Community Input of BL5.1 app pack applications.

I always considered our App Pack ISO unnecessary fluff. It goes against two fundamental Bodhi principles:

• Minimalism
• User choice

If I remember the history right and this is hard for me to verify with the loss of our old forum DeepSpeed came up with the idea and Started making the ISO. More than enough users like it that Jeff Started maintaining it. And it has been with use ever since.

While I may consider it unnecessary, I have no plans on abandoning it. A user on Discord told me he never would have used Bodhi without the App Pack version. Odd to me because before I started using Bodhi one of the first things I used to do after installing a distro was see what was installed and uninstall a lot of unneeded stuff. And then of course install what I wanted. To a minor degree I Even do that with Bodhi, on my laptop I have replaced esudo with gksudo (compiled from source), removed eepDater and closely examined the package list and removed a few things here and there.

Odd to me or not, a certain percentage of our users like the app Pack ISO and appreciate getting something more akin to a functioning DE than a bare bones Bodhi install provides. With this in mind, I would like some community input on the applications installed on the App Pack.

For reference here is a list of the apps currently installed (ignoring stuff I certainly am removing):

• aRandR
• Blender
• Chromium Web Browser
• ePhoto Image Viewer
• ePulse Audio Settings
• eSudo
• Evince Document Viewer
• Filezilla FTP Client
• gDebi
• Geany Text Editor
• HexChat IRC
• Inkscape
• Libre Office
• OpenShot Video Editor
• Pinta Graphics Tool
• PCManFM File Manager
• Pidgen
• PlayOnLinux
• Printer Support
• Qalculate Calculator
• Samba Support
• Steam
• Swami System Panel
• Synaptic Package Manager
• system-config-printer-gnome
• Terminology Terminal Emulator
• Transmission
• VLC Media Player
• xfburn

I am thinking of adding Štefan's Sticky Note Module as well as his compton module. Aside from that what apps does the community think should be installed? Any changes to the above list recommended?

I've been rather active on the suggestions front, so I'm a bit hesitant to come up with yet another suggestion....

Still, here are my 2 cents:

The feeling of rbtylee towards a special App Pack iso is something I share. I certainly won't use it: I love mean and lean. But perhaps the effort of creating a dedicated iso can be spared, if the dev team provides an install script or meta package instead?

Such an install script could be as simple as: sudo apt-get install xyz. A more elegant solution would probably be a meta package in the Bodhi App Store, containing dependencies for all the App Pack applications. Meta packages are being used for such purposes quite frequently, usually (but not exclusively) for pulling in an entire desktop environment.

Apart from the work load reduction for the dev team, this would have the additional advantage for the end user of reducing the update load after installation: with such a script (or meta package) you always have the latest version of the applications you add.

Finally, there's the communication aspect to be considered. If I understand correctly, the final "mean and lean" 5.1 will be released in the form of four targeted iso's. If you add even more iso's for the App Pack edition, it might confuse new users as to what to choose....

What do you think?

@Kiezel, short version: for now I am going to keep the app pack ISO. In the future I am uncertain whether it is worth the effort.

We do have an app-pack meta package. It is not featured on our AppCenter tho. Really for Bodhi it is best to install stuff using --no-install-recommends and then investigate the recommended deb files to see if you really want them. Otherwise one may end up with tools like gnome-help, which I don't want. Or some other stuff that may install unnecessary background processes. Looking over the package list of the BL 5.0 app pack ISO, I already see some unneeded stuff that most likely ended up there by being installed as a 'recommended' package. That alone makes me reluctant to put the app-pack on the AppCenter. But really unless I investigate it we may already have similar issues with the software we do provide there.

Another disadvantage with a meta-package is uninstalling stuff. Suppose I don't want Chromium, uninstall it and then install Firefox. Later I naively run apt autoremove and just about the whole app-pack ends up being removed. Now that certainly would not happen to me, but some of our users may be that 'naive'. For the record, in making the ISO I am not going to even use the app-pack meta-package, so the user can uninstall this or that package without worrying about the autoremove issue.

As far as the efforts of making another ISO are concerned, I do it all in a VM anyway. I would just take the 64 bit (non-hwe) VM snapshot I use and add the needed software, run BodhiBuilder, transfer the ISO to my hardware and test the install in a VM. Then upload to Sourceforge and modify my readme. If I am changing the package list maybe modify the website. As far as I know none of the apps have any special configuration to add nor anything else need done. Perhaps that sounds like alot but really it is not.

Now all that is ignoring my final round of tweaking the VM snapshots package list. There are some minor discrepancies between the ISOs. I want the package list to be more or less the same ignoring irrelevant details such as arch or kernel, xorg versions. I also need to tweak the default terminology font size as I agree it is rather small. With or without the app pack this works needs done anyway for the final release.

As far as confusing new users who are unsure what ISO to download we do have a link to Selecting the Correct ISO image on our main website. Naturally that is going to need updated with some of my changes, esp the hwe option. But regardless some new users still end up confused and show up in Discord about once a week asking questions. You will always have those new users who are confused, confused about the ISO, confused about how to use Moksha or install software or whatever. Some are completely new to linux period and for whatever reason ended up installing Bodhi. I prefer users who know their way around linux and debian based distros and have at least used some version of enlightenment in the past. That is alot to ask and truthfully seldom happens.

Fair enough. Success with the good work!

I also don't use the app-pack release, so my comments are pretty useless.

For example, never tried evince, does it allow printing pdf? If not, I'd recommend okular, cuz thats what I use to print pdf. I tried pinta in the past and it seems to crash a lot. For some reason I didnt like transmission when I tried it so I use QBitorrent. I also use Firefox primarily but have chromium installed as well, so no matter there. Half those apps I've never used or dont know what they are so no opinion.

If you're looking for apps to add that might be useful for others, I like gnome-system-monitor. The flatpak software installer might be useful, I think its gnome-software. Discord client since there's a bodhi channel and the deb isn't in default ubuntu repos, only their website.

Evince is what I use for most documents and yes it allows printing. I have used okular before tho. Have no strong opinions one way or the other. However I have used transmission since my early days with linux. Have used others before including QBitorrent but never felt any strong preference for them over transmission.

I don't not much experience with pinta. Do others find it crashes alot?

I prefer Firefox over chromium and really chrome over chromium. Chrome I would be reluctant to add to the ISO, unsure of the legalities of that and besides many are opposed to some of the things Google does. I am considering replace chromium with firefox tho. I don't know how others feel about it.

A system monitor would be nice any that are more or less full featured and work well. The gnome-system-monitor works well enough. I don't use it, cli is good enough for me on that kind of stuff. I have also been keeping an eye on Evisum an EFL system monitor developed by one of the e-devs. An old version of evisum is in our repos and a new version was recently released. Perhaps I should package it. And of course we have Jeff's Exterminator program, a py-efl app. Any preferences or comments on any of these?

I also think that snap and flatpack support should be installed on the app pack ISO. And prob should also add the Discord app altho I just use the web site.

i have also had trouble with pinta crashing so i stopped trying to use it. i like firefox as far as web browsers go. i would be interested in seeing what evisum has to offer though i like conky and htop for most of my monitoring needs

I also prefer lean and adding what I want but if I wanted an app pack (and many do) the above sounds good to me. I find evince fine. I think whether you use Firefox or Chromium, someone will always want the other one! But I think Firefox is the better option for an app pack. It's a good selection and better than some and adding Snaps and Flatpack is a good move.

There are some people who will want a full install with apps and not bother to remove any they don't use but just to have a simple install with most things they need and that's why an app pack iso would enable Bodhi to appeal to a wider variety of people.

Originally Posted by serendipity7000 ... I think whether you use Firefox or Chromium, someone will always want the other one! But I think Firefox is the better option for an app pack...

Yep, I agree with that and then you will have those that want some other browser: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, ...

Originally Posted by cordx i have also had trouble with pinta crashing so i stopped trying to use it ...

Out of curiosity, I took a look thru the issues reported for pinta on github. Way to many verified crash issues. Perhaps I should choose something more stable. I lean towards gimp, highly regarded and works well. But gimp has the downsides of perhaps being overkill and certainly being hard to use unless you know your way around it.

Any other recommendations?

Originally Posted by rbtylee Yep, I agree with that and then you will have those that want some other browser: Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, ... Out of curiosity, I took a look thru the issue reported for pinta on github. Way to many verified crash issues. Perhaps I should choose something more stable. I lean towards gimp, highly regarded and works well. But gimp has the downsides of perhaps being overkill and certainly being hard to use unless you know your way around it. Any other recommendations?

For something simple like pinta, but that doesnt crash, I use gnome-paint.

Gimp is the only one I know of and yes it's hard to know your around.

Originally Posted by rbtylee Any other recommendations?

i tend to use ephoto and mirage (a little better than ephoto for deleting photos and thumbnail view) for simple stuff like crop and rotate then try to muddle my way around gimp if i need something more advanced.

koulurpaint is an interesting microsoft paint analog in case anyone is interested.

out of curiosity i installed evisum (first a couple of days ago. then updated it today after the post about a new version). it certainly is less minimalist than exterminator, but i like the tabs to be able to see different sets of data. i figure as long as it is in the repos, it could probably stand a place in the appcenter so people could be made aware of the option to install if there isn't enough interest in adding it to the app-pack iso. i personally wouldn't switch to it from what i use, but appreciate the functionality.

i decided to run it side-by-side with exterminator just to see the difference. i can't seem to get exterminator to let me scroll up and down to see more than about a dozen processes (partly because of screen scaling) and the pid's don't necessarily line up with the processes.

I think Inkscape (already on the list) has some basic photo editing as well so maybe that and Gimp could be a good combination. Inkscape for simple editing, cropping etc, Gimp for those who know how!

AppPack 5.1 rc release is available.

Enjoy.

"Lean and mean", whatever that really means, is all well and good. Having options is all well and good. I realize that dev resources may be slim for Bodhi, so if you were to eliminate the App Pack option, it probably would be just fine, as long as users have the options (i.e., Synaptic, apt) to add whatever they feel is needed for their computing platform.

I "adjusted" my Bodhi installation via sudo apt install (lot of stuff) this past weekend. My old 2GB RAM Toshiba is just as snappy (or lack thereof!) as it was with the simple install. I realize that keeping that "snappiness" depends on me being wise with resource demands.

I do like what I see with Bodhi thus far!