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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."
In other news:
-Lemonade is one of the best beverages
-Pink is the best color
-Pi is the best number
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!
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.
This is exactly what is missing if Linux is going to make it to the mainstream desktop.
As soon as Linux is recognized as a userfriendly, easy-to-use desktop with lots of free (as in beer) software by the average user Windows will get into real problems. Such an opening would generate a *huge* increase in the number of users and thus in the interest in supporting Linux from different companies.
Two points to avoid flaming: 1) I know that Linux is only the kernel, simply sed 's/Linux/Gnu\\Linux/' and be happy, 2) "as in beer" is how the average user will see it, my mother don't care for open source, she wants to use it as a tool!
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.
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.
http://usability.kde.org/
Slightly off-topic, but bear with me: they mention using Ximian Setup Tools, but all mention of this project appears to have dissappeared from Ximian's website. Does anyone know what's happened to it? Are the tools orphaned, abandoned, or just moved (and hidden somewhere)? They were looking very promising, and in terms of achieving what this Debian desktop project is trying to, they seem to fit the bill very well...
Anyone...?
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.
One thing I hope that they will do is have better integrated menus for GNOME and KDE programs. I ran KDE in Debian and always hated that by default, there was a "Debian" submenu for non-KDE programs. Ditto under GNOME. Programs ought to be grouped by task, not by desktop.
:Peter
I just successfully installed Debian on my notebook about a week ago. For the most part, my installation experience was uneventful, but one of the first things I was surprised by is the lack of a graphical installer. ( I flashed back to installing Minix on my A500 and my first install of Slackware back in 1995! :)
:S
SO WHAT!?! It installed fine.
Some of my minor complaints include:
Ease of install of Xwindows
X installation has always been a bitch for me irregardless of the distribution Linux or BSD. It seems that it's something that always needs tinkering. I did get this going fairly quick after some help from my BSD admin guru--thank the Gods for buddies!
Ease of install of sound
I still don't have sound working, but I haven't given it the one two punch!
Ease of install of APM support
I probably haven't looked in the right place or good documentation doesn't exist. And I'm lazy?
Up to date install documentation
Let's face it, I think that once most people get their configuration working they don't think about giving back to the community. Something that should definately be reconsidered.
Package Manager selection at end of install
Aggravating. I don't want to sit and select then download and install 200M of software after I get it installed, but I DO want an easy way to get back to package management once I hastily exit out if it. I want my cake and I want to eat it too.
Overall though, my Debian install was a pleasant experience.
If I didn't have ~10 years of XP working with *NIX as a user and ~20 years of XP working with computers I certainly wouldn't know where to begin. That's why I think better documentation is certainly in order.
OVERALL, Debian is everything that I would expect it to be for what I consider to be a non-commercial distribution of Linux.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. (When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will
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.
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
...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