to some of my others. I installed the ps_mem Python app to check the memory footprint when the system starts, and it seems to be a shade under 400 MB. That's not BAD -- but compared to others where I'm also using JWM (but with tint2 for panel), such as my Q4OS distro, which also uses SystemD init, IT fires up under 290 MB. Granted, in it, I use Xterm rather than LXterminal (which I applaud the selection of), and the special TDE network systray app that's lighter than nm-applet, but that's still a lot of difference.
I might revisit the distro some time from now, but at this point, it simply doesn't give me anything that other distros don't.
|
Version: 3-1
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-11-05
Votes: 2
|
This looked very interesting to start with, but it seemed incredible that with all the packages there from install, Libre Office had been removed along with out of the box printer support. Such basics that surely need to be included. I have used Linux since 2010, but have always taken the stance of - it should work straight out of the box. Without plug n go for printers these seem to be a very retrograde step. I would have also liked to see Firefox instead of Brave as the default browser. After trying version 3.1 I tried version 3.0 and found Libre Office and Printer support there. But even then getting a printer to work was an issue, and I had to download further packages -and even then it was rough round the edges. It does look pretty but, after a short trial I abandoned the distro because of basics not being covered. I reverted back to the reliable MX.
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Version: 3-1
Rating: 9
Date: 2025-11-02
Votes: 0
|
I was not expecting such an amazing looking distro. The implementation of JWM is ahead of anything i've seen in other distros, it certainly doesn't look like a poor uncle as do so many others. It's fast, as one would expect of JWM but it looks great. I was once a fan of the MX implementation of JWM back in the day when I had a PC that really couldn't run much else based on debian, but here we are years later and the implimentation by MX still looks just the same, as does Antix. Meanwhile Besgnulinux has developed the JWM desktop into a very modern day front-end. Everything required for day-to-day use is included without any bloat, which means it's disk footprint is pleasantly small. Memory requirements are frugal too at around 500mb after boot-up. Besgnulinux has several tools of it's own included to make using the OS and UI intuitive.
For anyone looking for a lightweight linux distro this is up with the best of them in terms of modest system requirements, based on a solid debian base too.
|
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-24
Votes: 6
|
Minimum resource consumption. Memory used at boot is about 500MB. System performance is incredibly smooth and it looks simply amazing.
It has two types of menu: the first one is the fvwm classical menu and the other one is inspired of gnome, with a superb performance and a very polished look and feel.
It contains all the apps needed for a daily basis use with focus on an small resource consumption.
One of the best alternatives for old computers and one of the very few distro's using fvwm.
It's based on debian stable which let configure or install any app available.
|
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 4
|
Excelente, Its look is really beautiful.
It is a direct competitor of antiX with some improvements.
When idle after boot the ram occupation is roughly the same.
It is light in resources and very responsive.
Someone may say that it is bloated, I say thanks to the developer that did a lot of work in order to chose apps that fit with the old computers.
It is with sistemD: that means that it is not a pain to find apps that work with this distro.
I tried this distro for 1 month and so far I have no issues to report.
Many thanks to the developer: goo
|
Version: 3-0
Rating: 8
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 0
|
As a Turk, I'm proud that such work is happening and hope it continues to grow. I downloaded the 3.0 distribution to try it out. I have a better system than the one mentioned in the comments, so I think it will be more effective. However, learning that the distribution still has some very basic shortcomings (a touchpad driver hasn't been found!) dampened my enthusiasm for trying it out. The problem isn't with the team working on the distribution. But the 10/10 ratings here have given me a lot of hope. The work will continue, and I'm ready to support it. But no one should be fooled by these fake reviews and ratings like I was and try to build a main operating system.
|
Version: 3-0
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 0
|
So installing on my main test environment with laptop with 4k screen resolution & one external 32" 4k resolution monitor.
Very difficult to see and interact with getting this OS installed on my laptop.
In addition, I was not able to figure out how to set the default monitor as the 32" 4k monitor; it always defaults to the laptop screen, even if the laptop screen is closed.
Right-click desktop and menu appears (how quaint!)
Select the besgnulinux/Adjust Screen Resolution option; this open up some window titled BesRandr; I can see the screen size displayed info for laptop screen & external monitor.
But can't figure out how to actually use these controls to configure the active/main screen and resolution.
Not much else tested other then go thru the menu item by item and explore the various apps and options.
It does have some very nice screen backgrounds which I like; but the actual jpg/png picture file location is hidden; sigh!
So not very user friendly for me who is not used to an interface desktop environment so different to my experience with ubuntu/debian/mint/arch et al.
|
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-20
Votes: 5
|
I was never a fan of JWM until now.
I installed Besgnulinux on the oldish core i3 Lenovo machine that I use for testing. Frankly, I wanted to see what the buzz is about (with Distrowatch user ratings of "10," no less!); I never even heard of Besgnulinux before.
It's based on Debian 13 and--after a day of testing--I could not find anything wrong with it, functionally. Moreover, OOTB the desktop is gorgeous! Yeah, I know, it's JWM, but it's true. You expect a greased lightning sort of computing response with JWM on an i3 and you get it. Usually devs do not go the distance to do much more in similar distros.
By the way, the devs supplied several some extra tools that work flawlessly on my PC. (I looked at a different distro in the same class earlier this week and some of the vaunted settings/tools did not even work. That's kinda/sorta been my experience with little-known distros. Except. This. One.)
|
Version: 02-09_0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-07-12
Votes: 7
|
Its look is really beautiful.
It is a direct competitor of antiX with some improvements.
When idle after boot the ram occupation is roughly the same.
It is light in resources and very responsive.
Someone may say that it is bloated, I say thanks to the developer that did a lot of work in order to chose apps that fit with the old computers.
It is with sistemD: that means that it is not a pain to find apps that work with this distro.
I tried this distro for 1 month and so far I have no issues to report.
Many thanks to the developer: good job
|
Version: 02-09_0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-06-12
Votes: 5
|
I have been using jwm for years. I have seen the most useful system in this distribution. I have not had any problems. It has everything I need. I also really liked the look of it. It is good that it has a dock bar. Normally icons are not added to the panel in a jwm session, but this besgnulinux has done a good job of adding icons to the panel. I can change the background image with a single click. Its own screen resolution tool is also nice. It is incredibly fast that it uses 250 MB of memory and is configured to use so few resources I will continue to use the lightweight and useful besgnulinux distribution
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Latest Reviews
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-1
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-11-11
Votes: 0
|
Sigh. Yes, they've done a great job of making JWM menus and windows look good. Nice graphics.
Too bad many of the "plus" apps and settings simply don't work. Take the global audio Equalizer (ALSA based) -- simply doesn't work. (For that matter, the equalizer built in to Audacious didn't seem to work or work well, either -- but I didn't pursue that further.)
The "change background" app doesn't woirk, and is confusing as hell. It might be that I had to manually run my special xrandr command to set up my "portrait" mode monitor that I have above my laptop monitor in its proper rotation and location. When I entered the command, it worked (of course), but the original Besgnulinux background disappeared. The change backgound app's configuration setup is also very strange, and the suggestion to "swipe the right band" is not at all helpful. I did try installing nitrogen to put up a wallpaper, but for some reason, even THAT app won't work!
There's a graphical front end to the JWM startup code block, kinda like the GUI for startup stuff in Xfce. Super, right? Wrong. It doesn't work. I put my aforementioned xrandr command in there, and it doesn't run at startup.
Many, if not all, of the special JWM app windows provided are not resizeable, which is not great for my eyesight. There's also some strangeness in the way the JWM windowing settings are done, in that say I open a psensor app (after installing it, it's not already installed), it shows up in my top monitor (fine), but if I pull it down to the bottom (laptop) monitor, it won't go back up by grabbing the window and moving it. I did find out I could move it via a right mouse click selection, but that's not intuitive and takes more clicks.
The JWM panel is nice for a JWM panel, but I was hoping I could move it to the left side of the lower monitor in vertical orientation. Can't remember if JWM simply doesn't have that option, but I *think* I remember that being an option in the Besgnulinux panel setting, and it didn't work. I also tried adding a panel widget -- system info -- which I couldn't find out what it did in the first place, but after I added it, I couldn't find out how to remove it, AND eventually, there was a system monitor (?) window that popped up, and which seemed to have a one-minute auto pop-up setting, so it kept pop-up-ulating and I had to kill them all. Since I couldn't figure out how to remove the panel item, I wound up having to set the pop-up timer control to 9999 or some such so at least it would only show up during a limited test period.
When I had not futzed with the monitors (and so my monitor above my laptop was topologically to the "right" of the laptop and not rotated), the "Exit" menu selection showed up on my lower/main monitor and was usable. Once I had manually run my necessary xrandr command to get the proper monitor layout, the Exit menu popped up in the TOP monitor. Fine, but NOT fine! -- when I moved my mouse up to the top monitor to click on any of the selections, once I got into the graphical area, the damn thing simply disappeared! This is all too repeatable.
Lastly, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it's not when compared to some of my others. I installed the ps_mem Python app to check the memory footprint when the system starts, and it seems to be a shade under 400 MB. That's not BAD -- but compared to others where I'm also using JWM (but with tint2 for panel), such as my Q4OS distro, which also uses SystemD init, IT fires up under 290 MB. Granted, in it, I use Xterm rather than LXterminal (which I applaud the selection of), and the special TDE network systray app that's lighter than nm-applet, but that's still a lot of difference.
I might revisit the distro some time from now, but at this point, it simply doesn't give me anything that other distros don't.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-1
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-11-05
Votes: 2
|
This looked very interesting to start with, but it seemed incredible that with all the packages there from install, Libre Office had been removed along with out of the box printer support. Such basics that surely need to be included. I have used Linux since 2010, but have always taken the stance of - it should work straight out of the box. Without plug n go for printers these seem to be a very retrograde step. I would have also liked to see Firefox instead of Brave as the default browser. After trying version 3.1 I tried version 3.0 and found Libre Office and Printer support there. But even then getting a printer to work was an issue, and I had to download further packages -and even then it was rough round the edges. It does look pretty but, after a short trial I abandoned the distro because of basics not being covered. I reverted back to the reliable MX.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-1
Rating: 9
Date: 2025-11-02
Votes: 0
|
I was not expecting such an amazing looking distro. The implementation of JWM is ahead of anything i've seen in other distros, it certainly doesn't look like a poor uncle as do so many others. It's fast, as one would expect of JWM but it looks great. I was once a fan of the MX implementation of JWM back in the day when I had a PC that really couldn't run much else based on debian, but here we are years later and the implimentation by MX still looks just the same, as does Antix. Meanwhile Besgnulinux has developed the JWM desktop into a very modern day front-end. Everything required for day-to-day use is included without any bloat, which means it's disk footprint is pleasantly small. Memory requirements are frugal too at around 500mb after boot-up. Besgnulinux has several tools of it's own included to make using the OS and UI intuitive.
For anyone looking for a lightweight linux distro this is up with the best of them in terms of modest system requirements, based on a solid debian base too.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-24
Votes: 6
|
Minimum resource consumption. Memory used at boot is about 500MB. System performance is incredibly smooth and it looks simply amazing.
It has two types of menu: the first one is the fvwm classical menu and the other one is inspired of gnome, with a superb performance and a very polished look and feel.
It contains all the apps needed for a daily basis use with focus on an small resource consumption.
One of the best alternatives for old computers and one of the very few distro's using fvwm.
It's based on debian stable which let configure or install any app available.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-0
Rating: 4
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 0
|
So installing on my main test environment with laptop with 4k screen resolution & one external 32" 4k resolution monitor.
Very difficult to see and interact with getting this OS installed on my laptop.
In addition, I was not able to figure out how to set the default monitor as the 32" 4k monitor; it always defaults to the laptop screen, even if the laptop screen is closed.
Right-click desktop and menu appears (how quaint!)
Select the besgnulinux/Adjust Screen Resolution option; this open up some window titled BesRandr; I can see the screen size displayed info for laptop screen & external monitor.
But can't figure out how to actually use these controls to configure the active/main screen and resolution.
Not much else tested other then go thru the menu item by item and explore the various apps and options.
It does have some very nice screen backgrounds which I like; but the actual jpg/png picture file location is hidden; sigh!
So not very user friendly for me who is not used to an interface desktop environment so different to my experience with ubuntu/debian/mint/arch et al.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-0
Rating: 8
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 0
|
As a Turk, I'm proud that such work is happening and hope it continues to grow. I downloaded the 3.0 distribution to try it out. I have a better system than the one mentioned in the comments, so I think it will be more effective. However, learning that the distribution still has some very basic shortcomings (a touchpad driver hasn't been found!) dampened my enthusiasm for trying it out. The problem isn't with the team working on the distribution. But the 10/10 ratings here have given me a lot of hope. The work will continue, and I'm ready to support it. But no one should be fooled by these fake reviews and ratings like I was and try to build a main operating system.
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-21
Votes: 4
|
Excelente, Its look is really beautiful.
It is a direct competitor of antiX with some improvements.
When idle after boot the ram occupation is roughly the same.
It is light in resources and very responsive.
Someone may say that it is bloated, I say thanks to the developer that did a lot of work in order to chose apps that fit with the old computers.
It is with sistemD: that means that it is not a pain to find apps that work with this distro.
I tried this distro for 1 month and so far I have no issues to report.
Many thanks to the developer: goo
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 3-0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-08-20
Votes: 5
|
I was never a fan of JWM until now.
I installed Besgnulinux on the oldish core i3 Lenovo machine that I use for testing. Frankly, I wanted to see what the buzz is about (with Distrowatch user ratings of "10," no less!); I never even heard of Besgnulinux before.
It's based on Debian 13 and--after a day of testing--I could not find anything wrong with it, functionally. Moreover, OOTB the desktop is gorgeous! Yeah, I know, it's JWM, but it's true. You expect a greased lightning sort of computing response with JWM on an i3 and you get it. Usually devs do not go the distance to do much more in similar distros.
By the way, the devs supplied several some extra tools that work flawlessly on my PC. (I looked at a different distro in the same class earlier this week and some of the vaunted settings/tools did not even work. That's kinda/sorta been my experience with little-known distros. Except. This. One.)
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 02-09_0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-07-12
Votes: 7
|
Its look is really beautiful.
It is a direct competitor of antiX with some improvements.
When idle after boot the ram occupation is roughly the same.
It is light in resources and very responsive.
Someone may say that it is bloated, I say thanks to the developer that did a lot of work in order to chose apps that fit with the old computers.
It is with sistemD: that means that it is not a pain to find apps that work with this distro.
I tried this distro for 1 month and so far I have no issues to report.
Many thanks to the developer: good job
|
Project: Besgnulinux
Version: 02-09_0
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-06-12
Votes: 5
|
I have been using jwm for years. I have seen the most useful system in this distribution. I have not had any problems. It has everything I need. I also really liked the look of it. It is good that it has a dock bar. Normally icons are not added to the panel in a jwm session, but this besgnulinux has done a good job of adding icons to the panel. I can change the background image with a single click. Its own screen resolution tool is also nice. It is incredibly fast that it uses 250 MB of memory and is configured to use so few resources I will continue to use the lightweight and useful besgnulinux distribution
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