Jeff Hoogland announces he'll step down as leader of Bodhi Linux

by
Anonymous Coward
in linux on (#2SCH)
story imageSad days for fans of Bodhi Linux1: project lead Jeff Hoogland has announced he will be stepping down, and the project is in search of a volunteer or supporter to take over the leadership role of this unique distro.

There's more information - and a fair bit of anxiety - over at the Bodhi Linux forums.

This isn't necessarily the end of the distro, but there's no mistake this distro was very much his baby, and his vision and leadership have made it what it is. If you've never tried it, give it a spin. BodhiLinux starts with the Ubuntu base and installer, but strips out anything Gnome and replaces it with the Enlightenment 17 (E17) desktop environment. E17 is an amazing bit of work - a total rewrite from E16 that took years in the making. It's graphically very enticing, with carefully designed accents (animations, eye candy) that serves a useful purpose. You don't get wobbly windows, which is bling for the sake of bling. Instead, everything is very subtle and very useful. And on your E17 desktop you can download and install from Bodhi's - which are essentially Ubuntu's - repositories.

One of E17's most useful tricks is configuration profiles that provide different functionality for different machines or situations: there's a desktop, laptop, and tablet configuration, each with defaults that make sense for your likely hardware and situation. I'd love to try it on a tablet. You can get E17 on other distros, including Ubuntu, but by installing Bodhi you got a clean, useful, and well-configured Enlightenment desktop minutes after installing with no fuss. Lastly, E17 is phenomenally resource-conserving, so it runs blisteringly fast even on lightweight machines, and its install footprint is very small. It ran great on my Intel Atom netbook, and almost-as-great on a Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM.

This is a reminder that distros are a lot of work, and consist of long, thankless hours that you don't necessarily get to spend with your family or lounging in front of the TV. Many thanks to Jeff for a fantastic Linux distro, and thanks in advance to whichever hero decides to step up to the plate and continue where he left off.

1 [Ed. note: and I'm one of them! Bodhi has been one of my favorites since it came out.]
Reply 14 comments

This is why I read |. (Score: 2, Insightful)

by scotch@pipedot.org on 2014-09-14 14:09 (#2SCS)

glad to read such a news here, even if it the first time I read about this specific distro...

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-14 22:46 (#2SDF)

I wholeheartedly agree. I, too, am sorry that this is the first I am hearing of this distro. But at least Pipedot reported about it, unlike Slashdot, SoylentNews and other sites.

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-15 17:58 (#2SEB)

The story was submitted to all three sites.

The other two failed to publish them, just like they failed to publish news of Robin William's death while they continue to push mostly mundane Microsoft stories every day or every other day.

Slashd0t Beta: JUST IN! Bill Gates just picked his nose! Please face in the direction of ONE MICROSOFT WAY when you pray to Microsoft with your Microsoft Beads App.

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-15 17:59 (#2SEC)

minor correction -

"just like they failed to publish news of Robin William's death"

Soylent News may have reported this story but I know for a fact Slashr0t failed.

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-15 18:01 (#2SED)

another minor correction:

"while they continue to push mostly mundane Microsoft stories every day or every other day."

Should refer only to Slashr0t

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 2, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 11:22 (#2SF2)

Well, the other thing is it wasn't a very complex or complete submission. Odds are the other guys hadn't heard of it and decided they don't care about the article. Here at Pipedot, the article crossed the desk of a volunteer editor who uses and really likes Bodhi. That makes a difference. I was actually thinking of doing it for Distro Friday. Guess after doing this article, that won't be necessary anymore. Look for a different distro this week then.

Re: This is why I read |. (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 05:53 (#2SEN)

It's still in the submission queue at SN. The submission wasn't very good, just a couple links without text, which greatly slows-down how long it takes to get published, but I expect it'll get there.

Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 1)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-09-14 22:37 (#2SDE)

From the user viewpoint this really sucks, though we can all understand Jeff's priorities.

Re: Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-15 09:00 (#2SDQ)

There is potentially hope, but I dunno. Bodhi had a pretty lively and vigorous community, and the distro's goals were pretty narrow and focused - provide E17 (and maybe now E18?) on a Ubuntu base. That means a bit more than just compiling and packaging, but there's at least some hope a dedicated general would like to step up and become admiral, or equivalent.

Re: Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-15 11:38 (#2SDV)

So from an outsider's naive point of view, what's so special about Bodhi compared to say, Kubuntu? Or just using Wheezy/Jessie and installing E17? I mean, for it to work with no setup right out of the box is neat and all, but is that alone worth maintaining a whole separate distro?

Re: Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 4, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-15 12:17 (#2SE0)

That's really two questions: (1) why is e17 more interesting/better than KDE as a desktop, and (2) why is it better to install Bodhi, which is an e17-focused distro than simply installing e17 on another distro?

With regard to the first question: different people like different desktops, so that's a tough question to take a position on without starting a flamewar. I find that e17 does everything KDE4 does but more prettily and by using fewer resources. It took a little while to figure out how e17 organizes its functionality (there are modules and shelves and gadgets and it's all slightly different). But once I figured it out, I liked it better.

As for the second question, the fact that Bodhi people spend all their time making e17 work well on Bodhi means that more care and attention have gone into the integration. E17 is available on opensuse, for example, but when I installed it I found it was not as well packaged, required a lot more effort to make useable, and in general wasn't as easy to use. That's no surprise - the opensuse people spend most of their time focusing on KDE4 and Gnome3, and e17 is of secondary importance to them.

Re: Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 1)

by fnj@pipedot.org on 2014-09-15 12:21 (#2SE3)

In reply to the second question, yes, of course.

Re: Sense of foreboding for the distro (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-15 18:08 (#2SEE)

"what's so special about Bodhi compared to say, Kubuntu?"

First, I find Kubuntu buggy and bloated. The same goes for Gnome and it's GVFS crap and other bits.

Bodhi ran great on the slow system I tested it on.

The only failure IMO which kept me from using Bodhi was the lack of stunning and bug free themes. As is the case with several window managers, a lot or all of the pre-installed themes suck and suck hard. There were a few minor bugs with Bodhi which also steered me away.

All a person really needs to do is to install Debian minimal and build up from there.

TLDR; another promising, unique and lightweight distro falls.