More Bodhi 6 reviews

They in it for the CLICKS. Still good coverage I suppose ...

I have been corresponding with one the last few days. He has already reviewed Bodhi, but his next review of presumably our next release may show the "fruits" of this correspondence. Another that has not yet reviewed BL6 yet but did review BL5.1, I talk with sometimes on FB. So yes, I think there may be some value to a more personal interaction with some of  these "reviewers."

Ok, I said I had been corresponding with one reviewer, he specifically asked me to email him with my "plans for the Future of Bodhi." Turns out  I have rather detailed plans for both immediate future and long-term future (years later maybe even a decade or more). All plans may change tho and how much we get accomplished on this depends on many factors. Many of these plans involve Štefan or I. Other plans may involve other team members such as the web-dev team and so on. But regardless of my plans, I did not reach out to him to influence his review (which he already did), but how it impacts future reviews I don't know.

The reviewer I have talked with on FaceBook initiated the conversations we have had by messaging me. One of my jobs around here involves responding to emails and messages about Bodhi, esp from users and certainly from reviewers or journalists of any kind. Sadly occasionally some of it is more like spam than anything. Not much but some.

As to objectivity, how objective is it when some of  the information they say is actually wrong? I am not going to post links or name names but in many Bodhi video reviews, the reviewer says something completely false. Even if one of us later watches and cares enough to comment, it is still putting out false information. One example a reviewer said Bodhi lacks a tool to search for files. He was reviewing our standard ISO, I think either 5.0 or 5.1. Well we do have find and some bodhi versions have locate. That is not what he meant tho he wanted a GUI tool and extra GUI apps are not part of Bodhi's philosophy of minimalism. But the reviewer was still wrong as our Quick Launcher (Run Everything) does also search for files. I could give countless other examples of reviewers saying things that are incorrect.

Speaking of incorrect information:


I will cut him some slack on pointing out our Icon theme does not have Icons for every app. Even tho NO icon theme in existance does. If you doubt that tell me how many Icon themes have icons for ePhoto or terminology? Ignoring ours. But regardless, all the icon themes we (Štefan, that is) created for use with our themes lack icons for many relatively common apps.

But he is wrong on the mouse cursor theme comment. That in fact shows a serious misunderstanding of what using a cursor theme provide by our theme is supposed to do. I have never really been fond of themes that mess with the cursor, and honestly tend to set the "use x cursor" setting in Moksha settings. But that reviewer noted that these theme cursors do not apply to the cursor used by apps, he viewed that as a flaw. To me, it is more like NO sh*t dude.

The moksha theme cursors are the cursor moksha uses not the cursor used by gtk apps, nor ELM apps, nor qt apps, nor the x windows default and so on. Actually, an xOrg application could use its own cursor and there would be nothing you could do to change it. That reviewer was simply used to using GTK apps in a desktop where the window manager is also GTK, and yes in that case the desktop and app are going to use the same cursor. But even in that case, I could create an ELM app that when run in that gtk desktop used the ELM cursor defined in the ELM theme and not the GTK theme cursor. So that whole cursor issue that the reviewer pointed out was and is not a flaw of Moksha, it is user error. The reviewer not knowing enough about the subject to know if he wanted a consistent cursor theme across all apps he used it was solely on him to find matching cursor themes that worked with whatever apps he used. As mentioned before some straight xWindows coded applications are going to use their own cursors no matter what you try to do, aside from patching and recompiling the app.

Perhaps we should add gtk cursor themes to all out themes and alter Moksha to set the gtk cursor theme so well behaved GTK apps will use them. But how far do or can we go with this? Do we also provide xWindows cursors? Do we try to ensure qt also uses the same cursors? What do we do about some Java apps doing their own thing? How many GUI toolkits are there in the Linux world and how many of them mess with the cursor in one way or another. That is a deep rabbit hole to go down. And as far as I know not a single window/manager out there aside from enlightenment is going to have matching cursors for the cursors defined in  the ELM theme. And enlightenment is not going to support any theme aside from ELM. At least Moksha has support for icon themes and gtk themes if the moksha theme you are using supports it.

So at this point, I would say that reviewers not knowing what they are talking about and declaring in a video that Bodhi or any other distro has a bug or flaw and so on can and probably does hurt a distro. It is not uncommon for the ppl watching such videos to think of the reviewer as some kind of expert. They think he or she knows what they are talking about.

To that I might add a real review is not really fair or objective if they have not RTFM and don't know how to use the distro. Now I don't include videos where they say flat out watch me try to use the Distro or WM i know nothing about.