Bodhi Linux 5.1
Although Mayank Sharma would have you believe that he’s a grown man and this is just a distro, he can’t wipe that grin off his (beautiful) mug.
Although Mayank Sharma would have you believe that he’s a grown man and this is just a distro. But he can’t seem to wipe that grin off his (beautiful) mug.
Bodhi Linux has flirted with extinction in the past. With its creator moving on to other things, this time around Bodhi’s community has stepped up and the distro has new blood at the helm. The new management team has just put out its first ISO; a point release that’s been in the works for quite a while and refreshes Bodhi’s last major 5.0 release, which came out almost two years ago.
This latest 5.1 release continues to be based on Ubuntu 18.04. But don’t sweat, since the Bionic Beaver is a LTS release that’ll continue to receive updates until 2023. But the new project lead has made certain changes in Bodhi. Most noticeably, the distro has swapped out a couple of legacy apps with new ones that are just as lightweight, namely Leafpad text editor and the
Epiphany web browser.
The other major visible change is the new ISO lineup. Going forward the project will now make four ISOS for every release. There’s the Standard release that has the bare minimum number of apps to help you build your installation from the ground up, as per your requirements. If you’d rather have something with more tonnage, there’s the Apppack ISO that comes with all sorts of apps you’d expect on a desktop distro.
Starting with this release, the project also has a Hardware Enablement edition (HWE) that’s similar to the Standard release in terms of the default apps. But in stark contrast to the Standard release, the HWE release will also push kernel updates along with the regular ones. This makes HWE useful for someone who’d like to take advantage of the growing hardware support in the newer kernel releases.
Besides the Standard, Apppack and HWE releases that are available for 64-bit machines, there’s the Legacy edition that is designed for dated 32-bit machines. It uses an old 4.9 series kernel that’s been tuned for dated hardware and also doesn’t ship with the PAE extensions. Sure, that means you wouldn’t be able to use more than 4GB of memory with this ISO, but then we reckon there wouldn’t be too many users who’d have that much amount of RAM on a 32-bit machine.
Another legacy app that Bodhi has ditched with this release is the eepdater system updater. There are various other, far more capable updaters available, and the Apppack edition includes the update manager app from the Linux Mint project. You can pull that in the other editions or update either using either the command line or via the Synaptic package manager that’s included in all editions.
Bodhi Linux uses Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer, which you can fire up from the live medium’s boot menu or from within the live environment. If you’re using any edition besides Apppack, you’ll have to use the distro’s Appcenter package manager to flesh out your installation. Appcenter is a web-based app that uses the apturl protocol to fetch and install apps from within the web browser. Bodhi’s Appcenter has a curated list of several feature-rich mainstream open source apps as well as their lightweight equivalents. Unless you have very particular requirements, we’d suggest you start with the Apppack edition and then trim any excesses you don’t require using Synaptic or the apt CLI.
Bodhi’s highlight continues to be its pleasant desktop. In fact most of the changes in this release, besides the ones mentioned earlier, are behind-the-scenes tweaks to the distro’s Moksha desktop. Moksha was forked from the Enlightenment 17 desktop environment, which is famous for drawing an aesthetically pleasing desktop without stressing the hardware. Despite low RAM usage, the very customisable Moksha desktop is filled with polished animations that work well even on dated hardware.