Proposed updated AV Linux 23.2 ISO - Improvements?

[AVLinux]

Hi,

It is not completely unexpected to me that changing Desktop Environments in AV Linux 23 has not been unanimously well-received, I get that people don't like change and everybody has different tolerances to learning new things. I am however quite disappointed with how many people have posted complaints, or posted scathing reviews in various places (ie Distrowatch) and not bothered to ask for specific help or clearly identify what the actual observed issues were and just said things like "nothing works!" "everything is broken" "this sucks!". Let me be VERY clear... I use AV Linux MX Edition EVERY day 24/7, I produce all kinds of published Graphics/Audio/Video with it and it does every single thing I expect it to and many things that competitive projects haven't thought about yet, you may not like it, you may not understand how everything works (yet) but I assure you, it works! I'm far from perfect and AV Linux reflects that but I can't fix what I don't hear about and it's going to take some effort on both sides to correctly identify and fix things.

From day one in 2008 AV Linux has been first and foremost my own daily production system and from there something that is shared with the intention that if it's useful to me, it may be useful to others... When I make changes they are for a good reason and they are often long-researched before they are implemented, AV Linux was originally created with the original GTK2 LXDE, when it became clear that LXDE had too many limitations I moved to XFCE4 and when my recent situation changed to higher resolution 4K displays and with Wayland looming I had to think about other options (for me XFCE4 at high resolutions is far from ideal) I have no interest in Gnome or KDE so the only other avenue to try was Enlightenment and I tried it and I myself had quite a long period of getting used to it's quirks and I released my MXDE-EFL 21.X Respins to collect data and do a trial run of Enlightenment at which point I made it very clear that this was the intended Desktop Environment of AV Linux on Debian Bookworm/MX-23. If people feel this whole AV Linux Enlightenment thing has been a big rip-off and somebody has pulled the rug out from under you I'm sorry you feel that way but it wasn't exactly a secret. I have never guaranteed anything to anybody.. Many projects have promised big and come and gone over the years (JACKLab, MusiX, Dream Studio, Tango Studio, KXStudio ISO to name a few) and I'm still here.

Enlightenment for AV Linux is not going anywhere so that is probably the first thing to clarify, however of course I am interested in people getting the most out of AV Linux once they understand the basic guiding motivations behind it... I would like to update the ISO to smooth out some issues that have presented themselves since the initial release, this will also align with the recent MX-23.2 update. From reports in various places it appears the biggest hurdles to fix have been:

- Finding and changing the Keyboard layout for non-English Users has been too difficult..
- Some systems booting sysvinit have backlght issues dimming the lightDM Login screen due to Enlightenment resetting backlight to 0..
* It is strongly suggested to boot Enlightenment with systemd once installed because it is developed primarily for systemd usage which improves the backlight issue.
- Using Enlightenment's Screen setup for multi-head setups can be problematic for out of the ordinary setups.
- Installing new locales is not very clear (MX released a locale tool a week after AVL was released)
- Windows could appear outside the screen limits on occasion..

Are there other suggestions or solutions that could be included?

*Added suggestions (for me to keep track)

- Add system-config-printer, it got missed somehow...
- Ensure Enlightenment "Don't fade backlight" is enabled by default.
- Persistence of live changes into the installed system?
- Add MX Menu Editor

[artytux]

Hi,

posted scathing reviews in various places (ie Distrowatch) and not bothered to ask for specific help or clearly identify what the actual observed issues were

I saw that on Monday Jesse does have that, this leaning on the cynical it's the users comment that shine a good light on your works, maybe a few words over there from you wouldn't hurt. ? .

[m_pav]

I read the DW review, not at all impressed with the reviewer, but that's their job and ours is to rise above them and show them we're the grown ups and they're "that kid" who wants everything for nothing then disrespects what they have and thinks they have a right to do so.
As for the 3rd gen Intel not running with SysVinit, he probably had a stupid BIOS setting in place.

Anyway, I think you've done very well. One thing I recall was the complaint of having only the localhost:631 print support, so maybe add system-config-printer to your packages list.

[AVLinux]

I read the DW review, not at all impressed with the reviewer, but that's their job and ours is to rise above them and show them we're the grown ups and they're "that kid" who wants everything for nothing then disrespects what they have and thinks they have a right to do so.
As for the 3rd gen Intel not running with SysVinit, he probably had a stupid BIOS setting in place.

Anyway, I think you've done very well. One thing I recall was the complaint of having only the localhost:631 print support, so maybe add system-config-printer to your packages list.

Thanks, appreciated!

Yes, that's a good one, thanks for the reminder!

[siamhie]

- Some systems booting sysvinit have backlght issues dimming the lightDM Login screen due to Enlightenment resetting backlight to 0..

@AVLinux
I'm not sure if this is relevant or not but whenever I install Enlightenment (be it AVL edition or from the repo) the first thing I have to do is turn off the dimming of the backlight.
(Enlightenment settings > Look > Compositor > General > check mark the box Don't fade backlight and click apply)

If I don't do this and I reboot, my grub screen (and/or BIOS screen if I go into it) will be 50% dimmed until the desktop comes back up. It will happen with both sys-v and systemd.

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[AVLinux]

@siamhie

Good point and thanks for confirming that this works, I don't have any machines that exhibit this particular issue so I'm relying on other people to confirm, I will make sure that is checked off as part of the default Enlightenment setup on the next ISO, appreciated!

[Arnox]

I see you. It's incredibly frustrating as a creator to get vague complaints. It may even be better if there weren't any reviews at all as opposed to vague nonsense.

With that said, I'm afraid I probably won't be of much help here as I do very little audio/video work and I also don't have the first clue about Linux's audio and video subsystems as they relate to creative works.

[siamhie]

I just read that review from Jeff Siegel @ DW. Is he taking the piss? (British slang for meaning to mock at the expense of others, or to be joking, without the element of offense)

However, no one using modern hardware should have to struggle to boot a modern Linux distro anymore. But that's what happened here

He then proceeds to review this release on a 12 year old laptop that is a dual core Intel i5-3317U (1.7GHz) with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD drive.

There were problems
The second installation took twice as long, but don't hold that against the installer. It's the fault of the distro, which didn't load after I shut down the computer and came back to it the next day.

No, I'm going to chalk this up to your choice of testing hardware.
If your going to review a modern distro, at least use (somewhat) modern hardware.

[AVLinux]

Heh!

In my original post I was talking about User comments on the DW AVL page itself, I had no idea there was a full review!!

That was not a day-brightener to discover... Very ironic really, I never submitted AVL to Distrowatch, years ago it just appeared on there and it has bobbed up and down in the lower part of the top 100 for most of it's life.. I've never asked for a full review and of course for the many years it was in a steady-state with XFCE4 nobody there reviewed it which was fine... So weird that they randomly review this release which between Enlightenment and PipeWire is completely different than all previous ones (and obviously still needing tweaks).. Oh well, a good week for some humbling I guess..

[Adrian]

What I would do: compile a list of things that people complained about, eliminate trolling and stupid commends and then go down the list and try to fix what can be fixed then post a test, "Beta" or "RC" and let people bang on it for a bit before you release.