AVL-MXE 21.2.1 + MXDE-EFL 21.2.2 Released!
Eeeeesh! What was intended as a routine ISO freshen up job went down the rabbit hole quickly but ended up in some pretty cool places and so here we are with new ISO’s of AV Linux MX Edition and MXDE-EFL. It’s usually bad form to make deep changes to a ‘within-version’ ISO and better to save such tomfoolery for new releases but there were some pretty strong motivating factors to jerk the wheel and take that left turn in Albuquerque at this point. Much to my chagrin in the live music world a persistent quirk of human nature is the old “people don’t know what they like… they like what they know” mindset.. well it affects Linux Desktop Users too.. When AVL-MXE 21 came out I wanted to trim the resource consumption of XFCE4 and also put together something a little less ‘garden-variety’ because one of the things I loved about Linux when I got onboard many years ago was how it was ‘alternative’, a different way to do the same things… I thought a Distro catering to artists should be different than your basic Office box and have some art within itself. Well it seems I was dead wrong on that one! For the most part the reviews and the User comments have not been terribly positive about Openbox, most people like how the system works, they just don’t want to look at it…lol. We have entered a time where computers have become powerful enough and RAM and storage has become plentiful and cheap enough that resource consumption is much farther down the list of concerns than it ever was. New Linux shoppers in large part want their Desktops to be big, familiar and enterprise-y, Linux Desktops that are clever, crafty and light for the sake of lightness will always have their devoted adherents as MX-Fluxbox and antiX will readily show but I feel that these types of projects are more used and tried by people that have been under the Linux tent for a while or are tireless tinkerers. It seems AV Linux is an initial point of contact for many people trying Audio and Video production on Linux for the first time so although I may have my pet opinions I’m not so stubborn that I can’t listen and change direction, the limitations and caveats imposed by Openbox were not the best decision in hindsight.