Xebian Linux came to my attention as I was searching for Debian based distros to use for the next build of my desktop OS. My plan was to move from Ubuntu and into a rolling Debian Sid setup. The top contender for my move had been EznixOS 12, which is really good. It seemed smarter to use a distro with Sid already configured, instead of manually changing from Debian Bookworm and switching out the packages. Xebian fit the bill nicely, as it is Sid by default. Xebian, like EznixOS, is not bloated with a lot of extra packages.
Xebian's downloadable iso has a nice Debian configuration right out of the box, with a popular web browser, image viewer, and other basic apps included. I was immediately impressed how responsie, smoothly running, and visually pleasing the distro is. It has the basics and I could build my ideal computing environment up from Xebian's defaults.
I mostly use window managers in combination with an app launcher, and several essential hot keys. I don't use KDE, Gnome, or other "full up" desktop environments. It is a very efficient and friction free experience to work instead with a set of keybinds to open, close, and arrange various application windows. It took me about thirty minutes to convert my Xebian setup to a Dynamic Window Manager (DWM) environment, with a hot key daemon and other efficiencies.
On a simple window manager setup, Xebian is like greased lightning. It is not only fast and stable, on modest hardware, but things just work. I did make my typical changes, and am gradually developing what will be future rolling release respins of Skywave Linux, Catbird Linux, and others:
- Switched from XFCE to the DWM window manager.
- Changed text editors to only Neovim and Nano (with Libreoffice installed for office tasks).
- Installed support for Golang, Lua, Nodejs, and added more Python apps.
- Changed the terminal emulator Alacritty and installed Wezterm as a backup terminal.
- Set up Firefox as the web browser, along with Chrome, for Web scraping tools.
I do a lot of major changes on live Linux projects from a chroot environment, and use a Linux Respinner script which I have developed over a long time. If you want to try something different from Debian Live Build, give the respinner a try.
Xebian is a really nice distro, and perfect for basing your operating system projects for other specialized purposes. I was pleased that it is bloat free and easy to customize. streamlined and customizable. Give it a try, and enjoy your Linux!
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