I’ve recently been playing around with a new-ish distro called Bodhi Linux. It’s a light-weight distro, and since I’m a cheap bastard who likes to spend not much money on underpowered hardware, I like to get the most I can out of my OS.
That’s why I use primarily Xubuntu and Lubuntu, and even Puppy Linux on another machine. And that’s why I still stick with old Windows XP for games on another computer. Don’t worry, the games are all so old that I don’t need any newer software than that.
But back to Bodhi. It’s another Ubuntu-based distro. I’ve tried to get away from Ubuntu because of what I see to be a bad direction that things are headed with that project. But sadly, most other distros don’t go out of their way to make things easy for the end user like Ubuntu. Except for Mint, and you can read about my failed attempts at getting Mint to work below.
But I gave Bodhi a try as a live CD on a few of my computers. And I was seriously impressed. It was the fastest booting of any live CD I had ever tried, and all of the compositing and animation effects never lagged, even on this here 9-year old laptop that really shouldn’t have handled it.
This is because of the wonderful window manager known as Enlightenment. E17, to be exact. Bodhi is built around it, and after a lightening quick install, it also booted in record time too.
Now that’s when my disappointment started. I’m a customization junkie with computers and operating systems. If I can’t tweak it, I won’t use it. And it’s not that Bodhi and E17 can’t be tweaked, it’s just that they can’t quite be tweaked enough.
Deal-breaker #1 was the mouse cursor “jumping” automatically to a new open window or dialogue box. Hells no. I remember the first time I saw this kind of thing back in Windows 98. I think my hair spontaneously caught fire, I began to shriek, and I fell down 4 flights of stairs trying to figure out how to turn it off.
But I couldn’t figure that out in Bodhi. Meh.
Deal Breaker #2. Newly installed apps like Firefox and VirtualBox don’t get launchers added to the applications menu.
Okay, I realize that it’s trendy now for nobody to want to have icons and menus any more. Nobody uses a mouse with a computer apparently. But damn it, I still do. The only way I could figure out how to get Firefox to start was to do a “run” command. Fuck that.
Rather than try to research on the Bodhi wiki on whether or not I even could create custom launchers, I decided to go back to good old Lubuntu. And in the time it’s taken me to type this out, it’s installed and updated. Yay.
Sad thing is, I had a complete, updated and customized Lubuntu 12.04 installation up and running before I wiped it to try Bodhi on that computer this morning.
Sigh.
Anyway, I know you’re on the edge of sanity your seat wondering why I’m mucking about with all this OS installing business, and I shall reveal all in the next post!
SCIENCE!!!