Moksha, LibreOffice, and Antergos Woes
Headlines pretty much returned to normal today as LinuxCon concluded last night, but a few stories still trickled in. Elsewhere, Christine Hall pondered the future of new Bodhi desktop Moksha and Jack Wallen discussed the LibreOffice 5.0 interface. And finally, adventures in Antergos dominated my day.
Christine Hall is a fan of Bodhi Linux and holds high regard for founder Jeff Hoogland, I think that's safe to say. Today she previewed her upcoming review of recently released Bodhi 3.1.0 by asking Hoogland if Moksha, Bodhi's new default desktop forked from Enlightenment 17, would forever remain a clone of E17. He said, "Maybe." Changes don't need to be made just for the sake of change he explained, they need a developmental reason like new features or to fix a problem. He did go on to say, "The only major change we have for Moksha is a rewrite of E17’s configuration panel." There are a few minor differences already though and Hall thinks it was good move for Bodhi to have created Moksha. She's to post a review tomorrow.
Linux Bad Boy Jack Wallen today said that LibreOffice 5.0 is great, but it's just so darn ugly. He said he uses LibreOffice in his daily job as a writer and he likes it as well as some of its newest features, but "the developers and designers need to understand the average office suite user now expects a healthy mixture of modern design and ease of use." He called the LibreOffice interface "old school" and said, "It's time for LibreOffice to come up with something new and improved." I'm not sure I agree.
Speaking of me, I decided to go ahead and give Antergos another chance what with their new release on the same day I was poking around their site looking for clues. The new "rewrite" did complete the download and install of packages (which is what broke before), but alas, it failed installing the bootloader. It did give me an error message indicating as much. So, I reboot and there was a bootloader with only Arch in it. It did not boot, couldn't find root device. It's always fun to be left with a broken bootloader. Given that I didn't download the ISO for Mint 17.2, I updated from the updater, I thought the easiest route back is to install Mageia 5 that I've been wanting to test. Well, it failed on the bootloader step as well. No error, no warning, just a disappearing installer window. Back at GRUB I'm still only offered a broken Arch/Antergos. So, the only other new ISO in store was Fedora 23 Alpha released a couple of weeks ago. Well, Fedora 23 Alpha did install and did install a working albeit really, really ugly bootloader. Hey, as long as it works. I guess I'm waiting for the next release of Antergos/Cnchi now.
A couple of other tidbits in today's news:
* Microsoft Shows Up in Full Force at LinuxCon