Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Welcome to the first entry in what I hope will be a continuing series, Bodhi Corner. I've been using Linux since 2002, with full time use from 2009-2012 and again from 2015 to the present. I will have a number of insights into Linux and, specifically, Bodhi Linux, not all of which will be 100% “real”. I'm an older autistic individual, and sometimes my perceptions turn out to be a bit sideways, but I'm sure I will get more factual and informative as the series progresses.
I was becoming a fan of small Linux distros for some time, being all in on Puppy from the time before Lucid Lynx. At one point, someone came out with MacPup, which was Puppy but with the Enlightenment E17 desktop. I had two versions of MacPup before the distro stopped publishing, and was hooked on E17 as my favorite desktop.
I went looking for other distros featuring e17 (technically, enlightenment 0.17), and had trouble finding any. I ran into a disk for Bodhi 3.1 in Linux Magazine, but could not manage to make it install on the equipment I had at the time. I kept track of it, as nothing better was coming along, and when Bodhi 5 came out (the last edition featuring Jeff Hoogland as the lead dev), it finally worked on the machine I had. I have used it ever since.
Bodhi 5.1 was a huge step forward, as it was the first version where Robert Wiley served as lead dev, as he continues to do to the present day. It is also when the fork of e17, Moksha, which served as the desktop or window manager for Bodhi, started growing beyond e17 but away from the main ‘e’ development.
Why Moksha? Because I am addicted to Choice. In desktops, you have your choice of either Gnome or other GTK variants (Xfce, MATE, Zorin) or KDE Plasma or other Qt variants (Trinity, LXQt). The originals of both COSMIC from System 76 and Budgie from Solus were just GTK rearrangements. Until System 76 started writing their new version of COSMIC in Rust, those were your choices…
Unless you were aware of EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) and the enlightenment window manager. Enlightenment was dubbed, early and often, the “original eye-candy window manager”. It wasn't just a rehash of what you'd like your Windows PC to look like, and it wasn't, really, a full desktop. But it looked and worked like one. Tired of moving your mouse around to find the menu button? In ‘e’, you can just click anywhere on the desktop and get a menu.
So, over the years, I got more and more interested in Bodhi and the Moksha desktop. The current version of Moksha is still based on e17, but has gone far beyond that, both in stability and features. And in early 2025, two features of ‘e’ which had been forgotten have been added back to Moksha, but I'll talk about those later.
In 2021, I received some money from the death of my mother, and decided to spend some of it donating to Bodhi. I was already considered a team member, but had not really done anything with that. I have continued making regular monthly donations, and even supplied Robert Wile with a Lenovo ThinkPad T540p to continue developing on (his old computer, from 2008, was on its last legs). Just last month, I started adding Bodhi content to mintCast, where I have been a team member since 2018, and now I have been given the opportunity to talk about it here in Full Circle Magazine.
Basic information. Bodhi is based on the LTS versions of Ubuntu, but with Moksha Window Manager in place of other desktops. The installer is Ubiquity, the package manager is APT, and Synaptic has always been available. The file manager seems to toggle from version to version from PCFileManFM to Thunar. Bodhi is packaged in 64- and 32-bit (“Legacy”) versions. The most current “official” 32-bit is still version 5.1, but there are fully functioning betas of both Bodhi 6 and Bodhi 7 (based on Debian Bullseye) for 32-bit. The 64-bit version comes with your choice of the LTS kernel, the HWE kernel, or even the System 76 kernel (newer than HWE, better for gaming on new equipment). There is also a Beta3 version of 64-bit Bodhi 7 based on Debian Bookworm, which works quite nicely and is often referred to as DeBodhi.
The software included is fairly minimal, although they do produce a version called AppPack which is pretty full-featured. The basic version of Bodhi comes with the following software choices (although you can add anything Debian- or Ubuntu-related as you like): • Terminology Terminal Emulator • Chromium Web Browser • Thunar File Manager with archive plugin • Leafpad Text Editor • ePhoto Image Viewer • aRandr Monitor Settings • Web Browser Manager • Engrampa File Archiver • Pavucontrol Pulse Audio Control • Gnome Language Selector • Synaptic Package Manager
You can go to https://www.bodhilinux.com/w/selecting-the-correct-iso-image/#Legacy_32-bit_only and check out what applications are in the AppPack version.
You can see some of the changes just on the screenshots provided from different versions.
The latest updates to Bodhi 7 (and the under-development Bodhi 8) include the new wallpaper picker, called Wallscape, and the return of the Moon module (shown replacing the Bodhi logo on my own desktop screenshot). Work is in progress on the Drawer module, which I will talk about more in future articles as it develops.
I should wrap this up for now, but will be back with more in subsequent issues. I look forward to presenting more - and more technical - information on Bodhi next month.