Enso OS — The one with less attentions.
Enso OS, the one that is so unfortunate not having so much attention and talk amongs linux user. Well, I feel myself called upon to write about this, as I feel this distro is also need the exposure as the other linux is getting from day to day usage. Well some of the people out there might have stumble upon this distro before, because of the promising looking the developer behind it put in.
Introduction.
This distro is based on Xubuntu distro, which is also a derivation of Ubuntu. Built with XFCE default desktop environment, Gala from ElementaryOS as the windows manager and features Panther as the application launcher, you know, like the one Windows is using. Additionally, Enso also has Plank, an equivalent to Dock that sits on the bottom of the Desktop, just that it is on the right side, making it looks like it’s in Windows ecosystem — but that can be adjusted to be in the middle.
What made me change to this distro?
First of all, before even downloading the distro, I look into the internet and watch some YouTube videos and I found that it has beautiful and cleaner UI which suit to my taste, flat UI, or people nowadays called it Material Design.
2nd of all, beside of my inquiry feeling, this is the second time that I’m using XFCE desktop environment. It should be my 2nd time, last time try to boot Manjaro but it fails miserably.
Thirdly, this distro comes with dconf Editor out of the box. We all do knows that the reason people migrating from Windows (or even macOS) is that they want the free will to customize everything from the UI sizes and appearances to even the physical hardware. This is the compulsory tools that I will always install to every distro that I tested and use as my daily driver. Sometimes my trackpad not working, sometimes my scrolling behavior were in inversed direction thus make it compulsory for me to have it.
What are inside?
I really like to screenshot the Panther but it didn’t work out. So, lets skip to the AppHive, hehe.
- AppHive.
The AppHive is nothing differs to any AppStore. Not sure either only my 2013 Acer laptop not support it or it just lag almost 2–3 seconds when loading the applications from the difference categories. Plus, not much application available out of the box just yet.
2. Desktop Wallpaper (this has bug)
Enso shipped with lots of beautiful wallpaper collections as well as other distro. Most of the wallpaper consist of water-themed or ocean-themed images. Setting own image for the background also possible.
Unfortunately, as I try to change back my wallpaper to origin, the beach, it won’t change.
3. The File Manager, Thunar.
Thunar file manager is the default file manager for Enso. The side panel has 3 sub-categories. The one that caught my attention is Places. This section missing important subset in it. Such as Favorite. All the Folder inside Home (in this case Enzo) should be automatically pinned in Places, though you can do manually by right-click on it and Send to -> Side Pane (create shortcut).
4. macOS appearance alike.
Take a closer look at the Panel and the Application windows (in this case Firefox). The Menu selection that is on Firefox is “transferred” to the panel. This one is not available in Elementary, out of the box.
Why I didn’t see much people even recommend about it?
A lot of people being talking about this distro that just a Xubuntu derivatives. Some even take it as a joke if Elementary and Xubuntu were a couple, then their child would be Enso. Well, that could be true. But if we think a bit more, why the developer even release it if they already know the outcome of it. Some users (probably current Xubuntu users) knows where to tinker this and that, some users want to have everything already set up. Install it and ready to use.
2nd reason that I could think of maybe due to the version number. As of this writing, the version number is 0.3.1. The previous version is 0.3 and it takes a year for a minor release to get to 0.3.1. It’s very understandable that all of these works are been done alone, despite of busy daily life. So, the release schedule is quite slow. For some people that loves to jump-distro like me, I always looks into the version number in the first place. In software versioning, we know that floating number always mean Alpha or Beta version but Enso case is stable enough to be released to get more feedbacks for further release. Secondly I will look into how frequent the update is released. This is the reference on how quick the team behind the distro push an update to add new features as well as fix bugs reported in the previous version.
Thoughts to the developer/s?
This distro is great though. I’m enjoying using it now. Though there are few things I believe developers need to do in order to get more users jump in;\
Get more people involves with the project, will help this grow bigger.
Adding more supports for Wi-Fi cards especially the one from TP-Link. Alfa brands are hard to get on some countries.
Release more updates to user, even minors. Minors update when sum up altogether will equal to one big major. As least user knows that the developement behind this distro is still active, so they wanna stay longer.
Hey, you made it to the bottom of the post. Thanks for having time on this post. It’s not much, but there is.
