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Review: Shebang 25.0 and EndeavourOS 2025.03.19
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
This description appealed to me a lot. I think one of the more attractive characteristics of Arch Linux is its lightweight nature. The Arch project is, by default, incredibly minimal. Shebang uses Artix as a base, with its super lightweight runit implementation of init, and could be even more efficient than plain Arch. I like this idea because I've noticed a lot of Arch-based projects start with Arch's small base, but then layer a heavy desktop, lots of services, visual effects, and flashy widgets on top of the distribution. In the end, Arch-based distributions are often heavy and slow, which counters one of the main reasons to use Arch as a foundation.
A distribution which would stick to Arch's minimal nature and focus on efficiency seemed like a nice departure from the norm and I eagerly downloaded Shebang's 1.7GB ISO. The project offers a single edition and runs on x86_64 machines exclusively.
Shebang boots from its media and its boot menu offers options for changing the keyboard layout as well as offering separate boot options for launching from a optical media or a hard drive.
The live environment boots to an Openbox session and displays a news widget to the right of the screen. A virtual terminal opens in the middle of the desktop and reports it is checking for an Internet connection. This check failed, then was repeated, and repeated again. Clearly, one of the first things I would need to do was enable a network connection.
I started by clicking on the network icon in the system tray. This had no effect. The system tray sits in a panel at the top of the screen. To the left is a regularly updated memory and CPU usage monitor. There are tiny quick-launch icons in the middle of the panel. These are displayed in black and white and do not offer any tool tips, so guesswork is involved in figuring out which icons do what. The system tray is positioned to the right of the panel.