Thanks for your detailed opinion on Bodhi.

I don’t have a major beef with Bodhi Linux, but I do think there are things about it over the years that have made it move away from what I thought was a pretty awesome distro.

First of all, the “original Bodhi” had amazing integration with their website. You had everything laid out for a user to indulge in. The site offered a complete, tailored set of app packages you could download and install all in one go. This is something I’ve never seen from any other distro. But that’s all gone now. Instead, each current version of Bodhi barely includes enough normal programs to get going. You are forced to spend plenty of time getting all the apps you need. I don’t see any reason to include an office app. Do people really use word processing, databases, and spreadsheets that much anymore?

To me, it looks like they didn’t want to spend any effort choosing decent apps for all categories. There’s going lean, and then again, there’s going lean… out of the box, Bodhi appears very lacking in terms of getting the distro installed and being ready to do anything serious with it. With many hours of work, Bodhi could certainly hold up against most any other “light” distro around. In fact, there are fewer and fewer good lean distros to choose from these days.

I do appreciate the work the Bodhi developers have done, but for me, other light distros like Linux Lite shine above it with so many neat built-in features. The change in look between 6.0.0 and the current 7.0 isn’t necessarily an improvement, in my opinion. To me, that was change for the sake of change.

Another downer for me is that the old Bodhi used to find my wireless connection with no problem. Now I have to jump through whatever hoops are required in order to get it working, which many other distros have little issue with.

My apologies for all the negativity, but I don’t really see who they think their target audience is. That older Bodhi I spoke about was something I could readily recommend to any “noobie,” but I am certain I couldn’t do that today.

On the plus side, the memory footprint is almost unbeatable, even with the Chromium browser running. Overall, this desktop environment would take some getting used to for anyone coming from a Windows, Mac, or even “standard” Linux environment. It takes time to “grow on you,” so it’s probably worth the time to play with it for a few days. The options available for the desktop would throw a lot of people off. I like options as much as any Linux user, but I can see it as a barrier to less computer-adventuring users. The strengths of Mac and Windows are their consistent (i.e., boring) layout and look.

Anyway, I still hold out hope that Bodhi returns to its glory days. I do the same thing for Zorin OS, which, to me, went downhill after version 11.

Having said all this, I still have a reserved amount of love for this distro. But I still can’t shake the feeling I had for it in the past, when everything just seemed to check all the right boxes for me.