Absolute Linux is a light-weight modification of Slackware Linux. It includes several utilities that make configuration and maintenance easier and it has many common desktop and Internet applications installed and configured with tight integration of menus, applications and MIME types. Absolute Linux uses IceWM and ROX for its window and file managers.
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Reader Ratings
Reader supplied reviews for Absolute Linux
Average rating
4.8
from 6 review(s)
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only got it burnt to an USB drive with " Unetbootin with p7z" or With ventoy, then the iso would boot up for installation.
Pros : a) Firstly, I appreciated the Dev,for the nice cool startup wallpaper .
b) Nice Generic win95 look.
c) cool yellow/brown matching colors theme.
d) a workable desktop.
e) wifi auto detect working well.
Cons :a) icewm did not registering new apps installed and not showing menus icons for new apps. ( rebooted tried still missing.)
Tried edited /var/lib/AccountsService/users/$USER " [User] Xsession=icewm-session SystemAccount=false" --not working.
b) fcitx is installed so no menu only could be run in terminal,but errors shown "keyboard existed" even it was started first time.
c) thunar-vol file manager installed , no menu , command line could not start the program. (prefer this file manager for root power)
d) when click firefox icon on panel tab, most of the time lags 3 ~6 seconds to start, sometimes, it does not even start.
e) mission guides to add packages from slackware "stable" repository to smoothly.
Wishes : Cons be resolve soon.
Version: 15.0 Rating: 4 Date: 2022-02-08 Votes: 5
Installed Absolute 15.0 this morning. Crashed after first non-root login, and other assorted weird behavior under both root and individual accounts. So downloaded another ISO image and re-installed. Seems to be stable, but all applications are glacially slow. The QT development tools all had 1 to 6 sec delays (where nothing happens) before a project could be loaded and edited and other such nonsense. My SCons build system is no longer usable because I designed it with dead-man switches where a time-out at strategic places stops the build for failed code. As I type this review, I am one or two key-strokes ahead before anything shows in the text box.
I have always liked previous versions of the Absolute distro for its cleanness and responsiveness on both old and new machines, and for the selection of included applications, and for the well-designed add-on utilities written by Mr. Sherman. But much of that is broken or untenable with version 15; which is almost unusable. Not that it matters to me, but my niece noticed that some of the applications on the main menu have no corresponding program installed. Her desktop is an old dual-core i5, 8G, 500G HDD; and it is even slower than my machine (a three-year old i5, 16G, 1T HDD). She is not able to use any of the standard graphics programs (I had to manually install most of the previously 'standard programs on her machine, as they are no longer included.
Perhaps I need to install Slackware 15 and see if the 'base' distro is the source of problems. We are having a family conference this evening on whether to say goodbye to Absolute after many happy years. If I have to say goodbye to Slackware itself, I will be heart-broken.
Nowadays absolute is the best example of bloat that is hard to get rid of, because slackware isn't your average ubuntu or debian where you can simply apt-get purge a package with all "orphans" or leftovers. Here you need to know or google all the dependencies and then manually remove it. Was it so hard to generate a bare-bones ISO with x and icewm - only? Without all those browsers, audio and video players.
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