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Debian Desktop Subproject Launched
MrOutlander writes "The Debian Project is now officially addressing its usability on the desktop with the launch of the Debian Desktop subproject. Great to see usability being recognized as a very important part of debian. Other than the sometimes daunting install process, Debian is one of the best linux distributions."
Aqua Human Interface Guidelines and Mac OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines. Don't reinvent the wheel, perfect it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The Gnome Usability Report:
t /participant_mix.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_repor
I read this about a year ago. It does an *excellent* job of pointing out many of the inconsistencies and gotchas in any given linux desktop situation.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
When it comes to Debian it is not just a choice of distro, it is a choice of distro built on good principles as well as on good architecture.
The truth is however that each distro exist to offer you even more customizibilty. You have distros like Slack/Gentoo that many like because they don't include many unnecessary packages and the distro offers you much configurability. Many don't like these distros however because they don't have the time to compile(Gentoo)/configure/install everything the good-old-way or that they just want a distro that is a tad more user-friendly. For those you RedHat/Suse and Mandrake that are distros that are based on a binary package system (Gentoo has ports which downloads the source and compiles it). Each of these have their own "touch" as well.
Mandrake offers many patches/programs to make life easier, so Mandrake is a very popular choice for people that are new to Linux.
RedHat doesn't offer as much as Mandrake in the newbie area, and are a bit more strict on what goes into their kernel and distro. So imo RedHat isn't quite as user-friendly as Mandrake.
SuSe I don't know much about, I know that tthey have a configuration utility that has gotten a lot of positive feedback (YaST isn't it?).
So the choice of distro is just a part of the customization. Part of running Linux is choosing the distro that is right for you.
http://usability.kde.org/
backup your /etc
Well, I don't know what the hold-up for Mozilla is (someone else can jump in), but in the case of KDE3, the only reason that it isn't in unstable now is because of the GCC3.2 transition. One the transition is complete, it's ready to go in. (Of course, there are debs maintained now by the official packagers, they just can't be called official packages because they're not in unstable. But they work just fine.) As for XFree, the big hold-up was testing and patching it to be compatible with all the other platforms. As I understand it, XFree develops pretty much exclusively for x86, and then lets the Debian folk port/patch is over to Alpha, Sparc, PPC, etc.
:Peter
You also forget that Debian is not a company, but a community. In other words, you cannot dictate what will be done; people will do whatever interests them. It works, it's just that at this point with so many transitions and changes going on, the process has slowed down. Want to sped it up? Fork over some $$$ to a developer. Simple as that.
I was a Slack user for several years, but the Debian installer was just so darned screwy. I should be able to select a few categories of programs, then edit the contents _if_ i want to. I shouldn't have to pick from some two-thousand package names with terrible(if any) descriptions. I installed Deb once. The system didn't work very well, because I didn't install some of the things I was supposed to. Sure, I could have just started apt-getting. Problem was, I didn't know half of the stuff I needed. Now days, I might be able to cope. Then again, why would I want to cope when I can install Slack or RedHat?
A) I'm running Debian on old 386's now as routers. Why should I have to throw away that perfectly working hardware?
B) compiling for 586 is retarded. The only sytems that benefit from 586 optimizations are 586 systems - 686 systems are architectured differently so that good 586 optimizations don't do much for 686's. Optimizing for 686 would actually give a performance benefit. If you want that, go use Arch Linux or Gentoo.
C) Recompiling all those packages, or keeping both i386 and i686 archives, would be a tremendous amount of work. And, to be honest, 99% of apps don't benefit that much from the optimizations anyways. Recompile your multi-media apps (or use ones that detect the corrent modules at runtime) and install an optimized kernel package, and you should be good.
Ximain Setup Tools have been abandoned. Ximian is no longer sponsoring it. Instead, it continues it's life as GNOME System Tools.
The problem is not the "Text-base install" as much as "No hardware detection" and "too technical centric". The install sometimes looks cryptic to some (have to know that a geforce use the "nv" driver, etc.).
It took me a while to figure out the exact driver for my sparcstation, and in the end, i had to open the box and do a search on google to know.
This new incentive to push debian into the desktop is "a good thing". Even if it doesnt turn out perfect, it's still a step in the right direction.
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
I suspect that you're probably right about the costs outweighing the benefits. (Sigh.) It's just that when I tried out Gentoo, the difference in execution time was noticeable, and not just in big applications like KDE. I had used custom compiles of KDE and XFree86 under Debian Woody for some time, but the underlying stuff must have slowed it down. Under Gentoo, it takes my machine about 22 seconds to start KDE, whereas under Debian Woody it took about 45. In my book, a 50% decrease in startup time is significant.
Debian focusses on whatever the Debian developers care about. One thing Debian developers tend not to care about at all is armchair experts. If you happen to disagree with what we care about, feel free to learn How you can help, or to pay for a developer to scratch your particular itch.
We all know that some critical packages are way out of date:
-XFree, 4.2 just appeared in unstable
And excellent prerelease packages have been available from the X Strike Force for months. Not to mention that Debian supports X on 11 architectures rather than just i386.
-KDE 3 Unofficial packages are available; official packages will follow after the gcc transition; see the FAQ.
-Mozilla 1.1
Available in unstable and testing, as are recent CVS snapshots.
And it's even worse for people using woody without 'proposed-updates' package repository!
woody is the stable release. Debian takes stability very seriously and the stable release is only updated to fix serious issues (in particular security issues), not to put in new releases of packages. If you want a more up to date system, use testing.
One problem is that code optimized for a Pentium might not run as well on a K6 as 386 code.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
C) Recompiling all those packages, or keeping both i386 and i686 archives, would be a tremendous amount of work. And, to be honest, 99% of apps don't benefit that much from the optimizations anyways. Recompile your multi-media apps (or use ones that detect the corrent modules at runtime) and install an optimized kernel package, and you should be good.
Not really, do you have any idea of how many platforms Debian is currently autocompiled for? (I've lost count)
Some of these platforms takes days or weeks to compile some packages so there should be pleanty of time to compile the i386 package twice.
No the real issue is that dispite how cool processor specific optimizations sounds, the gains are very limited. I think it is supposed to improve when we switch to gcc-3.2, but it has to be ready for all the Debian platforms before that is attempted.
In debian stable (woody), when you are done setting up the base system, tasksel has a few broad catagories.
Afterwords, you can run dselect to individually select or deselect packages, but you aren't required to.
I think debian stable{-1} (potato) was the same way. Never had to install anything older then that.
...X-Windows is never going to cut it in the desktop world.
What is so wrong with X Windows? If anything, it should be refined to smooth out things people complain about. I'd hate to throw out X's abstractions (client-server; layered architecture: server, window manager, applications) in favor of something new and flashy but architecturally neutered.
I think the fundamental concepts behind X Windows are sound. If there are implementation issues, address those before trying to reinvent everything badly.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin