TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I discovered this little gem in this week's DistroWatch Weekly. When a distribution claims to be "Linux for Software and Web Developers," both of which I happen to be, my ears prick up. Could this be the distribution I've been waiting for? Or will it simply build up my hopes only to dash them later?

Workbench is relatively new, as far as I can tell. They're based on Xubuntu and claim to have very svelte system requirements because of it. The slideshow on their site shows they've managed to make quite an attractive desktop in spite of this. My interest was piqued.

Install:

My first indication that there might be more to this than Xubuntu was the 1.4GB ISO file. It runs as a LiveCD or offers the option to shove off straight into the installer, much like Xubuntu 8.04.

The installer itself is pretty standard Xubuntu. If you've installed any Ubuntu derivative recently you'll know what to expect.

Upon reboot, I got a sparse loading screen and a relatively unique, pleasant looking login prompt. What followed next surprised me.

The desktop was very much a combination of Windows Vista (see the "desklets" along the right side) and Mac OS X (see the dock, which imitates Leopard's folder list).

Still pictures don't quite do this whole experience justice. The dock rises up from the bottom of the screen and then expands sideways. Icons zoom in as you mouse over and out as you pass by. It's very pretty.

It's also worth noting that none of this required desktop effects to be turned on or 3D drivers to be installed. The effects worked the same on my VM as Rig 2. One oddity was that all the locale settings for the desklets were pre-configured for Greece.

As I was navigating around, I noticed that the dock had an annoying habit of popping up whenever I moused down close to the bottom of the screen, usually to click a button on a dialog. It got in the way. This wasn't so much of a problem on Rig 2 as the VM, due to the difference in screen size (800x600 versus 1280x1024).

Ndiswrapper and the GUI ndisgtk were installed by default, giving me wireless capability on Rig 2. I had no issues installing my Nvidia drivers either.

Software Selection:

Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice and GIMP are available, as well as Inkscape, Thunderbird, and VLC media player among others. MP3/WMV and Flash playback worked just fine. Not surprisingly the Development menu was the most populated. Two Java IDEs were included: Netbeans and Eclipse. The version of Java was the OpenJDK stack, rather than GCJ.

Multiple code editors for web and general software development were included, some of which I'd never heard of before: Geany, Lazarus (for Pascal programming), CSSed (for CSS editing), Gambas2 and Monodevelop (for Mono), and many others.

Conclusion:

For a 1.0 release that literally came out of nowhere, I was very impressed by the visual polish in Workbench. If you're not a fan of the look and feel of Microsoft Vista or Apple OS X, this is not the distro you're looking for. Move along.

I was equally impressed at the fact that all this eye candy didn't come at a steep hardware cost. If my lowly virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM and an 8GB harddrive, 8MB of video RAM and no 3D acceleration whatsoever can handle this, most people's boxes will be able to as well. If you have a newer box (like Rig 2 or 4), even better.

It wasn't all whiz-bang visuals though. I'm not a fan of shiny things for the sake of being shiny. Thanks to the included Java, GCC, and several IDEs to choose from I could do actual work out of the box on this distribution.

It's based on a solid Xubuntu system and adds things I find useful, including stuff I just like to have such as multimedia playback.

I was very impressed by this first effort and look forward to playing with new versions of Workbench in the future. I can't speak for everyone, but this developer felt right at home using Workbench.