Open Source and Free Software

I used to lament the way that great projects could sometimes go by the wayside, and I'd blame it on a lack of unity (not the desktop) in the Linux community. Several years ago started to dabble in Linux when I heard claims that a distro called Ubuntu was the first user-friendly version of Linux that would do anything your regulary Windows machine would do. This was around the time of Dapper, and I was impressed enough with it that I dual booted for quite awhile, trying to slowly transition my usage away from the Windows drive. But at that time, Ubuntu simply wouldn't do everything I needed it to without a ton of troubleshooting. I was a nerd, but I was a nerd with bills to pay who didn't have time to beat his computer into submission in ways beyond what was already familar. So I continued to rely pretty heavily on Windows.

A few years passed, and Ubuntu made some leaps and bounds in usability...and to top it off, a project called Geubuntu (later OpenGEU) sprang up and put the very experimental Enlightement E17 window manager on top of the now-reliable Ubuntu and basically kept aspects of Gnome for things outside of E17's scope. It was a very elegant distro geared toward designers, and some brilliant themes came out of it. I was amazed and maybe a little obsessed, but while there were some brilliant developers involved, there simply weren't enough of them. The project ground to a halt. It was a bold thing to have attempted in a time that the Gnome/KDE wars were drawing loads of attention (and community effort) to those projects. So although I didn't leave Linux when my favorite distro went cold, I was pretty much convinced that this was a disaster and the Linux community as a whole should really just get our shit together.

Fast forward a year or two, and SO MUCH interesting stuff has happened in the world of desktop Linux. I won't label this or any other year "the year of the Linux desktop," but the creativity and pace of innovation in the Linux community is astonishing. I'm currently running Xubuntu on a 10 year old desktop and a 5 year old laptop, as well as Linux Mint Debian Edition on a 6 year old lower-end laptop. I have settled on XFCE for all of them, and they do everything I need with grace (and sometimes a little extra effort). But I've really missed the style of the OpenGEU project.

So right as I'm coming to accept a more mundane approach to interacting with my computer (to be a bit overdramatic), along comes Bodhi Linux. What is Bodhi Linux? Well, I'd definitley recommend checking out the website [url]http://bodhilinux.com/[/url], but to put it simply, it seems like a continuation of what OpenGEU tried to do, but with a different philosophy and a bit more drive. So as OpenGEU rose and fell while Gnome and KDE were battling it out, so Bodhi Linux pops up to do the E17 thing as a lot of desktop Linux users are feeling stung by the loss of their Gnome 2.32, struggling to decide among KDE and Gnome 3 and Unity. But while there are always big fanatical factions running rampant all over the Linux landscape, their efforts are generally leveraged by lesser-knowns with their own vision and perspective. Substitute any software package for the desktop environments in this story, and it's the same deal--a lot of people doing the same thing with different approaches...and it all goes on in a way that looks a lot like natural selection.

I only hope that Bodhi keeps on going, even if it's slow and steady. The community benefits greatly from these projects that aim to do things a bit differently. My view of all the fragmentation has done a complete 360 in the past couple of years. It seems more and more like effort in Linux (whatever your pet project and whatever your contribution) is never wasted, and in the FOSS realm good ideas often go to sleep, but rarely die.