Outside looking in at Moksha

Hi,

In case anyone is interested I'm basically collecting my notes here of testing Bodhi/Moksha on a different platform (MX Linux 23.2, based on Debian 12 Bookworm)... Why? I have some experience with Enlightenment and have maintained my own Distribution (AV Linux) since 2008 and although I'm not a proper Coder I know a fair bit about putting a Distribution ISO together. I'm hoping my observations and feedback will be taken in a spirit of collaboration to help make Bodhi on Debian ("deBodhi") easier for the Bodhi developers and smoother for End-users. I rarely take time to Distro hop and look at other Distributions and I'm super-impressed with what you are doing with Bodhi, it's extremely unique in a world of flat un-engaging 'business blue' Linux Desktops, it's lightness and suitability to keep aging hardware running is an extremely noble pursuit in this disposable age... I am actually very excited by the potential of Bodhi's beautiful Desktop and taming of Enlightenment combined with the excellent sysadmin, live persistence and remastering tools of MX Linux, a great opportunity for both projects!

My testing is currently confined to a Virtualbox VM where I installed a custom "MX 23.3 Minimal XFCE4" ISO, then installed the Bodhi Linux "Distros" script and ran the Debian version of the script. The script installed successfully and once I was successfully booted into the beautiful Bodhi Moksha Desktop I completely removed all XFCE4 components and then reinstalled thunar, thunar-data and thunar-volman.. This gave me a clean basic Bodhi install to work with on a MX Linux 23.2 base.

 - MX Linux does an excellent job with firmware upgrades so I disabled all of the Bodhi/Debian firmware Repos, I suggest these should not be enabled by default in the Script and that Users can enable them on their own if needed to avoid clashing firmware packages right off the bat..

 - I kept the excellent 'MX-Tools' installed for all sort of handy sysadmin tasks... I also installed my own collection of Thunar Custom Actions as well as recoloring some of my Custom Icons from AV Linux.

 - MX Linux is set up with a choice of systemd or sysvinit boot,  Moksha seems to run OK with sysvinit so I'm a bit puzzled why systemd is a hard dependency? systemd is just fine but I think when possible Desktop Environments should be init agnostic..

 - I wanted to use Moksha with PipeWire, currently Moksha has a hard dependency for PulseAudio only... To get PipeWire installed I had to modify the Moksha Repo package and edit its 'Control' file to allow either PulseAudio or PipeWire ("pulseaudio | pipewire").

 - *NOTE PipeWire is a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio, anything on Bodhi that always worked with PulseAudio will continue to work with PipeWire, Bodhi itself doesn't need anything fixed or updated to work with PipeWire..

 - *NOTE MX Linux has a great pipewire setup meta package that installs selected PipeWire components and looks after setting the common default configuration to seamlessly pick up where PulseAudio left off and I used this..

 - It appears to me that Bodhi doesn't use Enlightenment's packagekit frontend for updates (good, it's broken in Debian Bookworm anyway) I installed the MX-Linux 'apt-notifier' and set it up for Update notifications.

 - I installed a newer Liquorix 6.4 kernel for it's performance, I did not install the very latest one because they don't work well in Virtualbox at the moment.

  - Somewhere along the line I've disabled my User authentication to power off and reboot the VM and those buttons in both the System Logout Dialog in both the Main menu are inactive.. sudo and pkexec still work as expected so whatever I've done seems limited to reboot, shutdown, hibernate..? maybe some kind of polkit nonsense..?

Anyway, that's as far as I've gotten and I wanted to collect my thoughts in a public place, I'm sure many edits will be forthcoming..