I tried it.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| montezuma Mar 25, 2012 9:27 AM EDT |
Not bad but needs some work is my opinion: Pros: Fast, well organised and very innovative feel. Cons: The fonts suck badly. The desktop has a clunky feel to it with for example tooltips having window bars. Manipulation of the desktop elements could be more intuitive: Reading a manual is not really appropriate for a desktop imho. It should be obvious. |
| Jeff91 Mar 26, 2012 10:12 AM EDT |
No desktop is "obvious" to a first time user. Gnome 3, KDE, Unity, LXDE, E17 - they all only feel "intuitive" if they are familiar with something you have previously used. In fact by human nature once you use something new if it is different than what you are used to things automatically don't seem "obvious", at least that has been my past experience with users. Fonts are purely subjective, but since you feel the default sucks - what do you prefer? Criticism is always preferred in a constructive form :) ~Jeff |
| tuxchick Mar 26, 2012 12:34 PM EDT |
Duh Jeff, Comic Sans. |
| gus3 Mar 26, 2012 12:56 PM EDT |
Papyrus. |
| skelband Mar 26, 2012 1:29 PM EDT |
@Jeff: "No desktop is "obvious" to a first time user." I think montezuma is referring to the "feeling" of a regular computer user. Sure, someone that doesn't use computers is going to find any GUI non-intuitive. Certain things in the desktop paradigm are pretty standard throughout the range available. Decorated windows with controls that you can move around, cascading menus. When you've seen one, you pretty much seen them all. In this context, intuitive means that certain important things are visually easily discoverable by someone "skilled in the art" (to use patenteze). This is one of the things that Microsoft seems to have lost its way on if we are to believe the various reviews around the web on Windows 8. There is a now popular YouTube video of the "dad" trying to find his way back to the Metro interface from the desktop. It is just not intuitive for him. There is no visual cue. There is no "one" obvious place where he could go to to get to where he needed to be. That is the reason why so many people want the "START" button back. From that single obvious point, you can navigate to anywhere with enough searching even by someone unfamiliar with the general setup. |
| montezuma Mar 26, 2012 2:58 PM EDT |
Jeff, Sorry for my superficiality. I think you have done a great job with this. I was just giving you honest quickfire feedback. On the fonts it isn't the type of font it is the fact that on the machine I tried Bodhi on (Thinkpad laptop) they were very spindly and not easy to read. The same machine running gnome (Mint/Ubuntu) has not this problem at all. Not sure if this is an anti-aliasing thing or what..... |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 26, 2012 5:38 PM EDT |
Coincidentally I've also just done an install of Bodhi 1.4.0 on my current testing machine, a 10-year-old Thinkpad R32 (Pentium 4 at 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk). I've been rolling the distros though it (DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, Debian, Ubuntu and now Bodhi). I'll write up a proper review at some point in the near future. First off, resource-wise Jeff isn't lying. The combination of Enlightenment, PCManFM, LXTerminal and Leafpad is excellent for this level of hardware (i.e. old). You really "feel" the extra care that most distributions take with their default desktop environment. By that I mean for the most part running Enlightment is more smooth than running LXDE in Debian (where GNOME is the default DE). I don't know if it's E17 itself or other things that the Bodhi team are doing in the configuration, but Bodhi is being extremely kind to this system in terms of memory. The amount of swapping it was doing in Debian Wheezy (GNOME 3 in Classic mode) and Ubuntu 12.04 Beta (Unity) was killing performance. But thus far Bodhi has done very well in 512 MB of RAM. That's a huge plus. Booting into Bodhi is very fast. Logging in is fast. The login screen looks great. Enlightenment has lots of configuration options, most of which I have yet to explore. So far I like this environment very, very much. It's a great alternative to Unity, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE (though it uses many of the same apps -- file manager, terminal, etc. -- as LXDE). There's been a lot of hype about Bodhi over the past few months, but this combination of extremely efficient yet configurable desktop environment coupled with the vast Ubuntu repositories is a compelling combination. However, here are my immediate issues with Bodhi: -- There is no option in the installer for encrypted /home (or /swap or /tmp, but I don't expect those, just /home). Ubuntu does offer this in its own installer, so I'm wondering why Bodhi does not. I'd be just as happy with the Ubuntu "alternate" installer (aka the Debian installer) for encrypted LVM. Especially for a laptop, I need my user files encrypted. -- I couldn't make changes to the networking settings in NetworkManager. When doing so, I wasn't asked for my password. Everything looked good, but nothing would "stick." I found the answer to this in a Crunchbang forum -- run this in a terminal: gksu nm-connection-editor -- I can't give you the link to the help I found above for NetworkManager because the default Midori Web browser kept crashing on me. And Bodhi's own software-installation utility relies on Midori to run. I found the Synaptic Package Manager and installed Firefox and Chromium, so I'm good to go browser-wise. That's a very small list of complaints. On my to-do list for Bodhi: I know there is a way to get the PCManFM file manager working with sftp:// and WebDAV (dav:// and secure davs://) connections. I just haven't figured it out yet. |
| BernardSwiss Mar 26, 2012 6:29 PM EDT |
What about package signing in the Bodhi repository -- has that been addressed yet? That's the deal-breaker issue for me -- especially because otherwise I'd see Bodhi as a really strong contender for Linux-newbie Windows-refugees with old hardware. Stuff like the network settings glitch are a pain, but are relatively easy to cope and relatively easy to work around till they are fixed in the default install (possibly even a good "teaching moment" if you're going to be available to hold the newbie's hands while they get accustomed to living on the other side of the -ahem- window) |
| Jeff91 Mar 26, 2012 6:39 PM EDT |
Regarding the Midori crash - disable the speed dial function if you enabled it. We have it disabled by default because it causes much sporadic crashing. If that doesn't resolve the issue our online AppCenter also works with Firefox. The installer is semi-lack luster. We are using the Ubiquity installer version slightly modified from Ubuntu 10.10 release, this will be updated to 12.04's installer with our 2.0.0 release. The network manager issue of settings is something we basically need to document better I think. It is caused by Gnome's tool being used in a non-GTK desktop. nm-applet is the best/most versatile network tool around though IMO, so we will be sticking with it. I'm not sure if PCMan supports those features - if you figure it out be sure to let us know :) If you have any questions/issue as always don't be afraid to post/email bout them. Cheers, ~Jeff |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 26, 2012 9:24 PM EDT |
I figured out sftp:// in PCManFM -- you need to specify the port number, as in sftp://site.com:2222 I plan to try the davfs2 package for webdav. I'm not hung up on Midori enough to care about it. This hardware responds well to Firefox and Chromium, so I'll stick with those. Nice job overall, Bodhi team. |
| vainrveenr Mar 28, 2012 1:40 AM EDT |
Quoting:So far I like this environment very, very much. It's a great alternative to Unity, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE (though it uses many of the same apps -- file manager, terminal, etc. -- as LXDE). Another "great alternative to Unity, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE" could also be CrunchBang Linux. From the CrunchBang DistroWatch.com description : Quoting:CrunchBang Linux is an Debian-based distribution featuring the light-weight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built from a minimal Debian system and customised to offer a good balance of speed and functionality. CrunchBang Linux is currently available as a live CD; however, the best performance is achieved by installing it to a hard disk. Although an updated set of CrunchBang Linux 10 "Statler" CD images was released as recently as last month, Bodhi Linux is clearly more hyped up than CrunchBang. --- Also see the relevant blog 'Larry the CrunchBang Guy' found at http://larrythecrunchbangguy.wordpress.com/, and actively maintained by another frequent commentator here at LXer. The latest blog post is entitled Why ‘solutions’ like CrunchBang matter and is concurrent with another immensely significant post by the same author at a different blog; Adios, Ubuntu . |
| lcafiero Mar 28, 2012 3:51 PM EDT |
vainrveenr wrote:Also see the relevant blog 'Larry the CrunchBang Guy' found at http://larrythecrunchbangguy.wordpress.com/, and actively maintained by another frequent commentator here at LXer. The latest blog post is entitled Why ‘solutions’ like CrunchBang matter and is concurrent with another immensely significant post by the same author at a different blog; Adios, Ubuntu. Hey, thanks for the plug, Vainrveenr! Jeff91 -- I'll have to give this version a shot. As you'll note, there's a 88-by-15 Bodhi Linux button on the bottom of the Larry the Free Software Guy posts (and it's Creative Commons, so feel free to use it), and as I've said in the past, you do a good job with Bodhi Linux. For my tastes, Enlightenment is too "baroque," a little too ornate and frilly, BUT (everyone has a big "but," and here I am talking about mine), the way that Enlightenment handles what normally weighs down other desktop environments -- especially on older hardware -- is pretty commendable. Though this DE is not my cup of tea, so to speak, Enlightenment is a commendable effort and something of which you and the Enlightenment team should be proud. |
| jdixon Mar 28, 2012 5:03 PM EDT |
> ...Enlightenment is too "baroque," You know, I think that's a perfect description of what I remember of Enlightenment the last time I tried it. :) It's been quite a while though. I really should take a look at what Jeff's done with it. One of these days when I actually have some "free time". |
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