Moss Bliss
I am running out of time on Distrohoppers’ Digest for more reviews. There surely will come a time when I will not have anything to review, but this is not that month.
This is a Q&D (Quixk & Dirty) review of RoboLinux 12.3 MATE
As this is essentially Ubuntu, it uses the Ubiquity installer. Most people are familiar with this, and it’s easy to learn if you’re not.
Everything looks 3-D metallic, kinda nice if you’re into that, and I am.
There were no surprises during installation. It did not steal GRUB for itself and many distros do, so I had to boot to Mint and run Grub Customizer so Mint would have it in the boot menu. GC identified it as Robolinux, not Ubuntu, so Robo did his background work, which even some of the major distros don’t bother with.
The desktop looks clean, with everything I have come to expect in Ubuntu MATE, with the taskbar on the bottom. The only change I had to make for my machine was to lower the resolution to 1368 from 1920; most users would keep the higher res.
The distro does not supply an office and has a good but light selection of tools. When you update it, you see there are only 5 feeds to upgrade from, which is also light and nice; some distros are searching 30 or more for updates.
I added Ubuntu Restricted Extras, neofetch, Stacer, Audacity, my four games, SoftMaker FreeOffice, gDebi, Slimbook Battery, and flatpaks for Element and Discord. Total disk used is 8.2 Gb. With Slimbookbattery running, RAM is 743 MiB.
A lot of people will like the fact that almost everything is dark mode, but this makes a bit of an issue as the status bar for downloads comes out dark gray on black.
I don’t know what the issue is, but the longer I keep this distro running, the more it seems to slow down.
So basically, this is a slimmed-down version of Ubuntu MATE, and I mostly like it. However, what makes it unique isn’t here, and you’ll have to spend $130 (per year, I think), which will get you some specially-developed White Hat hacking tools.
The developer appears to be a missionary for a rather fringe US/World Christian group, and spends his time either in Michigan or Cambodia, where he has a family.
I still have this installed, so if you have any questions, let me know, and I’ll add on to this.