Besgnulinux

Reader supplied reviews for Besgnulinux Average rating 7.9 from 10 review(s) What are your thoughts on Besgnulinux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 3-102-09_0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 10 reader reviews of Besgnulinux...