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If I Had My Own Distro...
Gentu writes "Adam Scheinberg writes an interesting editorial explaining what he would do if he was a developer and he had a Linux distribution. His suggestions are pretty radical, and in places resembles of what Apple had done to MacOSX with the help of BSD as the underlying technology. But if this is what it takes to get Linux into the next level, it might worth the consideration."
I did. I've never looked back on the desktop. Servers still run Linux.
(I've posted this before, but it is 100% relevant to this article and something I want people to think long and hard about.)
.RPM or .DEB, in which case it is already figured out for you (Mandrake-branded site will default to .RPM, etc).
Forget copying the Windows UI, that's absurd.
Someone is going to get on that machine, go to Start -> Programs looking for "Microsoft Excel" and feel like an idiot or be completely frustrated because they couldn't find it.
NO ONE has complained that people stay away from OS X "because it doesn't look like Windows." WHY are we trying to pretend that's the reason people don't try Linux?
If you want Windows people to use Linux, we need distributions to do a few things:
Ditch 3 of the 4 programs that do the same thing. Seriously. Why do I need 4 CD-R burning programs? Just give me the one that works the best, that's *all I care about* - and make sure it's labeled "CD Burner" so I don't have to decipher "gkdesbUISO." Contrary to what people here may think, we do NOT need to include every single Web Browser available. Don't put every alternative in the "Programs" menu - you hide the extra versions, and it only comes out when someone says they are an "advanced" user. Or perhaps a help option that says, "Software Doesn't Do What You Want? Try These:"
Distro installers should have a "I have never used Linux before, but I have been using Windows for 5 years" option. This will offer extra help in the form of, "If you are looking for this, you will now use this instead."
Make sure "regular" users *only* need the first CD. In the case of a 3 CD distro like Mandrake, make the additional CDs required only for developers and/or international users.
When you setup the desktop, be it either Gnome or KDE, you need to include a few "What do I do now?" icons on the desktop. I'm not talking about your "Welcome," because most of these people are illiterate or too lazy to read them, I'm talking about a few icons such as "Games," "Mozilla Web Browser," and "OpenOffice Applications." Do NOT just call the web icon "Mozilla," because these people have no idea what Mozilla even is.
I don't know if one exists yet, but we need yet-another new standard Linux portal. One that can be branded with Mandrake, RedHat, etc, but has software reviews, HOWTOs, special tips, best applications in each category, downloads, news, a forum, etc. And when you click to download a file, it is either a
Apple has the portal down to an art--take heed as it will go a long way to making them feel like they are both a part of something, and that they've just entered a Brave New World as opposed to being made to feel like an idiot because they can't find anything or get anything done.
The thing that most mainstream distros seem to be doing well, is that as soon as they are installed, 99% of the applications you will ever need are already installed and setup. With Windows, you're stuck with installing all of your software off of CD again, downloading everything again, etc, etc.
Prove me wrong now.
Jason Fisher
Aaaargh. not again. I thought I'd sorted this out last time around.
People, Apple have nothing to do with Linux, Linux has nothing to do with Apple
Mach at the centre of a *BSD* kernel makes OSX, not a linux kernel. Darwin is not Linux, OSX is not Linux, Linux is not Mach and Linux never contained Mach.
You're spreading misconceptions as if they're fact and that shits me. Get it right.
seems great on my dual Pentium Pro. one of the nice things about Gentoo is you roll your own kernel and all the programs are compiled by source using your custom set of options, so SMP support is no worse than it would be in the kernel itself overall.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
One of the things I love most about the Mac is its drag+drop installations. You won't have to worry about system dependancies (as much) if you just make the drag+drop installer include all the libraries that the application in question needs, in the application's folder. Mozilla can have its own private version of GTK. Rhythmbox can have its own version of gstreamer, etc.
--
Yes, I posted this on OSnews.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The article illustrates one of the problems I see with the various distros out there. There's just SO much availible, I just don't know where to start. It's rather intimidating. Also, why should I have to learn the ins and outs of 2 or more DEs (KDE, Gnome and maybe others) to get all the functionality that should be availible in one. I think this is one of the reasons why people put up with Windows despite Microsofts draconian EULAs: there's a consistant look and feel there that just isn't availible on linux (yet).
/usr didn't mean USER but rather Unix System Resources. WTF?)
And on a similar note, I definitly agree with the authors idea of changing default directory names to be more user friendly (it wasn't up until 2 years ago that I found out that
Having worked on a few large projects I'm always amazed how you can start with a clear set of ideas like this guy and wind up with a monstrosity. I'm pretty sure a Linux distro meeting my needs could easily fit on one CD -source and all. Instead I wind up installing 3CDs because. It's just too hard to say "no".
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I was the only person to run it too. I first installed Linux back in 1993, and except for the basic kernel and compiler (which were SLS) I manually tracked down the sources to everything I needed and compiled it myself. I kept everything up to date by myself, and even went through some standard library changes, and the big move to the ELF executable format. I had networking, and X running twm very well on my 386SX. When I switched computers, I'd just make a boot disk, make a filesystem, move a big tarball from one machine to the other with floppies, untar it, and reconfigure everything by hand. I learned so much about how UNIX works in those years, but it eventually became too much work to keep it all running. I was spending most of my time tracking down sources, compiling, installing, and configuring my machine.
So, I installed Red Hat 4.0 and later moved to Debian. I'd recommend that everyone should have the opportunity to build a linux system from scratch, even if it's just a fairly simple single floppy boot disk distribution. Get the kernel and filesystem installed. Build init from sources on another machine. Download a prebuild gcc compiler from the net, and the sources to gcc, and build a stage two compiler and install it. Get the XFree86 sources and compile them. Same goes for xterm and the other utilities.
This is a much different experience than installing Red Hat, or Slackware, or Gentoo, and I promise you'll learn a lot and have fun at the same time.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Isn't that a Barenaked Ladies song?
"If I Had My Own Distro"
If I Had My Own Distro
If I Had My Own Distro
I would code my own FS
I would code my own FS
and, If I Had My Own Distro
If I Had My Own Distro
Design a sensible directory structure
Keep those symlinks all in order
If I Had My Own Distro
If I Had My Own Distro
Well, I'd select only ONE desktop
A nice reliant environment
.
.
.
Something like that.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Where can I get a CD that I put in my computer, click the appropriate "Yes/Ok" buttons a few times, and have Linux on my computer, with a web browser and a word processor, that all my hardware automatically works with, including my internet connection through my router to my cable modem, as well as my video and sound cards, that automagically downloads any updates I need, and works with anything I happen to plug into the USB port?
Where would I get something like that?
The very fact that I don't know whether something like that exists, much less where to get it, is exactly why people use windows.
paintball
He covers a lot of overlooked stuff. A lot of the people working on having a desktop-ready linux seem to think that you can just throw on some clone of LinuxConf or YaST that you made yourself and call it a day.
Not true.
The math and CS departments at my school have started maintaining machines running Red Hat in any computer lab they can exercise any control over. Naturally, students who aren't familiar with linux try them out. Seeing as how I work the helpdesk and I'm the one everybody seems to come to for help with installing linux anyway, I end up helping them out a lot, and I've noticed a few things.
The author's comments on the filesystem are dead-on, but don't go far enough. I've helped users who are trying to save files on the desktop, and they expect the desktop to be an option in file pickers. I would like it to be there, too - having to go to "/home/uname/Desktop" is not intuitive, and it's a pain in the ass. This should be something that is global to all file handling dialogs. KDE does it in a half-assed way (I don't know about Gnome 2), and it doesn't really help much anyway since all applications seem to want to write their own dialogs from scratch, anyway.
KDE and Gnome need to come to an agreement on some common dialogs, work on a design for these dialogs and how they will work, and then implement them using a shared library that both will access. I don't care how it is implemented - the dialogs can be written in straight X11 so it looks the same on both, or the library can check for what environment is being used and pop up a dialog that is written using GTK+ or QT. As long as they look and work the same, I'm happy.
Another one is networking. We've tried finding a good way to help students who aren't good with Linux to access our campus network resources. LinNeighborhood is the best we've come up with so far, and that doesn't even get to the configuration issues that pop up for people trying to get their own linux boxen connected to the network. Come on, people. Most everyone using Samba is connecting to Windows networks. Windows networks usually have pretty much the same configuration. Why the heck can't we have distros that set up Samba by default, have Samba's default configuration be for a standard Windows network, and give users a decent system? On top of it, there is no good network browser. Apple gives me splat-K and pops shares up on my desktop. Windows gives me Network Neighborhood and acts as if all shares on a network are already in my filesystem. LinNeighborhood makes me mount everything, then forces me to go into the filesystem again and find where I mounted the share, and it asks me for my username and password every step of the way. In this case, I like the Apple model best. Give me a "connect to server" option in my start menu, and when I connect to a server, pop up an icon on my desktop.
While we're on the subject of things just popping up without any hassle, if your distro isn't using DevFS yet, get it switched the heck over. If the driver you're writing isn't DevFS compatible, get it working that way.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but the point is, there are a whole lot of details involved in a good desktop OS. Linux is a great desktop OS for me, but I am comfortable enough with Linux to handle the hassle, and I've made it over the 2-year learning curve. Anyone who thinks that drag'n'drop and a somewhat working office suite makes a complete desktop OS for the general public needs to get a clue.
There are two areas that most need fixing. Filesystem structure, configurability of apps, and other things aren't what need fixing most.
We need fewer, better (how about, doesn't crash often, for starters) apps and tools. After using Linux for several years for servers, this weekend I actually tried to use it as a desktop OS. I had a big mess of files, source, and other docs (of my own making) that I had to try to get organized.
Gnome Nautilus crashed frequently. It paused for several seconds at a time periodically (top showed no activity, no load). It didn't redraw all the time as it should. It sometimes wouldn't allow an operation (such as deleting an empty folder), for no apparent reason.
KDE (konquerer) was moderately better, but it still crashed periodically.
There will forever be debates over KDE vs Gnome, but the fact is, we'd be better off with just one desktop that worked (dare I say, as good as Windows). Windows has its problems, but it is much more reliable as a desktop OS, in terms of application behavior.
And then we have desktop apps - word processors, spreadsheets, etc. How many email clients do we need? How many word processors? There needs to be some consolidation and some serious quality improvement. Then we can diverge into competing products. But right now, in general, we have a bunch of decent, but still-too-buggy apps.
Last, we need more complete, universally supported OS management tools. Whether it's linuxconf, webmin, etc., we need one or two solid tools for helping non-shell users manage their OS. Right now we have some nice individual tools, and some decent tool umbrellas, but it's still not clean and uniform.
I know you can't expect people working for free to do exactly what you want, but it would be nice if half of the creative energy spent was directed toward some of these goals, rather than yet-another-IM, or WM, or screensaver, etc. Let's get one to three of each type of app or tool, and one or two desktop managers, etc.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I think Linux could benefit from scrapping X and developing a new, fast GUI system like Windows or MacOS. X is too dependent on networking protocols and is just pretty goddamn slow all-around. It will take a lot of effort to make something like this happen, but if Apple could do it why can't the open source community do it too? Instead of developing Window Manager # 123480, people need to collaborate and make a common, consistent, and standard layout that all programs can use, without all the bloat of the gtk+ and QT toolkits.
One thing that I didn't see him mention was a standardized GUI help facility with a search feature. It seems that most times I open a help file it is usually either a text file or html which only allows me to find keywords on the particular page I am looking at. xman doesn't count because it is not slick, is not showing text formatting correctly, is not hyperlinked, and man pages are being maintained less and less these days.
You've obviously never used a DECwriter. Those keyboards were horrible.
-30-
One of the things I like about Unix is that it helps power users and programmers get done what they need to get done, simply making everything more verbose and harder to type won't be of help to anyone, expert or novice, IMHO, anymore than COBOL is more friendly to programmers than C.
Linux is a kernel which is commonly accompanied by the GNU system, and possibly an XFree system with KDE or GNOME on top. If this is running on a Mach kernel, then it may well be a Mach based Linux compliant GNU operating system.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
"...show the filesystem layout to your mother and ask her where an application might be located."
i love my best friend dearly, but she (an intelligent young woman in her twenties) didn't know what an APPLICATION was, let alone where she might find one.
this is Stephenson's "Metaphor Shear", methinks. we're too presumptuous about what a user wants, what a user needs, and (most importantly) what will SATISFY a user.
i, personally, think the only real computer interface that will be a success (apart from complete market saturation and the billions of dollars needed to enforce such a monopoly) is limitted, proprietary interfaces like you'd find at an ATM, or on a very basic cell-phone.
Adobe shouldn't be selling software for hundreds of dollars - they should be selling customized workstations for the same money! computers will only be the huge success this author and many like him describe when it is as intuitive as gaming consoles, regardless the OS/vendor/business. as a technician and "yes, i'll fix your computer" geek, i know that NO user likes Microsoft's product, on the whole. and when given the choice of Linux, the reason for staying with Microsoft has nothing to do with useability, it's just that they can go to Best Buy for software or repair.
when computers are *not* customizable, are intuitive, and never crash, the users will be happy. general computing is for hackers. focused computing is necessary for everyone else.
Few possible solutions, none perfect:
Warn user during delete if any symlinks are pointing there. Requires kernel filesystem rewrite.
Default "ls" should be modified to warn user that the file is a symlink. This may break many shell scripts.
Shells should have "ls" built-in. In interactive mode, it should warn users. Requires users to use one of these shells.
Second problem with symlink is that you can't move up and down in the hierarchy in intuitive way. If you do "cd x/y" followed by "cd ..". You should in directory "x", right? Not necessarily, if you are using symlinks. Since "cd" command is a shell built-in, the shells should be able to keep track of directory navigation and should be able to keep track of this, so that user would in directory "x" even if there are symlinks. This may break some unknown things.
In short, I believe that for home user, symlinks should not be requirement (no executible or scripts should use) and user must get visible signs that they are dealing with symlinks whenever they encounter one.
Point one:
...without all the bloat of the gtk+ and QT toolkits.
X is too dependent on networking protocols and is just pretty goddamn slow all-around.
X is hardly dependent on networking protocols. Local client access to the server happens over Unix Sockets, a very low-latency, architecture-independent solution. Nor is X that slow. X ran jes' fine on my old 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 256K CL graphics card. Let's see the "fast GUI system like Windows or MacOS X" do that.
I think this is the core problem, not X.
Point 2:
Instead of developing Window Manager # 123480, people need to collaborate and make a common, consistent, and standard layout that all programs can use...
If Linux were a business, I'd agree with you. However, Linux is not a business; it's essentially a hobby. Linux' success is based not on the application of business practices, but by a bunch of people having fun writing software.
Sure, there's a lot of businesses interested in Linux, and contributing to Linux for their own needs. But this is after-the-fact; businesses have already accepted Linux. Now they are customising it to fit their own needs, or supporting it out of the understanding that what is good for Linux is good for business.
Anyway, this is all a lot of armchair quarterbacking. Linux is Linux is Linux. Telling a bunch of volunteer developers what they *should* be working on (instead of providing positive and useful feedback on they projects they *are* working on) shows both ingratitude and lack of understanding of the entire Free/Open Source culture.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
1) A manual.
... I'LL GO INSANE.
No more man pages. Ever. I am as sick to death of plowing through all that crap as I know all of you are. If I have to deal with one more half-written, closely-worded, semi-irrelevant man page that doesn't even talk about the stuff I think I know I want to do but I have to read it because I think the command I think I want MIGHT have something to do with what I think I want to do
2) A good GUI.
Good means fast. Good means internally consistent. Good means programmatically consistent. Good means the programs actually USE the GUI. One thing I really like about Windows? Add/Remove Programs. It's right there. Talking about package this and package that makes everyone's eyes glaze over.
3) A good set of apps.
As the other guy said, let's quit jamming every stupid little command line piece of shit into every distro. Most of us never bother with them, and that's half the reason RedHat is 94 DVDs and can only fit on a shelf that's got concrete reinforcements. OK, I'm exaggerating, but seriously -- if the "competition" fits on ONE CD, how "bloated" is that?!
4) A good use of the Linux kernel and the Linux philosophy (such as there is one).
Do we really need to see 50,000,000,000,000,000 lines of kernel messages whenever we boot? Do we really need to have every messy, nasty part of the kernel hanging out and exposed? I'm sorry, but the more I work with Linux, the less I appreciate its design -- it's ten thousand times as crufty as anything else out there. I'm sick of getting library errors 'pon unpacking a distro straight from the CD, sick of not being able to figure out how to do X on this particular distro (which package manager is it again?... where do I find that?... uhhh...), sick of the fact that we have a GUI which most programs don't bother to fully exploit (no consistent mechanism for adding and removing an icon, for Christ's sake!)
5) A good level of internal consistency.
Linux needs to PICK ONE THING AND STICK WITH IT.
Sometimes a little internal consistency is not a bad thing. I don't need 300 shells and 129 different ways to boot. I need something that works, and I need to know that if something goes wrong with it, I can get better answers than "oh, here's the source code, you figure it out." I'm amazed more people are not as shocked by the essential contempt that such an attitude shows for the end user (i.e., the people who want to, you know, USE the computer instead of have to learn 30 programming languages to do every lousy thing).
There. Flame away.
After reading the article and after years of work in groups trying to make Linux more palatable to the end user, I pretty much agree with the author.
My 2 main differences are:
1) I think source should be online and downloadable. NOT in CD form is just fine, but if I do need to compile something new or recompile part of DistroX with a new option, I need to be able to get access faster than postal mail. I work for Sun, we use similar methods (postal mail or pre-paid downloads) and for my customers these methods just don't work. Put your source tree online, but don't put it in a CD format and label it clearly as for developers and you'll find almost no one downloads it except those who need it.
2) I disagree with moving to FreeBSD from the point of view of losing a LOT of development and it will very much hurt marketing. Apple didn't get bit hard by the *BSD thing, but that was because they were only concerned with selling to an existing desktop install base. If you are starting from scratch, being based on something (Linux) that the market has at least heard of with regularity is going to be a big boost.
I can see where there are big commercial advantages for not using Linux as your base, but I don't see them outweighing the benefits. I could be wrong, but that's the way I see it. By keeping your main system tools that do things like creating all the aliases, etc you are going to make it just as hard for a competitor to copy everything as you would if you based yourself off of FreeBSD.
NOTE: No matter what you do or how you do it, expect someone to try and clone DistroX. Therefore, spend a full R&D cycle (2-3 years) privately getting it POLISHED before you release it. If you start out significantly ahead of the game, it will be that much harder to catch up with you. When releasing, let it known that technically it is Linux, but don't HYPE the Linux. Hype the usability and compatibility. I know, sounds contradictory to what I said before about marketing, but Linux tends to market itself where people want that, you don't need to worry about it.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
This article has some (really) good ideas, but there's some pretty bad ones that would cause problems right from the word go. For example:
My developers are going to meet and agree on ONE desktop environment. Yes, we'll include the libs for the other major one we leave out.
Already you've fallen into the trap of pandering to the existing Linux crowd. Why ? Most of the other things you're doing are already going to drive away these people. Pick (or create) a GUI. Stick to it, customise it, tweak it "just so". Don't waste any developmental effort on another - let others do that if they _really_ want to. Every minute spent on including or developing stuff for the "other GUI" is time you could have spent making yours better.
[...] graphical, heavy on eye candy, with few visible options but lots of "Advanced" buttons.
Bad idea. "Advanced" buttons just allow for more mistakes to be made by newbies. If you *really* want to give the option for users to perform an "advanced" install (in which case you should really sit down and ask yourself *WHY*), then make it a well documeted *boot-time* option that can't be stumbled on accidentally. SImilarly with things like filesystems - pick on and stick to it.
I'm already stripping out a number of apps, so what I'm not going to worry about are libraries and system files. Even the minimal install will include every common system tool my develops can think of.
This is another bad idea. It's this sort of reasoning that *causes* library versioning problems. Include _only_ the libs necessary to support your included software and development on your "default" platform. Again, if other people really want to get app XYZ that requires libs ABC and HIJ to get working, they will. The only time this might be an issue for you is when your users are asking for a service your existing software doesn't provide.
On the whole, the ideas here are pretty good. It's obvious your objective (dream ?) is to create an OS X equivalent on x86, which is an admirable (and achievable IMHO) goal. However, you're also trying to pander to existing userbase by including options for this, options for that, etc. Don't - it's one of the biggest reasons Linux distros are difficult to approach for people who don't have the knowledge to make the necessary decisions between all those options. If you _really_ want to make "something new" then you have to make choices and stick by them. Certainly don't go out of your way to hinder people trying to port/develop for the new platform, but by the same token don't waste any of your development time and money re-implementing features (note: *features*, not specific bits of software) that already exist on your platform, just because a handful of users prefer a slightly different version.
X is too dependent on networking protocols and is just pretty goddamn slow all-around
IMO, X is NOT what is slow! It is KDE/Gnome/[insert slow desktop/window manager here]. If you want to see the speed of X all by itself, try typing 'X' at the command line. The X server pops up damn near instantaneously (minus anything useful though) on my P4 1.7Ghz, and it is still quite fast on my K6-2 450 (yeah I still have one of those). Also, I have noticed that recent versions of Gnome have improved startup times. Faster than KDE on the same machine in my personal experience. (I still use KDE though.)
All I have to so is switch to a lighter destkop (i.e. twm) and the startup time from 'startx' to "ready for use" is dramatically reduced. I see plenty of "X sucks" lately, but I don't see it as being X.
Just my 2
Example: "/var => mostly placed under /System" The /var directory exists to collect the stuff that programs have to have write access to, like logs, spools, locks. There is some advantage to mounting e.g. /usr/bin read-only on production systems while mounting /var read-write.
Example: "/bin => /System/Commands.../usr/bin => /System/Executables" The stuff in /bin (and /sbin) consists of programs you need to rescue a system that has gone nuts, e.g. ps belongs in /bin and pstree goes in /usr/bin. It makes no sense to call one of these a "Command" and one an "Executable".
Example: "/opt => /Apps" What is the difference between a "Command", an "Executable", and an "App"? Is mozilla an executable or an application? This is very like metaphor shear. These three different names seem to mean three different things, but really they are essentially synonymous, so all this will do is create confusion as people try to understand the difference when the categorization is in fact utterly arbitrary.
The goals: "100% Application Directory Oriented" which means what? "Internationalization of Directory Names" has nothing to do with moving around /bin etc. "More Intuitive Directory Names" Demonstrably false--see above. "Fewer Root Directories" so what? What value is there in have fewer root directories, when all you are doing is creating more subdirectories? "Increased System Flexibility" how is flexibility increased? "Applications would no longer need to hard code directory names." Any hardcoded directory compiled into an app is probably a bug (unless it is easily over-ridden with an environment variable). "Set of environmental variables pointing the location of major system directories." What is the difference between hardcoding a directory name like /tmp and hardcoding an environment variable like $TEMP? NOTHING. (As I said, a decent program will do something like use $TEMP if it exists and fall back on /tmp.)
This is the best: "The standard will not be finalized until a Linux distribution ships based upon it." I have a good idea when that will happen.
"I'm going to remove a lot of choice from the user, because, to many, it's more a gamble than a choice."
I agree whole-heartedly with that. When your basic desktop user is switching from Microsoft to Windows, all of those choices are guaranteed to blow his mind. Postfix? Sendmail? Qmail? Procmail, mailx, mailutils, maildrop, mailbase, getmail, fetchmail, mutt, elm, squirrelmail, kmail, sylpheed, evolution!? I don't know, I just want to check my mail! Why are there so many choices in the "mail" section!?
What ALL distros lack is sufficient documentation on what all of these packages are and why you would need them. Gentoo's description of fluxbox: "Window manager based on Blackbox -- has tabs." Yeah, that about sums it up. Now I know exactly what it is... uh huh. To anybody who needs a description of fluxbox, that's not enough. Imagine the user coming from Windows and reading that description. What's a window manager? What's blackbox? What are tabs? Do I need this?
The way to fix this isn't to just force the user to take a certain window manager. It's to give real documentation. A page, or two, or three. Better yet: screenshots. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Each window manager could have 5 or 6 screenshots viewable from the installer, or maybe a little automated tour.. a slideshow or video that demonstrates its features. Every program should be well documented. Those that can't be described completely yet simply should include some sort of a graphical demonstration. Documentation should include who it's targeted at, what it does, and why you would need it. This could include a list of common tasks it is used for.
Similarly, a well-documented installer should have an index where users can search for specific actions like "reading mail" or "web browsing". Under each topic should be a list of available programs to do that task. Current installers allow you to choose pre-defined setups like "workstation" or "server". There should be more than just a few pre-defined choices, and they should explain in great detail what they install and why. Obviously, there are some people who just want to click "install" and have everything setup for them. But those who are really trying to get into Linux won't just want to have a box pre-configured for them. It's MUCH more valuable to have each choice explained. "This is fluxbox. Fluxbox is a window manager. A window manager is... Fluxbox was chosen because you selected the 'fast and lightweight' setup. Fluxbox's competition is:... Fluxbox was chosen instead of its competition because..." Sure, it would take forever. I know I would have preferred to have taken a long time but known exactly what was going on rather than installing in 10 minutes and taking two years to learn what all of my software is for.
Maybe a distro intended solely for introducing linux is in order. Not like Lindows and Lycoris which "introduce" you to linux by isolating you from it, but something that is more of an interactive tutorial.
Scratched Emulsion
All of the problems you see are UI problems and should be taken care of in the UI layer. I believe the best thing about *NIX is its seperation of duties and layers. No need to make *NIX more like windows in the respect of mixing layers. Fix UI problems in the UI and let the fs be the best FS it can be. Oh, and there is support for FAT16/32 and other case-insensitive FSes in *NIX. I believe the driver converts all of the paths to upper case. Maybe tab-completion in your shell doesn't work the way you want, but then you should fix the shell.
Others have pointed out most of the other flaws in your proposal. Hard-coding should be considered a bug, etc. People will ignore your suggestion for environemnt varibles just as much as they ignore good design practice now.
You should look at Plan9. Each user has a custom view of the filesystem, kind of like chrooting every user, but much more elegant. You could implement your proposal that way if you wanted and it would indeed be more elegant than the *NIX single-rooted fs. However, your proposal makes changes at the wrong layer. Move up or two in the layers of abstraction. You're too used to windows where it's painfully obvious which "drive" your files are on. Under *NIX, if you care you can type "df" and see what's mounted where, butoterwise you don't know which physical volume your data is on, nor should you. Think abstraction layers. They make things cleaner and more flexible.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
The directory aliasing, is rather trivial. I do something like this as part of my default installs by hand in a few minutes (example /root to /home/root, /tmp to /var/tmp, /var/www to /home/apache, etc...).
As for a repository of rpms that are distribution specific most distributions do do this. So your question about why they don't is moot. The issue with software occur when people try to install rpms from other distributions.
As far as libraries, certainly to a limited extent you could simply install all libraries but then frankly if you are going to do that go whole hog and just the apps as well and have only one software configuration you need to support. In general though you may not resolve all the issues of dependencies. Often apps need libraries compliled with particular settings. So if you are really going in this direction you are not only assuming quite a bit of harddrive space but also 2-3x as much ram. For a newbie distribution that isn't neccesarily that horrible but it should be understood.
Take a simple example. What languages are you going to compile into your interfaces for messages? English only (very limiting). Or maybe English and Spanish (now you have just added a lot because you now have to support some non ascii fonts)? But then are you going to have right to left support so that people can use Arabic and Hebrew? What about cyrillic support for eastern europenas. How about Unicode and if so will all Asian fonts have to use something like UTF8 (i.e. Asian text will be 50% larger than using a 16 bit font)? Most unix code will allow you to complile versions for various font sets, very few support arbitrary font systems and those that do are very complicated (see Oracle's excellent documentation on national language standards for a very good discussion).
Finally on the issue of apps you are showing ignorance here. Either you install one of each major type of app or you give people wildely different experience and install/offer lots of different apps. People always say "why do I need 12 different text editors" but what they forget is:
Emacs -- virtual lisp environment editor
note two choices which are incompatable if you want X support: GNU with X extensions or XEmacs
Also Emacs21 introduced library incompatabilities so you often want to offer 20 and 21 versions.
VI/VIM/Elvis/Viper -- vi environment. BTW often people who use one of these are quite picky
pico -- very simple editor
joe -- full features wordstarish editor
if we are going to offer joe what about jed?
beav -- good hex editor, also useful for people who need EBCDIC
yudit -- better for unicode users
etc... Mainstream Linux distributions on the whole handle this situation quite well:
a) Very nice default choices
b) Wide range of packages for people with specialized needs
c) The ability to install the thousands of other packages which are even more specialized.
The fact that you couldn't even make simple choices:
-- gnome only
-- open office only (though why pick gnome since OO isn't gnome specific)
etc... means you wouldn't be able to go the unified route.
Having a single place, shared library allows you to know exactly what library you have, and how vulnerable you are, in a single location. And if a vulnerability is found, you fix the problem in one shot.
unfinished: (adj.)
I found this thread hilarious. Some parts of the proposal are very iffy, but some parts of the criticisms are even iffier.
...
:-)
.... very much like the horrendous MS registry, although admittedly Unix retains some degree of sanity by keeping those centralized files separate and plain. :-)
Just to highlight a totally nonsensical (but very funny) comment of yours
In particular, spreading configuration files all around with their owners is a great mistake.
Hahahaha. Those files started out all in one place, together with their owner package, and it's you that says that the right thing to do is to spread them out all over the system.
Just to tease you a little more on this, the traditional Unix approach is centralized
There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think that any reasonable person would have to admit that. Unfortunately, we're not seeing much in the way of a reasoned meeting of minds at all on this topic.
There is a danger here. While Windoze is still primitive compared to even a 15-year old Unix except in surface aesthetics, it will mature eventually, and if attempts to make even small and fairly reasonable improvements to Unix continue to be thwarted by barely-substantiated resistance to change then the future will not be rosey.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
He would build a Linux distribution using BSD... Too funny. This whole article is such an obvious troll.
First of all, X is fast... Many games get higher frame rates under Linux and X than they do on Windows. So X is not the problem.
Secondly, using BSD at the core of your product is no better than using Linux. Sure you can change it all you want and keep all the changes secret. This doesn't help you a bit, unless you want the expense of supporting your very own version of UNIX. Which is neither fun, nor cheap.
Thirdly, he talks about needing standards, but then wants to move away from the Linux standards base, the X windows system and nearly all other established open standards. At the end he is talking about forking BSD to keep all his changes secret. Niiiiiiiice! So it is obvious that this person is no fan of open source at all.
I have a system that is aging now... It's going on 3 years old. It is a dual celeron overclocked to 522MHz, 512MB of RAM and 4 twenty GB hard drives. And it literally flies. I click and * BOOM *, the window pops up, almost before I can move the mouse after the click. So I really have no clue about why these people are complaining about how slow linux and X is all the time.
In fact, my normal system that I use most of the time for web browsing and chatting on the internet is an ancient laptop that is just a pentium 266, with 192MB of RAM and a 4GB drive. And I run Mozilla under KDE just fine.
And if you are going to complain that my systems have too much RAM let me tell you that Linux is _not_ CPU intensive for normal operations and that you are much better off putting 1 GB of RAM in a trailing edge system than you are with 128MB of RAM and the fastest P4 on the market.
Now, back to the topic at hand. My biggest issues with computers is the fact that they make me work too hard to use them... I want to have everything just work without me having to do much to get it that way.
For instance... I use the computer to communicate with people from all over the world. But my email client, each different chat client and address book and all that crap just don't communicate with each other... I want to create a new folder in my computer and call it George to represent my friend George... then I want to assign all things relating to George to this folder, so that I can tie him to multiple email accounts, to multiple instant messengers, to multiple addresses and multiple phones and anything else that his system supports. Every email that he sent to me or I sent to him should be tied to this folder. Every IM conversation should be here. My phone should record every conversation I have, compress it as an mp3 and copy them to this folder as well. I should be able to log every contact that I have made with him, be it email or phone or whatever and write notes about it, tied back to the event that triggered me wanting to write a note in the first place. If I want to phone him, I should just have to click a button, and the phone should dial him, if I want to mail something to him, just click a button and a mailing lable is printed. If I tell it to the program should tell me when he is having a birthday and I should be able to link other people to him so that it will tell me when his anniversary is, or when his wife or kids are having a birthday too. If he is a devout religious friend I should be able to tell my system that and be told about my friends holy days as they come up. If my friend is on vacation, I should be able to mark that so that if I start to try to contact him, it will remind me. And all this information should be indexed so that if I want to know everytime I said the word "accounts receivable" to my friend in any email, attached note, instant message conversation, or file downloaded or uploaded from him it would be right there, instantly retrieved and in a list sorted by date.
And I am tired of having programs needing to have support for each individual graphics and video and audio format. Programs s
My experience with Debian has been that "sudo apt-get install " will reliably install just about all of the programs I've tried
So will 'sudo urpmi'
RPM is a nice idea, but you have to actually find RPMs, which is a pain.
You're confusing the package format and the tool used by Redhat to manage RPMs.
Don't diss the RPM package format until you've tried a real packaging frontend (urpmi/yum/apt-rpm).
And don't make the mistake all Debian users make in comparing rpm to apt, you should be comparing rpm to dpkg.
When an application wants a web browser, it should run "web-browser [url]"
What about using $BROWSER, which has been in use for over 5 years?
One KDE:
$ echo $BROWSER
kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing
$