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Colin Walters Talks About Debian On The Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com caught up with Colin Walters of the Debian Desktop subproject. Launched in late October, the project aims to simplify Desktop Linux. Walters' discusses the project goal to offer 'Software which Just Works' for home and office, new user and expert ... "
This is really something that should be addressed by all distros, not just Debian.
When the user makes any customizations, she should be given an option to test the changes ("Try it now" button) and revert to the previous settings. Inexperienced users are often afraid to make changes, which in their minds (or in reality) might break something, and have a hard time getting into the habit of just playing with different options, unless they are specifically encouraged or made to feel safe.
These are great ideas.
One of the things I've seen over my many years of Slackware use is that the menus for installed window managers often do not reflect actually installed packages. It's simply got to be frustrating for a newbie to see a menu entry for an app that is not installed on the system.
And how about upgrades? It seems to me that upgrading from one version to another should automatically trigger a search to ensure that installed programs are still there so that everything actually works.
Can I help? Erm, no...sorry. I wish I could. It doesn't bother me so much as I've grown accustomed to it, but grandma sure wouldn't tolerate that for very long.
The idea is to identify the complaints people currently have as a desktop for ordinary users and start to address them. For example, an ordinary user can't play CDs until they are added to the "audio" group, and they can't run hardware-accelerated 3D programs unless they are part of the "video" group. Likewise, it takes some special tinkering with /etc/fstab to allow ordinary users to access a vfat (Windows) partition. These are minor annoyances for someone who knows their way around Linux, but for the general public they would make many give up and go back to Windows.