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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."
Debian's installer isn't any more difficult than any other distribution, IMHO. Why do people freeze up as soon as they see a text-based installer?
We will try to ensure that software is configured for the most common desktop use. For instance, the regular user account added by default during installation should have permission to play audio and video, print, and manage the system through sudo.
I think giving the root privileges to the user using sudo is a security risk. It will be very easy to wreak a havoc on the system, once you break into the user account.
It's fantastic that there is so much happening in the Linux desktop area at the moment. But a plea to you guys -- can we have some co-ordination and co-operation please? Everyone seems to be doing their own thing in many areas. Remember, your competitioin is Microsoft, they have 95% of the desktop market (or there abouts). You should be teaming together to fight them, not amongst each other.
The OSS community can make a desktop that is better than XP. In fact, all of the bits of the puzzle are already there, it's just that they are in different distributions! (Xandros, SUSE, RedHat, Lindows, Debian...)
When Linux has a reasonable foothold in the desktop market, then go ahead, fight away. But until that day, please share and co-operate. For motivation, imagine Bill Gates giggling to himself and muttering "what a bunch of losers". Works for me.
a processor architecture update would be good too. Currently, all Debian packages are compiled for use on a 386. I can't think of ANYONE who still uses a 386 for ANYTHING. So why do we need to continue supporting it?
At the least, I'd like to see the Debian compiles updated to i586. (That's the equivalent of a Pentium 1, in non-geek speak.) There are still quite a few of those in use.
Updating the targetted processor architecture would give a significant performance boost to Debian. I mean seriously, nobody is going to run KDE or Gnome on a 386 -- it'd take DAYS just to start a program.
It might also be possible to support multiple processor architectures; eg during installation you get a list of i386, i486, i586, and i686 (386, 486, Pentium 1, More Recent Stuff). Then apt would fetch the appropriate package flavor. Of course, this would require non-trivial amounts of storage space, not to mention all the time needed to re-compile everything.
Don't worry about that. If Debian dares to mimic Aqua as a theme for their Deskstop, Apple will sue them over look and feel. Jobs is good at that. However, the HIG provided free of charge online will be a good guide for Debian to enhance the usability of their KDE and GNOME desktops for the novice users.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Don't reinvent the wheel, perfect it.
/. article) to provide a full & finished desktop experience.
Yes. Yes. Yes. People..read this line and chant it.
And in the process, they could also team up with the 'Debian Graphical Installer' group (see this
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Because they all target a different audience. It is impossible to have 1 distro that fits all.
Let's look at the following targets: server, corporate desktop, home desktop and embedded.
Server: customizability and security is a Good Thing(tm). You don't need GUI tools, they only make the server less stable. You need to have server software installed.
Corporate desktop: you need GUIs. You don't want server software, but office software. Security is important.
This target conflicts with the server target.
Home desktop: *customizability and security* are not important. The home user simply doesn't care and is lazy. He doesn't want to customize everything, and doesn't want to enter a password to install software.
This conflicts with both server and corporate desktop.
Embedded: you want to have as less stuff as possible because disk space and memory are limited. This conflicts with all of the above.
You see? Totally different targets with totally different needs. And this is just an example, the real world is much, MUCH more complicated. Add a graphical installer and you'll piss off the old school power users or users with old hardware. Don't add a graphical installer and you'll piss of the home user. Add an option and you'll confuse the hell out of newbies. Etc. etc.
You can't have one single distro that fits them all, the situations are too different.
I totally agree, but only to a point. I think there should be a standard on what a Linux core system is. And that "core" system should be part of every Linux distro. So what's the "core", I'd make it as simple as possible. It should be a simple filesystem structure, standard set of drivers, and the very minimal set of system commands (something less then 20 commands and perferribly NOT anything from FSF). The "core" probably wouldn't be anything more that say 5Mb. Then everything else, like the GNU utilities, GCC, XFree, ... would all be addons. This would be very analogous to the UNIX days with the BSD distro addon. When you think about it, isn't that what Linux is today? And besides, then we could end that whole dumbass Linux vs Linux/GNU naming scheme that RMS and his FSF buddies cry about. Linux would then be LINUX and GNU will then be what is really is....just a bunch of addon utilities. That to me is the cleanist approach to standardising Linux.
For the people saying "There's only one Windows"...
Linux "server" distro: Win 2K Enterprise Server
Linux "corporate" distro: Win 2K Workstation or XP Professional
Linux "home" distro: Win 98/ME or XP Home
Linux "embedded": Win CE
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
That's because of a lack of certain tools. What does the user interface guidelines have anything to do with that?
No Linux interface that exists today provides unified system usability.
Or for that matter, windows. KDE has its faults, to be sure, but Konq provides better integration than even Windows. In Windows, I can only see folders on the left pane in explorer. In Konquerer, I can at my option see files, and view all kinds of content, from HTML to text to postscript, in the right hand pane. I can rubberband a bunch of files in ftp and drag them to the desktop. The control center includes system management (to some degree), whereas in windows, you use a completely separate app, MMC. Granted, Windows is carrying along legacy cruft, and would probably make every control panel a MMC snap-in nowadays, but they don't even provide an adaptor.
The user experience on windows is pretty disjointed too. But I don't think Unix (it's more than Linux, folks) exactly has further to go than Windows. It's just broken in different places.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The multiple "Desktop" distros are all coming from different mindsets. Lycoris wants to emulate Windows. Lindows.com wants to kind of emulate Windows, but add features from other OSes as well as some new ideas. RedHat is trying to set a standard across environments that seems to piss people off more than help. Suse is pretty original and seems to be the closest to making a "Joe User" Linux distro but they have no market share outside of Europe yet.
It's actually a case of "too many chefs". No one can agree on what a "great" desktop actually is, since a desktop is so many different things to so many people. The amount of flames I usually receive from people on Slashdot about how feature "X" in environment "X" (or even Windows XP) is stupid and pointless illustrates that well. To one person, it's performance that makes for a great desktop. To another, it's applications. Yet another, eye candy. So far, here's a breakdown of what I've seen:
There are the guys who like to run light with TWM and just use X as a way of having multiple terminals visible at once. I'll bet if there was an option to do this without the overhead of X, they would. As I ocassionally would, myself.
Then there are the folks (like me) who love the eye candy and use X with environments like Gnome or KDE, or just go with a window manager like Enlightenment. These people are the obsessive tweakers who constantly poke and prod and try to get their GUI to be as efficient, customized and sweet looking as possible. To them, the eye-candy/themes, easy customizability and responsiveness of the GUI are what make for a great desktop.
Then there are the utilitarians. They believe that a computer is just a tool. There are also subgroups within this group because some of them want to run light (TWM, FVWM, etc...) and others want an easy to use system that resembles Windows or Macintosh depending on their previous platform (KDE).
Those who use KDE tend to just do the trivial tasks like, browsing the web, working with e-mail, writing docs and balancing their checkbook. They are less concerned about looking cool and more interested in "just working". To them, KDE is the ideal desktop.
The FVWM and TWM crowd that go beyond using X for terms, usually have more specialized needs. They don't need a file manager since they tend to do that from the terminal. They don't need a launcher, since they tend to do that from the terminal too. But they want access to a basic GUI for the apps they run that need it: (GIMP, Mozilla, Netscape, etc...).
There are more groups, but I won't continue. The basic problem is that the desktop is something different for every person. I think the ideal would be an environment that can be as spare as TWM with only xterms/gnome-terms/konsoles, as feature filled as a normal GNOME or KDE environment, and as beautiful as Enlightnment. Upon installation of the environment, the user picks "Thin, Moderate, Full, Custom" and gets what they want. If KDE or GNOME could be made to do this easily and on-the-fly, that would be wonderful.
For instance, if a window manager like Sawfish or KWM could tell it was running with the gnome-panel or kicker, it would revert to a TWM mode. In this mode it would minimize apps to icons on the root window and place a simple right click menu (like TWM's) on the desktop to run a basic set of apps (terms specifically). I think the people who want the lightness of TWM, but maybe like more modern looking widgets and their accompanying functions would really appreciate this.
The ability to switch between Thin, Moderate, Full and Custom, on the fly would be great too. A laptop user could just toggle to Full mode when plugged in and toggle to Light (TWM-like) mode when on battery.
Suspendable X session would be nice too... You suspend the X session and go to runlevel 3 to do deep work that needs all the horsepower it can get. Or you suspend and get back to XDM/GDM/KDM and log in as a different user to do other tasks. (Great for a multiuser machine at home or work) Then you resume your X session with all apps running. This would be kind of interdependent on both the environment and X.
Whatever the case, I think the "Desktop Distro" that will win dominance would be the distro that addresses these issues and does it in a simple way for "Joe User" as well as more complex ways for "Joe Power User" and "J03 G33k G0d".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
often, ok always, it is said that debian is hard to use but the package management is solid as ft knox.
well, I'd rather have a solid package management (PM) tool than a simple gui for everything. but now that I've got the solid PM sure go for the solid gui or solid config tools.
I think debian has it right in hitting the important bits first and getting it right before moving on to somthing else. they don't do it half assed.
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Our physics department runs three versions of windows. Our library runs two versions of windows. The intersection is null. So Without leaving my dorm room I can see two buildings that have 5 versions of windows in production use. Win 3.1, Win 98SE, NT4, W2K, XP.