magda

After some not-so-satisfying experiences with a few BSD's, I wanted to test something I am somewhat familiar with and came across a project anyone would suspect me of developing an instant dislike for: Mabox is a quite young distribution based on Manjaro, providing a customized Openbox environment and some additional tools for easier system customization. According to the project's homepage, this operating system aims to be fast, lightweight, functional, and stable – nothing beyond the common buzzword bingo, at least on the website's first page; the project's about page grants a little more insight:

Mabox Linux is based on Manjaro, featuring a customized Openbox window manager preconfigured to be ready to use.

It was inspired by CrunchBang, and uses some BunsenLabs utilities adapted for Manjaro.

Mabox Linux uses some of XFCE and LXDE components.

Tint2 is default panel.

Mabox use jgmenu for main menu, sidepanels, exit dialog and screenshot tool.

Ignoring the broken English for now, Mabox appears to emulate one of the most popular “lightweight” distributions, yet with a different base. It should be mentioned that Mabox is not the only distribution attempting to provide a CrunchBang-like experience, however only BunsenLabs succeeded at reaching a “wider” userbase. Given that I use a lightweight distribution based on Arch Linux as my daily driver and already tested Manjaro last year, it shouldn't be too difficult to judge Mabox.

Live-ISO

Due to having encountered many fundamental issues with distributions specifically targeting weak hardware and/or ricers, I decided to exclusively test Mabox within a poorly-configured virtual environment. The ISO is 2.1 GB in size, which is heavier than those of most “lightweight distributions” such as BunsenLabs and Archcraft, though approximately 1 GB lighter than Manjaro's. Loading the ISO first prompts a customized GRUB boot loader, which also allows to set the preferred timezone, keyboard layout, drivers, and language prior to booting the system. Once finished, I immediately came across a “bug” I regularly encounter when testing Openbox-based distributions, and this time I would be unable to choose a fitting screen resolution due to Mabox failing to detect it completely.

Before progressing, I observed the distribution's idle performance and noticed the Conky keeping track of used resources registering the CPU jumping between 22 and 52% for roughly four minutes until settling at 2%. Usually, I only encounter this kind of behavior when the system's set to automatically search for software updates after logon, though the same Conky, which also lists the most heavy processes, did not indicate such.

Installation

Like Manjaro, Mabox lets Calamares handle the installation process. Being kept “vanilla”, it automatically sets the location and keyboard layout to the choices I made when I started to run the ISO and thus only required me to get active when setting up an user. Confirming my choices instantly let the installer do its job, which would take longer than anticipated, despite progressing fast when copying the base files. The shown slides merely repeat what is already being stated on the project's homepage, although the single empty slide was rather unexpected. Postinstall configurations took the longest to set up and the installer became stuck at pacman-key --populate archlinux manjaro for five minutes, pushing the entire installation process up to a little more than ten minutes.

Installed Sytem

Booting the installed system instantly revealed a bug that causes GRUB to be empty and unusable, though it did not make Mabox unbootable. The second bug I encountered can be missed easily if not keeping an eye on systemd initializing and when not using the OS within a virtual machine; the missing VirtualBox Guest Additions might explain why Mabox refused to detect my screen resolution, yet this is something I did not encounter on Manjaro, which provided a bigger choice of screen resolutions and aspects.

Speaking of screen resolution: Before I could even close the welcome window, I had to adjust the screen and was confused to find out that Mabox uses two tools to manage monitor settings: ARandR and LXRandR, with the latter also being labeled “Monitor” in jgmenu and also acting as the only tool allowing permanent changes. And although I had to settle with a smaller resolution, I got to check out the Mabox Control Center.

This tool, inherited from Manjaro, offers a variety of settings, including desktop tweaks and system-related adjustments like kernel management. Since I seldom encounter issues with the vanilla kernel and also wanted to figure out if installing another kernel alongside the LTS one would fix the empty GRUB issue, I decided to download Linux 5.19.7-1. Once installed, Mabox recommended a reboot, yet again, I was presented with an empty GRUB menu, unable to choose a kernel pre-boot, and the vanilla kernel automatically being loaded.

Package Management

While additional kernels can be installed via Mabox Control Center, Mabox offers the GUI tool Pamac to manage packages. Alternatively, pacman and the AUR helper yay can be used, as well. Pamac is set to scann for updates every six hours – way too short for a distribution that receives non-AUR updates every two weeks.

During this test, I mainly relied on pacman and yay to fetch additional packages. Upon closer inspection, Mabox does not pull packages directly from Manjaro but, alongside the usual Arch Linux repos, from its own Mabox repository. So effectively, it's virtually no different from the Manjaro repository and, in a sense, redundant.

Documentation

Trying to figure out, which packages originate from where, Mabox doesn't offer any documentation on this topic, in fact documentation is limited to installation, desktop configuration, and few specific tools. The forum hints that users would be advised to keep up with official documentation provided by Manjaro and Arch Linux, given that only a handful of people are regularly active on Mabox's forum.

Performance

Overall, Mabox performed significantly better than Manjaro during my last test, even within a virtual environment, though with three tools installed to check system resources, I got slightly varying results:

	btop	Task Manager	Conky
CPU rate (idle)	10%	7%	10%
RAM (idle)	494 MB	333 MB	334 MB

At first I assumed that bashtop might explain the RAM gap, yet upon re-checking, the CLI tool does not need an additional 160 MB. This led me to another strange discovery that appears to be common among small “ricer” distributions.

Other Observations

While dotfiles for htop, another CLI process monitor, exist and thus indicate that the program is shipped with Mabox, the tool itself actually isn't installed and needs to be pulled manually. It`s likely that prior ISO's came with htop pre-installed and the developers simply forgot to remove the dotfiles after switching to bashtop.

Speaking of inconsistencies: While I tried to appreciate the customization options and actually do prefer those to Archcraft's approach, it's hard to ignore the design flaws of both Tint2 themes and the display manager's bottom bar. A distributions focusing this heavily on aesthetics can't set icons and text to centric on its own. Interestingly, whilst testing the live environment on bare metal, the same Tint2 configuration failed to load, among other symbols, the < next to Applications for no apparent reason, as those did load without issues within a VM.

Another thing that will irk non-QWERTY users is the keybinding for quake-terminal. Due to QWERTZ keyboards requiring me to press Alt Gr to access the ~ symbol, I was unable to even check the application due to it also not being available in jgmenu.

TL;DR

At this point, I honestly don't get why ricers refuse to simply dump their dotfiles on code hosting sites and write simple installation scripts for every Linux user to profit from and instead try to create a distribution without really wanting to take care of anything beyond desktop customization. Mabox resides somewhere between a remix of a distribution's desktop and a more independent OS similar to Ubuntu and Manjaro. Ultimately, it's a hobbyist distribution that shouldn't be used as a daily driver, despite its claims of being suited as such. It won't make users more productive due to being distracting and virtually being no different from Manjaro under the hood.

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Hardware

Medion Akoya E4070 D

Processor: AMD A10–5700 APU @ 3.40 GHz

Display: Trinity (Radeon HD 7660D)

Memory: 4 GB RAM (3462 MiB)

Storage: 1 TB ST1000DM003-9YN162 (CC4G)

Network: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Control & Realtek RTL 8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter