Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment and Mageia

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Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment and Mageia

Postby aguador » Sep 22nd, '14, 23:48

I just did a quick search of the forum and was somewhat surprised to see that no one had commented on the moribund state of Bodhi Linux, definitely dead if no one steps forward to lead it.

In my near three years using Linux I have worked with three distros (Mint, Mageia, Manjaro -- sticking with the Ms!) and three desktops: MATE, KDE, E18. Each of the three distros and desktops seems to me to meet a particular need.

Mint is a community-response version of Ubuntu, suffering from the same dated repositories as Ubuntu, but easy to install and work with. Something of a gateway to other distros for some, a final destination for some. Manjaro offers the benefits of Arch (closer to cutting edge, semi-rolling release, ample repositories and access to AUR) with few of the downsides and a good community. In my opinion Mageia may fit better with the average desktop user: great community, more up-to-date, easy updates from one version to another (at least from 3 to 4!), good respositories, and the advantage of more widely available rpm packages (a minus for Manjaro not fully compensated for by the AUR).

Of the three desktops, KDE has much to recommend it -- and Mageia's avoidance of a "pure" KDE experience has even more to recommend it. I not found a file manager better than Dolphin -- and love the easy configurability of KDE. But I have found the KDE SC less stellar than advertised. I do not like or trust Kmail, and even a generally good, relatively feature-rich program like Okular has given me problems. One problem continues to be resource use. With social desktop features turned off, Mageia KDE seems to idle at around 700 MB of RAM use, even on 32 bit machines.

At the moment I have two, old 32-bit workhorses that can manage with KDE, but my desire to use resources better and pare down a bit led me to play with Enlightenment. It is flawed, other than Terminology offers some rather limited applications (EFM, Ecire), yet it just works, and works well on my netbook and 10-year old Dell and I find it easy and comfortable to work with. Both machines run Manjaro given the problems I had loading E17 in Mageia 4. (And, yes, I did see the patch.)

With the presumed death of Bodhi, I would like to see Mageia offer more support to Enlightenment. In my opinion Mageia is a much better distribution than Bodhi in many ways -- and it certainly fits my needs and tastes better. It would be a great distro for Enlightenment. Furthermore, the success of Bodhi in the community shows that there is, indeed, a niche for Enlightenment when packaged and done right. The distros (other than Manjaro) of which I know that offer Enlightenment as an option are Sparky, Makulu and Elive. I have no experience with the first; Makulu has modified E17 in some ways -- and will not run on non-PAE equipment like my Dell; Elive has gone for years without getting out a new stable release (although they do seem to be getting closer). Note that all three of these are Debian-based. Manjaro has an excellent E18 version, but despite the team's success in creating a user-friendly, more stable fork of Arch, I think that non-technically inclined users will still find it a challenge at times.

I do not really have the training and experience or, at the moment, the equipment and time to volunteer as I might like. However, I think that it would be wonderful now that Mageia is as well established as it is if there were a way to find/devote more resources to Enlightenment as an alternative. I have read doktor5000's 2011 comments on the difficulty of working with E17, but perhaps its time to devote a bit more to it.

It is hard to keep up with the proliferation of desktops and maintain as many options as Mageia offers, and so it may seem that I am asking for too much here. Perhaps to some extent I am, but more importantly I wanted to plant a seed for thought and discussion.
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Re: Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment and Mageia

Postby claire » Sep 23rd, '14, 14:34

You're not asking for too much at all. Mageia can be anything we want it to be. Devoting resources though is not something we're really free to do. Certainly not in the same way as commercial Linux vendors or commercially led distrbutions, where resources (we call them people here) can be directed where needed. Mageia is not an entity in this way, it is a community.

As an individual of the community, you can certainly try to raise the profile of any issues in any area but the people actually doing the work, packaging the packages and maintaining them are all volunteers who likely have the same time pressures you feel yourself. Mageia is a community of volunteers from one end to the other, there are no employees - at least none yet. If you'd like to help in any particular area I would encourage you to do so, however small your part may be. Reporting bugs on our bugzilla is a part of that. Creating time, learning and doing are even better though :)

There are many teams with different roles, some technical and some not https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Contributing
Help to make Mageia! Get involved.. Please come and join us
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Re: Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment and Mageia

Postby aguador » Sep 23rd, '14, 22:46

Thanks for a thoughtful, well-worded reply. I know that ultimately I need to become more involved and hope to do so at some point. I just spent days learning something about E18 because I lost my graphical interface due to a simple, stupid error on my part. The ensuing chase through config files brought a little more understanding of Enlightenment. A few more stupidities like this and I might actually learn enough to be able to contribute in some good ways!

I would differ with you on one point: I am asking a lot precisely because Mageia is a community edition and one that, while centered on KDE and Gnome, supports all the major desktops. Asking for, urging, whatever, more support for yet another DE in that context really is asking a lot.
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