 One of my all-time favorite window managers on Linux is OpenBox. A matter of fact, OpenBox was the very first standalone window manager I ever used about 15 years ago when I first switched to Linux. The very first desktop environment I ever tried was GNOME 2, which was very popular on a lot of Linux distributions back then, and I didn't like GNOME 2. So I quickly searched for something else and I discovered the OpenBox window manager and I fell in love with OpenBox back then. And there's actually a lot of OpenBox Selenix distributions that already have OpenBox configured for you, set up for you, so it really makes it easy for new users to get into OpenBox. I think one of the absolute best OpenBox Selenix distributions is a distribution called Matebox. I think one of the reasons I like Matebox a lot is because one of my favorite distributions that's been dead for many, many years now was the old CrunchBang distribution. CrunchBang was a Debian distribution that used the OpenBox window manager and had a lot of custom scripts and it was just very well set up and CrunchBang has been dead for a number of years now and Matebox kind of has that CrunchBang feel to it, so instead of being Debian based, Matebox is based on Manjaro. So Matebox had a recent release just a few days ago. They released version 2208, so I went ahead and spun up a virtual machine here. I'm going to run through a quick installation of Matebox 2208 and take a first look. And one of the things immediately when I boot into the live environment here is what a gorgeous desktop. When I say that it's one of the best OpenBox Selenix distributions, you can tell that they put a lot of thought and effort as far as both aesthetics and functionality. I love the cockies like the dotted borders around the cockies. They've got three cockies on the screen here. They've got a lot of information about key bindings. Now, typically you wouldn't want this many cockies filling up your screen, but for a brand new user who maybe is not familiar with what the key bindings are for this, I can understand having these cockies on the screen. And then you have the panel at the top. It looks like it's split into two sections here. You've got one section over here with quick launchers. Then you've got the section over here. This looks like your Cistray clock and a session panel. And this, I believe, is the Tent 2 panel, which is the panel I typically use when I run OpenBox. It's a very easy to configure panel. Looking at the quick launchers here at the top, let me find the installer. And it looks like Install Maybox Selenix. Let me click on this. And they're going to use the Calamaris installer. So first we get the welcome screen. We need to choose the language for the installer. American English is the default. That's fine for me. So I'm just going to click Next. And then we need to set our time zone. It is correctly chosen. The central time zone in the US for me. So all I need to do is click Next. And then we need to set our keyboard. The English US is what is chosen. I'm going to click Next. And we need to set up our partitions. We can either erase the disk and give the entire drive of this virtual machine to Maybox, which is what I'm going to do. Or if you need to set up some kind of custom partition scheme, especially if you're dual booting, you could choose manual partitioning and do it yourself. But I'm going to choose erase disk and give Maybox the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine. We have the option, do we want no swap, swap, no hibernate, swap with hibernate or a swap file. I'm going to do a swap file for the file system. We have the option of extend for, butterfs, f2fs, or xfs. I'm going to stick with the tried and true extend for file system. And then I'm going to click Next. Now let's create our username and password. My username is going to be DT, the host name of this computer. I'm going to call it maybox-vert, just to give it something that's obvious and descriptive in case I need to SSH into this virtual machine. I have so many virtual machines. I want to know exactly which one I'm logged into. And then let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically without asking for a password? That's ticked off by default. I'm going to leave that ticked off because I want to have to enter a password to get into my machines for privacy reasons. And then do we want to use the same password for the administrator account? The sudo password, yes. That way DT's password and the sudo password are the same. And then let's click next. And the summary, location, looks good. Keyboard looks good. The partition scheme looks good. I'm going to click install. And then it's going to give us a warning. It's about to format the drive. And right to the disk I'm going to click install now. And away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my machine. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once the installation has completed. And the installer has completed. And now what I need to do is I need to tick this box that says restart now and then click done. And we're at our login manager. It looks like they're probably using LightDM for the login manager. Let me go ahead and login. And we've logged into our newly installed Maybox Linux. Now one thing is the screen resolution is all walkie. So let me right click on the desktop because this is open box. Your menu system is a right click desktop menu. So right click the mouse and you get your menu system here. And if I look around I go into Maybox config. And let me see if I can find something to change the screen resolution as far as a GUI. I could always open a terminal and do it with X Render. But I want to see what graphical programs they have installed. There is screen resolution. Let me see what that is. Then it looks like that is AR and R, A Render. So I could change the screen resolution with that. But let's see, they had a different program also here. Screen resolution LX, R and R. So this will be a little bit more user friendly. So let me find 1920 by 1080 and hit apply and hit okay. And I've logged back in and now we've got our 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. And I've got our welcome screen here. And on our welcome screen we have several things to choose from. We have this column here that says start. And the first thing is update the system which being a rolling release distribution based on Manjaro we probably should do. So let me click update. This had a release just a few days ago so there shouldn't be a ton of stuff to update when our graphical software center opens. Let's see, is this PAMAC? It is PAMAC 10.4-2-1. Makes sense. PAMAC is a GUI package manager that the Manjaro team built specifically for Manjaro. Maybox is based on Manjaro. Let's go ahead and click apply, give our sudo password for the update since there's just a few packages that need to be updated here. By the way in the cocky here off to the right I have installed packages and it's numbered 882. So there's 882 packages installed out of the box here. And let me close PAMAC now that the update has completed. Then under the start column we have add kernel. So do I wanna change the kernel? It looks like out of the box they installed the LTS kernel but if we wanted to we could install a newer kernel. I'm fine using the LTS kernel though. We could install popular apps. I'm assuming that would just launch the software center here. This is the Manjaro application utility. So this little utility is a list of very popular programs that are not installed by default but many users will want. For example, browsers, Firefox is the default browser but they go ahead and offer you the choice of installing Vivaldi, Chromium, Midori, Opera. Have email clients here, several email clients, Evolution, Geary, Thunderbird, et cetera, Office Suite. So this would be LibreOffice, FreeOffice, MSOffice. I'm not really gonna install any extra software so I'm just gonna go with what is installed out of the box for today's first impression video. Then we have this resources column where we have a quick start guide, we have a link to the website and we have a link to the Maybox form. And then we have Project and here we can get involved with the development of Maybox or we could donate to the project and then we have the checkbox here. Do we want this to launch at startup? So every time you log in the welcome screen auto starts for me, now that I've seen it this one time I'm gonna take that off so it never auto starts again and then I'm gonna close it. So let's see what programs are installed out of the box here in Maybox 2208. So at the top of our right click menu we have some, I guess, quick launchers. So common programs that you're gonna open all the time. So this would be the terminal, the web browser, the file manager, the terminal. Let's see which terminal emulator they're using. The font size is very small. Let me zoom in a little bit here. I don't recognize that icon for the terminal and I don't know how to get the terminal name other than using X-Prop. So I'm gonna do X-Prop. My cursor turns into an X. Now let me click the window that I want the X properties for. And this terminal is Terminator. You can see window manager class is Terminator. So that is the terminal. The web browser of course is going to be Firefox. Let's see what version of Firefox they're on. It should be the absolute latest being based on Manjaro and being our rolling release. Let me go to help and about Firefox. Firefox 103.0.2. Let me close Firefox. And then back to the right click menu. Let's see what file manager they're using. It looks like this could be maybe PCMan FM. It is PCMan FM 1.3.2. That's the file manager that I prefer to use on all of my standalone window managers. So PCMan FM is a fine choice. And it's typically the file manager you'll see on open box distributions. Mainly because PCMan FM was the file manager on the old LXDE desktop environment that's no longer being maintained. But LXDE was a old desktop environment that was very lightweight. It used the open box window manager and it typically used PCMan FM as the file manager. Now let me get back into the right click menu and let's get into the categories here. Accessories, we have Clip It for our Clipboard Manager. Once again, we have our PCMan FM file manager. We have Fsearch, so this will be a file search. We have Calculator, which is a standard calculator. So if I go to about, this is Calculator 2.1.4. This is a GTK-based scientific calculator. And if you go to View, if you need scientific mode, you know, you can get all the fancy buttons. Most of them, I have no idea what they do. For me, I just like basic calculators, but Calculator is a pretty fantastic calculator available on Linux. And then we have our LightDM settings. So this will be changing like the wallpaper for your LightDM login manager. Then we have Nitrogen, which sets our wallpaper. Let's go ahead and see what wallpapers we have available to us here in Maybox. So the wallpapers honestly look very gorgeous. Let me cycle through just a few of these. A lot of these are standard Manjaro wallpapers, part of some of the Manjaro wallpaper packs. So some good looking wallpapers here. There's some Maybox branded wallpapers as well, such as, well, that's a Manjaro branded wallpaper. Here's one that is Maybox branded. And so a mixture of some Manjaro wallpaper packs, some standard Manjaro wallpaper stuff, and some Maybox specific stuff. I really like the natural photographs, right? The nature photographs. Some of this looks really, really good. Here's one that I bet would be great. The black cat with the green eyes. That is pretty awesome. I may need to actually rip off that wallpaper because I kind of like that. Let's go with this here because I think that's gonna fit with the green theme. Yeah, that's really, really nice there. Let me get back into the right click menu. Wow, the open box theme changed because wasn't it a darker theme before? So that is really, really cool. We need to get into some of the configuration stuff in just a second. But let me go ahead and see what else is installed as far as default applications. We have, of course, Terminator was the terminal. Xarchiver is our archive manager. So that's for zip, unzip, that sort of thing. Xpad, I guess for sticky notes. Under development we have Genie. Genie is IDE slash text editor. One of my favorite plain text editors that's available on Linux. Really fantastic program. Under graphics we have Color Picker, Color Menu. We have Flameshot for our screenshot utility. By open Flameshot it actually sits up here in the sys tray until I actually click on something and then you get your menu here but I don't really plan on taking a screenshot right now. Also under graphics we have G-Pick which is another Color Picker which probably is the same as this entry here in the menu. We have View Noir which I believe is a image viewer. Elegant image viewer, you have View Noir 1.8. Under multimedia we have some minimal audio players and multimedia players. We have our Audacious Music Player which is a great little audio player. Also under multimedia we have MPV which of course is our movie player, a very minimal movie player. Other than that the only other thing we have in multimedia is the Pulse Audio Volume Control of course. V4L2 video for Linux which is used especially for capturing webcam stuff and then your volume icon which should be sitting in the sys tray up here. This volume icon that says 100% when I click it it mutes the volume. When I unclick it, it unmutes the volume. Under the internet category we have our Firefox web browser. We have our Mail Reader which I didn't know they had a Mail client installed out of the box, they don't. So we need to check one so I'm not gonna install the email client. Under settings we have Ad Remove Software I'm assuming that would be PAMAC and it is. Also under settings we have AR and R for our screen settings especially if you're using multi monitors you'll love this tool because what you'll do is you'll have like for example I have three monitors I would have three monitors here and I could rearrange the order of them if the order of your displays is out of order for some reason or maybe one of the displays is mirrored to another monitor and it shouldn't be, et cetera. So you will really like AR and R if you're a multi monitor user. Also under settings we have Customize Look and Feel so this is the LX Appearance Tool so this is how you would change your GTK themes and your icon themes. So this is all the GTK themes that are installed and they have a ton of GTK themes installed out of the box and yeah, you can change them. I kinda like dark themes so let me find one that's more appropriate here for this color scheme. I think I like this one here, Matcha Dark For Real. I'm sure I didn't pronounce that right but let me hit Apply on that. And then our icon theme right now we're using Numix Circle but you have a few other choices such as Papyrus Dark which is a really nice icon set as well. We have Numix Square as well. You hit Apply on that. You can also play with the fonts and the mouse cursor here in LX Appearance. Let's get into some of the Maybox specific configuration tool. So if I go into the Maybox sub menu here there is a Maybox Control Center. Let's click on that. So the very first screen is kind of like a system information screen so it lets you know what window manager you're using, uptime, screen resolution, installed packages, updates, kernel version, et cetera. Really not much to see there but then you have tint to panel. So I guess this is allowing us to configure the panel here and you can see we can add or remove launchers. If I click on that, I'm assuming the launchers are the quick launchers here. So these are the programs that we could add to the quick launcher. For example, maybe I use Calculator all the time. If I click on that, yeah I now have a quick launcher for Calculator. That is extremely cool. You have a button here for configure panel. I'm assuming this would be where you could change like size and position, yeah padding and several other things. I'm not gonna play with that because I don't wanna accidentally mess things up. I don't wanna be playing with it that long. But anyway, you can adjust everything in the panel to your heart's content, colors and transparency and positioning and all of that. And then of course you can save that config. Then we have menu and side panels. So it tells us the main menu is accessed by right clicking or when space, I haven't tried that. So if I do super space, yeah. So if for example, you have a window full screen, of course you can't right click on the desktop because the window will be in the way. So how would you pull up your open box menu? Well, they have a key binding, super space. So very cool. Let me get back into the Maybox Control Center here. One of the things that they recently added was the colorizer. So they're really getting into colors and color schemes. I think a lot of people are getting into color schemes these days. I know I seem to be preoccupied with adding color schemes to everything as far as all of my configs. And it looks like Maybox is going down that route as well. If I click on colorizer, wow, we get this nice little side menu here. Which is essentially, I believe, I'm guessing is an open box menu that's using a dynamic script because open box menus, you can actually pipe scripts into them to dynamically generate the contents of the menu. It's one of the real neat features of open box. And if I go in here, and I can change the open box theme right here so I can play with the colors. And it even gives me the values that are currently set and everything. There is the colors for the menu and the panels. There is the colors for khaki. And we have pie radio. I'm not familiar with pie radio, but I could play with that as well. We have popular accent colors down here. So if I wanted to change the accent color, maybe right now I think I'm using green for accents. So let's change to something that would be obvious. So let's change to like an orange color. You can see that accent color is actually the open box color, the open box title bar. So that is pretty cool. Let me go ahead and change that accent color back to something maybe something more normal. Man, that is very, very green. It looks like they have these colors grouped based on like popular distributions and desktop environments. You see this first set of colors is called Ubuntu. It's popular Ubuntu colors. So probably, you know, a lot of purple and orange, right? And then you have the mint colors. Although oddly there's no green in the mint colors. And then you have plasma colors, which are a lot of hot pinks and pastels. For me, let me choose, could I choose something like that? Yes, I could. Yeah, so that is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in any distribution is this colorizer thing. That is probably what I would consider the defining feature for this current release of Maybox. That's, I read their release notes and they specifically mentioned this colorizer tool and having worked on that. And I gotta say job well done on that Maybox team. Yeah, there's so much I could play with here. I see all the key bindings for various things here for launching programs and also some open box specific things. One thing I don't see is like snapping and grid, key bindings for open box, but I'm sure Maybox has included that stuff. So if I open a file manager here and I do super and I'll do left arrow, yeah, it'll snap to the left side. And if I open a calculator and I did super right, I could snap that to the right side, very cool. If I did super up on the calculator, that would take up the upper half, super down would take the lower half and super right again would get back to the right. Yeah, really, really neat. Let's see what kind of system resource usage we're using. Now I did launch a lot of programs here in the last few minutes and some of them are still running in the Cistray. I see Flameshot still running. I'll actually kill Flameshot because it wasn't running by default. And let's go ahead and run Htop. Htop is not found. So let's do a sudo pacman dash capital S Htop. And that's really neat that Terminator or Terminal actually turns red when it's asking for the sudo password. I really wasn't expecting that but that is actually a neat little feature. And this is one of the reasons why people love Openbox. The Openbox window manager is even with the tent tube panel and all the conches running and I've got the terminal open and Htop running and I've got several things sitting in the Cistray. We're using 437 megs of the six gigs of RAM. I gave this virtual machine. That is extremely light, especially considering we've got quite a bunch of stuff running. If I really spent some time and killed a lot of processes, I could easily get this down to probably 250 megs, right? So very, very light window manager, CPU usage. We're using about 3% of the CPU here, which is about normal for what we've got going on. A lot of that CPU usage is going to be some of the calculations being done that's automatically generated for this cocky here. So that was just a cursory look at the latest release of Maybox, Maybox 2208. I think this, again, this distribution has been around for a few years. I think it's fantastic. I think it's one of the best, if not the best, open box distributions on the planet. Some of their custom tools are really neat and I am just so impressed with that colorizer menu that allows you to adjust your color schemes and things for various things. Your open box theme and your cocky theme, your tint tube panel and everything. I could see so many possibilities for me creating a script very similar for me to use in my window managers, some of my tiling window managers. Maybe I'll use their colorizer, maybe take a look at some of what they're doing. Maybe as inspiration for me making my own colorizer script in the future. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I needed to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe, James Matt, Maxim, and Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why you bald homie? Allen, Armored Rackin, Chuck, Commander Marie, Daniel, Delin, Greg, Marshdarm, Arjan, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Watch, Infador, Polytech, Realities for Luxury Profits, Steven, Tools, Devils, and Willie. I think I mispronounced a couple of the names there, but these guys, all these names you're seeing, these are the producers of the show. These are my has-eared patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at Maybox 2208 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys if you like my work and want to help me out. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. I love X-Monad, but OpenBox still has a place in my heart.