Salix has now joined Mint as the second distro offering an installation disk for Mate. So how do they compare?

At present, Salix only offers an installation disk, not a live one, although that will soon change. The installer is keyboard- rather than mouse-based, but easy to use. There is no option to encrypt /home, which is bad. The resulting installation is smaller than Mint, and would run in 256MB. The main difference is that Mint is 6-monthly or rolling-release (LMDE), while Salix is biennial with long-term support.

Not all the software is what one would expect with Mate: e.g. the Leafpad editor, Claws mail, Exaile audio player, Whaaw video player. You also get the more predictable LibreOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, and Gimp. As usual, the menu includes a tool to install media codecs. All the software worked, and even the “mp4 from hell” played.

On a more specialist level, Salix recognised my USB speakers which baffle many Debian derivatives.

This won’t replace the Xfce Salix on my laptop, but it’s a pretty good distro. Those brave souls who install Gnome on Slackware, and are less than happy at the prospect of Gnome 3, will find it particularly interesting, since anything in the Salix repository can be used in Slackware.