The developers have made some important modifications

Oct 19, 2014 17:47 GMT  ·  By

HandyLinux is a very interesting Linux distribution based on Debian and Xfce that comes with a curios and very different kind of launcher and an oddly familiar system theme.

There are hundreds of active Linux distributions right now that are being worked on, but most of them are not very different from their bases. Despite the large number of open source OSes, there are just a few base systems that are used predominantly and the same can be said for desktop environments.

In fact, all the major desktop environments can be easily recognized, even if the developers made serious modifications to them. We can't say the same about HandyLinux, and the devs know this fact. It's pretty obvious from the start that the makers of HandyLinux wanted something else, so they built their own launcher, which is pretty different from everything users have seen until now.

HandyLinux 1.7 is major update

Things are moving very fast for this new Linux distribution. It's built by a French team and they have been very active in the past few months. They had a very important release in August, but now they're returned with an even bigger update and some pretty important modifications.

There are two major features that define HandyLinux. The first one is the custom launcher built for this distribution. Instead of using the launcher in Xfce, the devs have made a new one that opens in the middle of the screen and shows categories and specific apps.

The second thing that will be noticed immediately is the theme used by the OS, which vaguely resembles the one from the Windows 8 operating system. If you are a user that dual boots with Windows, you might be inclined to say that it's more than vague. There is nothing wrong with it, just that it looks strange in a Linux distro.

One of the biggest changes in the HandyLinux 1.7 is the fact that Chromium has been dropped in favor of Iceweasel, the browser based on Mozilla's Firefox. Also, the HandyMenu (launcher) has been updated as well, the home window for netbooks has been reduced, some packages have been imported from Debian 7.7, and "social launchers" have been added to the list of applications.

You can find more details about this Linux distribution in the release notes, but they are written in French. Don't fret, the system has English support. You can also download HandyLinux 1.7 right now from Softpedia.