Zenwalk 5.0 .. yes a bit old but..

I just found that old (well not that old) Zenwalk 5.0 CD lying around and hence took it for a spin. Some 20 minutes or so later I am starring at a XFCE desktop. Not bad, but its the same old blue color everywhere. Now while I have been using Linux for a while now, it was mostly awesome, xmonad or openbox, with Gnome in the earlier days. The first time I used XFCE, and I was impressed.

Zenwalk brings smoothness to the desktop. Apps are well integrated and the choice of apps are good too. No more bulky open-office or evolution. Instead I get abiword, gnumeric, ice-dove (thunderbird without the brand name) and gmusic-browser, which I must say is gtk's best answer to amarok.

Some quirks are there like the package-management for instance, dont even try to compare it with pacman or apt! But then anyone trying a slack or its derivative already knows that. It may even be a plus point since every thing is under manual control. Gslapt was ok but not upto the mark. Netpkg comes default, and while it does the job, I find manual control to be much better in zenwalk.

Stability is something I cannot really report on in a weeks time, so I will post on that later. However, it does feel really smooth amd fast and is good in resource management. Also solves the hal issues with slackware 12 (which got rectified in 12.1 I heard).

I already posted some screenshots in the screenshot gallery in deviantart. So let me know what you think of it, if you are using Zenwalk or are planning to use it. Offcourse you should go for the 5.2 version, I used the old one because I didn't feel like downloading again.