Bodhi Linux's Special April 1 Announcement

I thought my first post to this blog would be a review of a distro, but this was too interesting to pass up.

Visitors to the Bodhi Linux homepage today were greeted with a new color scheme (blue instead of orange) and a stunning announcement:

Since I can't display the screenshot in its original size without messing up my blog layout, here's the text of the announcement for those who can't read tiny print:

News
Bodhi Linux 1.1.0 PRE RELEASE NEWS 1.1.0 JEFFS BIG PLAN REVEALED - Bodhi Goes Blue

We would like to take a moment to thank everyone that has helped Bodhi 1.0.0 become the success that it is today. With our dedicated development team and our ever growing community we would not be where we are today. Looking to the future, a Bodhi 1.1.0 release is on the horizon. This release will have two prominent features – first we will start shipping the 2.6.38 kernel with this release. Second, while we at Bodhi think Enlightenment makes a great desktop – after much discussion in closed door meetings – the Bodhi team and I have decided to make the move to using the KDE desktop with Enlightenment acting as strictly the Window manager for this next release. We feel this should improve Bodhi usability over all and give Bodhi a “fuller desktop feeling” as it will now require at least 1gig of RAM to fully utilizes it's KDE desktop.
proposed release date MAY 22 2011
Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 Stable released 26 March 2011.Find out more here Bodhi News Page.

They had me going for a little while. I was prepared to go to the forums and ask what the heck the developers were thinking, giving up the entire lightweight philosophy of their young distro in favor of one of the standard, bloated Linux desktop environments. Then I got to the bit about how 1.1.0 would have a "fuller desktop feeling" because it would use more resources, and I remembered what day it was. My hunch was confirmed by clicking on the link to the Bodhi news page. It turns out that this item was only on the main page and not on the news page (though the blue color scheme is site-wide). I must admit that I like the combined KDE-Enlightenment logo for some strange reason.

Intro

Lately, I've been trying out some lightweight Linux distros on my four-year-old desktop at home. The last couple of months, I've been trying out various distros with the Xfce and LXDE desktops. I also used the Openbox window manager for five minutes before becoming annoyed that I couldn't figure out how to customize it (apparently, it involves lots of text files). I've also noticed that, even on my higher-spec laptop, certain things (most notably Flash content) run much better on a lightweight desktop. This even applies to Xfce, which is often accused of not being truly lightweight.

I figured that my love of Linux and increasing aversion to feature-heavy desktops like GNOME formed a niche that was specific enough to be unusual, but also rich enough to generate a decent amount of blog content. Therefore, I decided to start a focused blog after a couple of years of blogging sporadically on various subjects in a rambling personal blog.

A word of caution: This blog only represents the experiences of one person, a person who is not the most hardcore Linux geek in the world. I don't know all the ins and outs of Linux, and my experiences reflect only the viewpoint of a modestly Linux-educated end user. Furthermore, I can only blog about what I experience on my computer. I have no idea how any software will run on your computer, or whether your particular hardware is compatible with a given distro. Like everything else on somebody's blog, everything written here is subjective.