MX Moksha "Out of Bodhi" Testing Release RC1

[AVLinux]

Hi,

*RC2 has been uploaded please carry on in the RC2 thread. viewtopic.php?t=84298

After many months of testing and consultation with developers ylee and the_waiter from Bodhi Linux I'm very happy to present the first RC1 Testing ISO for the Moksha Desktop Environment on MX Linux; MX Moksha "Out of Bodhi" RC1. As always credit, thanks and great appreciation to the MX Linux developers for the 'build-iso-mx' build system.

For those who are not aware Bodhi Linux is a unique, light and fast Linux Distribution that has carved out a popular niche with it's attractive 'Moksha' Desktop Environment which was forked from Enlightenment E17. For those acquainted with Enlightenment Moksha is quite familiar and has added it's own features, fixes and improvements to the original E17 base. E17 was Iconic for it's uniquely skeumorphic and textural appearance and Bodhi carries on in this vein as an attractive alternative to the current ubiquitous Flat theming trends. It seemed to me Bodhi's uniqueness and the robust stability and toolset of MX would make an excellent hybrid and I was very pleasantly surprised to receive not only a warm welcome from the Bodhi developers but also a helpful and collaborative spirit which had not really been my experience with Enlightenment. Bodhi had already made inroads to moving from a Ubuntu base to also supporting Debian with their recent 'deBodhi 7' release and with some help from ylee I was able to incorporate deBodhi with MX and produce a working build-iso template which has gotten things this far. Essentially this ISO is a Base release with the bare elements of Bodhi Linux 7 and it's Moksha Desktop Environment + MX Linux Tools, AHS Repo and Build system + AV Linux Tweaks, Utilities and File Actions. Other key differences are PipeWire by default and the solid Liquorix 6.6.12 Kernel.

An obvious question is probably how this relates to AV Linux and the answer is not yet known, there are Pros and Cons and as much as I love the 'pure' Enlightenment Desktop Environment there is no real interest from the Enlightenment developer in facilitating deployment of Enlightenment on an ISO or seemingly in furthering it's usage popularity in general. He is a brilliant developer and has invested many years of ingenious work into Enlightenment with a relatively small number of major collaborators and his project is his prerogative and I have come to accept that for what it is. It is promising to me that Moksha is quite similar to Enlightenment and even more resource efficient and that it's developers are open to collaboration and keen to help with potential obstacles to deploying it so I am hopeful that this may be a good match but at the end of the day AV Linux needs to be a reliable workstation platform and until I have a few releases and lots of testing feedback under my belt it's too soon to commit to a future change.

MX Moksha custom theme to complement Bodhi's signature 'Moksha Green' look with a custom Skewaita GTK theme.



MX Moksha with AVL's PipeWire, Yabridge/Wine-Staging setup by default.



AVL's handy and File Manager agnostic Custom Actions are also included with Thunar as the default File Manager.



KNOWN ISSUES:

- As with Enlightenment currently the keyboard settings are not carried through from the Live session to the Install.
- Non-English Users will need to manually set their Moksha keyboard setting from the keyboard applet on the Panel (shelf) once logged in to a fresh install.
*Keyboard setting will be worked on before a final release.
- Live boot has a several second delay from GRUB to the Moksha Desktop loading, this is expected and performance is normal once Desktop loads.
- Currently UI scaling to values higher than the default 1.2 X in Moksha doesn't adjust GTK and Qt apps, this is being worked on, you may find 'DPI' scaling to work better in the meantime on HiDPI didplays

DOWNLOAD IS HERE:

https://downloads.bandshed.net/MX-MOKSHA/

Please post questions, issues and observations in this thread.

This is a preliminary RC Release to find bugs and incompatibility issues, I don't suggest this as a production system yet!

You can optionally add and test AV Linux DAW's, NLE's and Plugins from here:

https://bandshed.net/packages/AVL_MXe-23.X/

*DO NOT install packages from the 'SYSTEM_DEV' folder!

*ADDED NOTES

Some things that have been mentioned in feedback can be controlled in Moksha with it's Environment Variables dialog,

- GTK font scaling can be controlled with a GDK_DPI_SCALE variable, as an example if Moksha is set at 1.5 X scaling a GDK_DPI_SCALE value of 1.2 is an approximate match.
* GTK scaling is being worked on, this is a temp workaround

- The systray width in Moksha can be controlled with a MOKSHA_SYSTRAY_SPACING variable

When entering a variable enter the variable name in the left text box and the value in the right text box the '=' will be automatically formatted.

Screenshot showing Environment Variables dialog with the latest 'Zenithal' rounded Moksha theme which has not been released yet..

[hugok]

Nice @AVLinux I'll try it out when I get a chance! Great work :^)

[AVLinux]

Nice @AVLinux I'll try it out when I get a chance! Great work :^)

Thanks very much!

[Germ]

Looks good! Very well done. I like Moksha but never cared for Bodhi.

[AVLinux]

Thanks, the Moksha themes and modules are all available to be installed, the utility stuff MX Tools, MXPI and apt-notifier are all present from MX so visually it's like Bodhi but under the hood it's MX.

[Nokkaelaein]

I'm not at all familiar with Moksha, and this does look really good, congrats. It's much more up my alley than the current Enlightenment vibe.

(And all in all, I'm quite a die hard Fluxbox user and customizer :P and prefer sleek, minimal environments. But I do also like building the Fluxbox experience so that I can, for example, use actual graphical alt-tabbing, minimize/iconify windows to the system tray on the fly to declutter the taskbar, have tasteful unobtrusive animations for some window actions with picom, and so on and so forth.)

How's the resource usage with Moksha compared to something like Fluxbox or the current AV Linux Enlightenment configuration? [Edit: coming from the realtime audio angle, I'm especially interested in CPU spikes and such, and the suitability of it all for low latency audio... instead of RAM figures and so on :) - well you know exactly what I mean, Im sure. ] What compositor does this use by default?

Seems very promising, good luck with the project, and thanks for experimenting with stuff like this and showcasing the findings!

[AVLinux]

I'm not at all familiar with Moksha, and this does look really good, congrats. It's much more up my alley than the current Enlightenment vibe.

(And all in all, I'm quite a die hard Fluxbox user and customizer :P and prefer sleek, minimal environments. But I do also like building the Fluxbox experience so that I can, for example, use actual graphical alt-tabbing, minimize/iconify windows to the system tray on the fly to declutter the taskbar, have tasteful unobtrusive animations for some window actions with picom, and so on and so forth.)

How's the resource usage with Moksha compared to something like Fluxbox or the current AV Linux Enlightenment configuration? [Edit: coming from the realtime audio angle, I'm especially interested in CPU spikes and such, and the suitability of it all for low latency audio... instead of RAM figures and so on :) - well you know exactly what I mean, Im sure. ] What compositor does this use by default?

Seems very promising, good luck with the project, and thanks for experimenting with stuff like this and showcasing the findings!

Moksha is quite efficient even more so than Enlightenment however my development box has a lot of RAM (96Gb) and with any and all DE's I don't seem to get the record breaking numbers because it seems if RAM is plentiful more gets used and I find VM's can be a bit variable in reporting actual RAM usage accurately. That said there are plenty of folks out there reporting 250-300Mb of RAM usage with 64bit Moksha and significantly less with 32bit. So you could probably safely say about 100Mb higher than Fluxbox on the average. There are numerous YT Videos of people installing Bodhi Linux on pretty ancient netbooks and having them perform very well.

Unlike Enlightenment which IMHO has excellent compositing Moksha comes without compositing by default but they have a picom module that can be installed optionally which gives the expected results with picom. I haven't tested it extensively because at this point I have no bare metal MX Moksha installs to really put everything through it's paces so I also have not pressure tested Moksha for Audio production but I'm hoping to get some feedback from this RC release and I will probably replace Enlightenment on my laptop with Moksha once a final release is close at hand.

[Nokkaelaein]

Yep, thinking along the same lines, about RAM being plentiful and all that: when wanting to run an audio system, the RAM differences of small(ish) environments like this are pretty much of no consequence if the computer is up to scratch with running the actual audio software anyway - but if the environment itself occasionally does something that hogs the CPU even for a blink of an eye, and does that by design, it's a no go (imo, for that kind of use case).

Ah okay, it's tested with picom by default... Thanks. Yeah, I'm definitely keeping this on my radar, it's an interesting one for designing a desktop experience for a daily driver, if it's readily available for MX like this.

[AVLinux]

Yep, thinking along the same lines, about RAM being plentiful and all that: when wanting to run an audio system, the RAM differences of small(ish) environments like this are pretty much of no consequence if the computer is up to scratch with running the actual audio software anyway - but if the environment itself occasionally does something that hogs the CPU even for a blink of an eye, and does that by design, it's a no go (imo, for that kind of use case).

Ah okay, it's tested with picom by default... Thanks. Yeah, I'm definitely keeping this on my radar, it's an interesting one for designing a desktop experience for a daily driver, if it's readily available for MX like this.

Looking forward they already have Bodhi/Moksha tested and running on a Debian Trixie base so that variable is figured out, there is no Wayland support (nor will there be in Fluxbox I suppose) and no real Roadmap for Wayland in Moksha (yet). Enlightenment does have Wayland support (I have not tested it myself). In the production sphere the whole thing annoys me to death especially when every major DAW is currently built with intended X11 use except Studio One and their kludgy Plugin Xwayland wrapper.. Like PipeWire another major premature distraction whipping up M.U.D. (Manic Upgrade Disorder) and misinformation making Linux look like a sketchy and confusing production platform yet again..

[sunrat]

Booted it live in virt-manager. Seems to work nicely in a quick perusal. Posting now from Firefox in it. RAM use about 350MB after boot, very good. Graphics are a bit blurry in VM.
I have Bodhi installed to metal but never boot it because ubuntu. May try putting this over it instead which should provide better graphics.