Distrowatch reviews Bodhi Linux 6.0

The Bodhi distribution is unusually lightweight. It requires about 160MB of RAM to login to Moksha and a fresh install only consumed 3.6GB of disk space, plus any swap area we enable. This makes Bodhi one of the smallest (in RAM) distributions I have used which also offers a feature-rich desktop environment.

However, maybe I'm warming up to Bodhi or maybe the distribution has polished some of its features because I found myself more at home with it this time around. I liked that Bodhi was so lightweight (with a surprisingly small resource footprint).ote here

Sometimes when a widget is near the edge of a screen its menu is not displayed properly and this can make it difficult to adjust or remove the target gadget.

I am running BL 6.0 on a 2009 MacBook Dual Core with 6G RAM.

I found Moksha like any new DE takes some getting used to but not any more so in my experience than with other DEs that I have tried like Xfce, LXQt etc. And definitely much easier than som light weight DEs like Trinity or IceWM

Another aspect BodhiMoksha is the defualt theme - you either love it or you hate it. There is a nice range of themes (and icons as well) available in the Bodie app center - try them all. And if you are adventurous you can find some Enlightenment themes on the Internet that will work as well. Same with icons - create a .icons folder in /home/user dir and download a few Icons sets from B00merang (Win 7 and 10 being my favorite). You can mix theme attributes and icons in settings under the Look settings as well. Moksha is quite customizable.

Light weight and fast on low resource systems was what I needed. That is where Bodhi shines. Out of the box it only take 160m of RAM. As a comparison I looked at some of the different supposedly "light" distros that I have tested in VirtualBox. I measured these systems (htop RAM) out of the box with the exception of Bodhi Standard 6.0 which I measured after it was configured with the applications that I typically use - Abiword, gnumeric, Xarchiver, gdebi firefox, firejail and several more. The htop figures for RAM were:

Bodhi Standard 6.0 185m,
LinuxLite 200m,
Lubuntu 233m,
LXLE 319m,
Peppermint 320m,
Q4OS 339m,
Xubuntu 499m

The only way I could get lighter than Bodhi was with IceWM as a DE. IceWM as a DE is kind of crude in an 80s style. For me these are not really usable systems I could live with on a day to day basis.
antiX 133m,
Debian 11 minimum CD (no apps) w/IceWM 147m                                                                                                                                                                                                         EDIT: I should add IceWM is really a Windows Manager that can be used as a Desktop Environment which is why it is very basic.