Linux Lite 4.0 Linux Lite is a desktop distribution built from Ubuntu packages that features the Xfce desktop environment and some custom tools. The project's latest version is Linux Lite 4.0 which is based on Ubuntu 18.04, a long term support release offering five years of security updates.



There are a number of key changes in Lite 4.0, several of them inherited from its parent distribution. Home directory encryption has been replaced with full disk encryption and 32-bit x86 support has been dropped in this release. The LXTerminal virtual terminal has been replaced with Xfce Terminal and the Systemback backup software has been replaced by Timeshift. I will talk more about Timeshift later. The Lite help manual has been updated and users can now manage session sounds through a new utility called Lite Sounds. In addition, Lite branded utilities now show up in the distribution's control panel with a black background to separate them from Xfce settings modules.



Lite 4.0 is available for 64-bit x86 machines and its ISO file is 1.3GB in size. Booting from install media brings up a menu offering to start a live desktop session, start the desktop with safe settings or perform a media check on the DVD. Loading the desktop session brings up Xfce with its panel placed at the bottom of the screen. The panel holds the application menu, a few quick-launch icons and the system tray. Icons on the desktop launch the project's system installer, open a local copy of the help manual and launch a file manager.



Shortly after the desktop loads, a welcome screen appears. The welcome screen provides links to documentation, the support forum and some useful utilities. I will refer to some of the welcome screen's features later as they are more useful after we install the distribution. The live desktop seemed fairly standard, though one little thing which did stand out was that my mouse pointer was displayed backward, pointing from left-to-right instead of the typical right-to-left.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- The Whisker application menu

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Installing



Linux Lite uses the Ubiquity system installer, which it inherits from Ubuntu. Setting up the operating system is quite straight forward. We confirm our preferred language, get a chance to change our keyboard's layout and have the option of installing multimedia support. Lite's installer offers to automatically set up partitions for us, or we can use its very straight forward, built-in partition manager. Ubiquity supports setting up Btrfs, JFS, XFS and ext2/3/4 file systems and I decided to set up Lite on ext4. The last two screens of the installer ask us to select a time zone from a map and then create a username and password for ourselves. The whole process is quite fast and about as simple as installing an operating system gets.



Early impressions



A fresh copy of Lite boots to a graphical login screen. Signing in brings up the Xfce desktop again. The desktop is responsive and uses a mostly dark theme, with detailed, colourful icons. I say the theme is "mostly" dark because panels and window borders are dark, but the application menu, control panel background and application menu bars are bright. I also noticed that after installing Lite, the mouse pointer reversed its look and resumed its usual right-to-left orientation.



Welcome screen



When we first sign in, the welcome window greets us. The welcome screen provides us with links to on-line resources and support, but the more interesting buttons in the welcome window launch tasks we should perform immediately after setting up the operating system. There are buttons for opening an update manager, managing hardware drivers, creating a restore point and installing support for additional languages. Clicking one of these buttons launches the corresponding tool.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- The welcome screen

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The update manager is a fairly simple program that lists available updates and downloads them for us. A simple progress bar is shown while new packages are downloaded and applied. The driver manager and language pack tools were similarly straight forward, though I did not give them a proper test as I already had all the language support and drivers I needed.



Timeshift



The restore point option intrigued me and I found clicking its button opens the Timeshift application. Timeshift begins by walking us through a configuration wizard that offers to create either rsync or Btrfs snapshots. I didn't set up Lite on a Btrfs volume so that option should probably have been disabled in the wizard. I went with the other option, making a snapshot with rsync. We can then schedule when snapshots will be taken and decide how often future snapshots will be created. Unfortunately, Timeshift appears to only be able to save snapshots on the local disk, not in a remote location. This means if something harms our root file system, the snapshot may be destroyed too.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- Creating restore point with Timeshift

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Timeshift jobs run periodically in the background and can automatically clear out old snapshots. This is great, though I occasionally wished it were possible to tell Timeshift to run with a reduced priority as having it run in the background can degrade the system's overall performance and the rsync snapshot jobs take around twenty minutes to complete on my machine.



I don't want to dive too deeply into the Timeshift topic, but since many users may see it as a way to rescue their systems in case something goes wrong, I want to share a few more thoughts on it. The first is that Timeshift's rsync snapshots do not make it possible to simply reboot the operating system and roll back to a previous snapshot, the way openSUSE's boot environments work. Timeshift can provide us with a good copy of our operating system, but restoring a snapshot after a serious system failure requires a bit of manual work. If the operating system is damaged enough that it cannot boot, we need to either get into recovery mode (more notes on that later) or use a live CD to boot the computer.



Assuming we can boot into a live CD then we can mount the root file system and locate our snapshot in the /timeshift directory, using it to copy programs and configuration files where they need to go. This is an awkward manual process, but does give us a shot at successful recovery. I tested this process, after wiping out about 10% of my /usr/bin directory, and managed to make a full recovery using the snapshot. While Btrfs snapshots are relatively light, the rsync snapshots at least double the space the operating system uses on disk and users should plan accordingly, making their root file system double or triple the usual size.



One last note on Timeshift: when running the Timeshift application, which has a nice, simple interface and a friendly configuration wizard, clicking the Delete button immediate removes the selected snapshot without confirmation. So be careful when navigating the Timeshift interface.



Hardware



When running in a VirtualBox environment, Lite worked very well. The operating system automatically integrated with the host operating system and could use my full screen resolution. When I tried running Lite on a desktop computer, the system booted quickly, performed tasks smoothly and properly utilized all my hardware. The Xfce desktop was unusually responsive and I encountered no issues with performance or stability.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- A local copy of the help manual

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When logged into Xfce, Lite required about 300MB of RAM to run. A fresh install took about 5GB of disk space, but this amount doubled as soon as I created a Timeshift snapshot. In hindsight, I probably should have used Btrfs as my root file system as it makes snapshots that require very little space and are created almost instantly.



Applications



Lite ships with a fairly small collection of desktop applications. Users are given Firefox, the Thunderbird e-mail client and LibreOffice. There is a PDF viewer, the GNU Image Manipulation Program and the Shotwell image viewer. The Deja Dup backup utility is included for making backups of users' files. Network Manager is included to help people connect to the Internet. Lite ships with the VLC media player, which is capable of playing virtually any multimedia file. I did not find any dedicated audio player installed by default, but we can install all sorts of additional software from Ubuntu's massive software repositories (more on software management in a moment). In the background we find Lite runs the systemd init software and version 4.15 of the Linux kernel.



At one point, when I was testing the Timeshift recovery options, I rebooted the computer and, from GRUB's menu, selected the advanced boot options. I noticed that some of Lite's boot options included launching the system using the Upstart init software. The Upstart boot entries did not work and quickly caused the boot process to hang. Although Upstart has been replaced by systemd, some relics from the GRUB configuration files have lingered - ghosts of init software past.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- Creating backups and adjusting the window manager

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Also on the subject of advanced boot options, I tried loading Lite's recovery mode. This worked, to a point, but I was unable to access a recovery shell. The recovery prompt asks for the root password and, since we do not have a root password (Lite uses sudo for administrative tasks) I was unable to get root access to repair the system. This is where having a live CD on hand helps a lot.



Settings and Lite tools



Lite includes many configuration tools to adjust the appearance of the desktop, tweak window manager settings, set up printers and create user accounts. There are also tools for cleaning up files to free disk space, upgrade to a new version of Lite and toggle desktop icons on/off. These tools can be accessed from the application menu or from the control centre. As mentioned previously, the icons for Lite's custom tools have black backgrounds and this helps separate the Xfce desktop settings from the lower level operating system controls. All in all, the settings modules worked well for me and I encountered no problems.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- The settings panel

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Software management



Lite ships with two graphical package managers. The first is Synaptic (listed in the application menu as Add/Remove Software). Synaptic is a powerful, flexible package manager which can perform installs, removals, upgrades and even configure repositories. It's a great, all-in-one package manager. If we want to deal exclusively with desktop software and not wade through the tens of thousands of packages Synaptic can access, then we can run a utility called Lite Software. Lite Software shows us a limited list of popular desktop software we might want to install or remove. It is a short list, with just a few items per category, but makes installing new desktop items very straight forward. We can highlight the item (or items) we want and click a button to install them. The process went smoothly for me each time I used Lite Software.





Linux Lite 4.0 -- Installing desktop applications

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I did not spot a more feature rich software manager such as GNOME Software or mintInstall, at least not in the default installation. Behind the scenes we can use the APT suite of command line package managers if we want to work from a terminal.



Conclusions



I think some people might, upon glancing at Linux Lite's description, pass it off as just another one of the many Ubuntu derivatives. After all, one may wonder what separates Linux Lite from another flavour of Ubuntu running the Xfce desktop, such as Xubuntu.



While Lite does share a lot in common with other members of the Ubuntu family, the project has a lot of little features and special tweaks which left me impressed this week. The distribution includes a very nice and detailed help manual that is easy to navigate and provides a lot of useful information. The manual not only explains how we can do things, but also offers some alternatives and trouble-shooting tips, which I think new users will appreciate. Lite is also very easy to install, it can be set up by basically clicking "Next" a bunch of times in the Ubiquity installer.



While I ran into a few limitations while using Timeshift, I think the idea behind including it is good. I would like to see Timeshift run at a lower priority and offer a way to save snapshots on a remote computer, but otherwise the technology is off to a good start. I'd love to see Lite take Timeshift a step further and integrate it with boot environments.



Mostly though what impressed me with Lite was a combination of the performance and the visual style. Lite is one of the faster, smoother, more responsive distributions I have used this year. I also liked that there was a minimal amount of visual effects, but a maximum amount of detailed, colourful icons, high contrast buttons and fonts I could read without a trip to the settings panel. I get frustrated with minimal, stick-figure icons and buttons that are indistinguishable from labels. Lite looks nice. Not in a flashy way, but in a clear, easy to read, pleasant to navigate way.



As an example of Lite's visual style, I have used Xfce a lot recently. I run it on one computer or another almost every day. And, on an intellectual level, I knew it was possible to adjust the size and dimensions of the Xfce Whisker application menu. But I'd never thought to do it because on every other distribution I have used the menu's resize button is so muted and low-contrast I'd never noticed it before. But on Lite, the resize button stands out and I clicked and dragged the menu to the size I wanted without even thinking about it. This is a very little feature, but one I had never noticed on other distributions, even though it was always there. In my opinion, all of Lite is like that: offering well defined controls that are clear about what they do.



Lite's value, in my opinion, is not in any one big feature or unique offering, but in the way Lite polishes many little things which make it so much more pleasant to use day-to-day than most other distributions. Lite is an operating system I can use consistently without thinking about it, without distractions, without hiccups and without searching for features I suspect are there, but are tucked away. I've used some powerful distributions this year, and some with really neat, unique features; but probably not any that have offered such a smooth experience as I've had this week. That's why the next friend who asks me to come over and fix their messed up laptop is going to get a fresh copy of Linux Lite. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card * * * * * Visitor supplied rating



Linux Lite has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.7/10 from 245 review(s).

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