Conclusions

Jacque Raymer mostly develops Makulu alone, which means the Makulu project succeeds or fails with him. We found very little to criticize in our assessment of the Makulu MCDE 2.0 and Makulu 7.1 Xfce releases. Although the installation routine was buggy at first, the developer quickly took care of the problem.

The PAE-enabled kernel means the 32-bit system can address more that 3.2GB of RAM; if you have an older system, you need to be sure it supports PAE. Makulu now has an alternative 64-bit version, although it didn't arrive in time to be included in this review.

The variant with Cinnamon is better suited for users with recent hardware, because the desktop needs the 3D capabilities of the graphics card to display desktop effects. In the Xfce edition of the distribution, you can switch off Compiz in the menu; it thus works well on older computers. It should be noted that a new Makulu version for KDE has been released that uses Compiz instead of KWin as its a window manager.

In addition to its general usability, MakuluLinux also offers a unique look and thoughtful design. Raymer hopes to alternate between Debian "Testing" and Ubuntu as the basis in the future, so future editions should have something for everyone.