Pardus 21.4 XFCE - Summary, Conclusion
Everything (well, almost everything) I attempted to do went quickly and smoothly. I have a newfound appreciation for XFCE, that's for sure. Pardus loads and enables only 43 unit files at startup, which is on the low end of what I've come to think of as "medium." It starts up and shuts down without any objectionable slowness.
Icons can be placed anywhere on the desktop, as shown above. The bottom panel is very easy to configure, and the icons used there are crisp and detailed. There are tooltips, of course, but hardly any need for them. The Thunar file manager allows access to remote folders as Anonymous, neither blocking access to them nor requiring a password to access them. Thunar is something else I've come to appreciate.
There were no mouse issues at all. Mouse wheel scrolling works exactly as it does on the host machine, with no need to search for a scroll bar anywhere that scrolling is available. There is a useful selection of software included by default, and of course, apt will gladly install most anything that's missing. It even installed Vivaldi without the need to go looking for a .DEB file on the web.
The only disappointment -- and a small one at that -- was the inability to install the VirtualBox guest additions. I would have liked to use some of those features, but could not find a way to run the executable script. That, of course, would not matter to someone who's installed Pardus on hardware instead of a VM, something I'm very likely to do soon.
CONCLUSION
Pardus has been one of the most enjoyable distros I've worked with. I recommend it highly. In particular, I'm very impressed with XFCE as a DE. It presents itself as crisp, clean, and fast. As I mentioned at the start, the last time I'd used it was many years ago, and it's certainly matured since then.
As always, I've fully updated Pardus while working with it, installed Restic, and performed a backup. I plan to keep this VM around for a while longer, and take it for more of a test-drive.
Pardus is what I consider a "lean" distro, largely because of XFCE, but that lean-ness shows up in its performance.
