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."

Comments

Uhm...

[jawtheshark]

I understand what he means. I've been trying to do what he describes with the bare bones distributions like Debian and Slackware. I didn't succeed by now.

This is probably linked to my own incompetence and not to the fact that it isn't feasible.

Re:Uhm...

[intermodal]

Gentoo. Customize as much as you want. most of his first page can be taken care of with static links anyhow.

Re:Uhm...

[intermodal]

well, thanks for the cut and paste, but that relates to basically nothing I said in parent. Because your post was so amusingly idiotic, i will of course respond.

NetBSD rules! Anyway, Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

NetBSD is not my preference, Gentoo is simply an easier way of going about a linux from scratch source-approach than the actual LFS system is, and has a thriving community willing to help the less knowledgeable.

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

I rarely update my system. I do it whenever I either have some downtime, or will be away from my computer for a significant amount of time, like if I have a busy weekend coming up. (yes, I do actually do things other than use my computer.)

"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

Idealism doesn't even enter into it. Yes, I program. No, I haven't contributed to any released opensource projects yet but I do have some things in the works. Nothing earth-shattering, as most of those are either in the works or I am not at that level of skill yet. I do not proclaim l33tness before the n00bs, nor do I consider myself to be particularly knowledgeable apart from areas I have worked on myself.

"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

Not a sentence of this applied to me. I have used Debian, Red Flag, Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, tinfoil hat, hal99 or whatever, and core linux. I found Gentoo to be a better fit for my needs, and also was better at handling dependency checks than the alternatives.

"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

Perhaps my machine spends more time compiling, but I spend more time not having to deal with it compiling. Portage does it for me, when I am not at my computer anyhow. I don't see how this is a logical arguement at all. You must use Windows XP. And I do use FluxBox, but its a matter of preference.

"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

Actually I roll my own. hand picked parts, good fans, good quality power supplies and drives, and yes I run AMD but no it's not out of Intel hatred. Also, I don't overclock.

"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

Not true. I successfully used Red Hat without such problems for about a year. I found its defaults wanting. The best part of Gentoo for me is customization from the start at low l

Just get Mac OS X

[coconn06]

Instead of doing what this article describes, just get Mac OS X.

I don't understand why anyone wouldn't.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[The Vulture]

I have to agree and disagree with you on this.

First of all, I would like to say that I have no objections on multiple pieces of software that do the same thing, after all, variety is good. Whether they should be included in a distro, well, that's up to the distro.

There's different Linux distributions out there that have different purposes. RedHat seems to be going after the office market, Mandrake, the home user, Debian, the person who wants complete freedom (as in speech), Slackware, the tinkerer, etc.

I've actually had visions of making my own distro, similar to the article author - I've gotten so far as to building my own program (on Freshmeat) that parses the Linux From Scratch XML file, to generate scripts to do an (fairly) automated build. From there, I would then decide on which packages I'd like to standardize on (KDE probably), and build them, make a nice installer, and there's my homebrew Linux.

Personally, I don't care if Linux ever gets complete mainstream acceptance, and I get the feeling that many of the core developers of the kernel and other bug projects feel the same way. However, I would love to see a good distro that:
1. Does not use RPM for package management (I've had RPM screw up way too many times in the past).
2. Has a decent GUI installer
3. Can configure all of my hardware without me tewaking it (I'll understand for some of the latest/greatest hardware, like my AIW 9700 Pro, but for instance, getting wireless setup on my laptop with both RedHat 8.0 and Slackware 9.0-pre was a pain)
4. Very configurable

The biggest obstacle to a lot of this is that writing programs (or frontends) that are easy to use is a pain. It takes a lot of work to design a GUI, and a lot of programming, and sanity checking, and for most of these developers who are working for free, it's just not worth the time (unless the program absolutely requires a GUI).

Until then, I keep dreaming of my magical Linux distro... What keeps me from doing it is my full-time job as a programmer, which gives me little incentive to code at night.

-- Joe

Wrong: Stripped down Knoppix version

[Anonymous Coward]

with out of the box read/write access on fat32, cd-rw, and floppy drives.

The hard disks would just be data drives.

Add a boot settings config file in hd0's root directory, and you have a fully bootable, configurable linux version without all of the installation hassles.

Windows is already going there with a push for run from CD-ROM without installation needed software.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[NanoGator]

"As a poweruser of all software platforms I often have multiple programs that do similar things. One I might fire up if I just need to do something quick, another if I need something more powerful, and still another that might offer a unique feature that I need every now and then."

If you're a power user, then you know what you're looking for and how to go find it. When you're a new user, these little interruptions slow Linux's adoption.

That was one of the first things that slowed me down when using Linux. That and everything began with K. Yeah, real Kute. Kwhen Keverything Kbegins Kwith K Kit's Konfusing.

Mac OS X

[Swift Guru]

There's not a single thing he mentioned that Mac OS X doesn't have. Not one single thing. If he hadn't mentioned it once in his article I would guess that he had either never heard of it, or was making a thinly veiled jab at the OS community for not achieving anything that comes close to the usability of Mac OS X.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[bigjocker]

You are so damn right. That's exactly what Linux distros are lacking. Linux already has all the applications needed to make the change (all but a DreamWeaver-like HTML editor), the problem is in the presentation, distribution, general feel of the environment.

I know a lot of distros are going this way (RH 8.0 and the unified desktop was a step in the right direction and they ditched a lot of apps from the menus, just leaving one of each; MDK 9.0 and 9.1 have the right installer for any newbie to use, perhaps Lycoris is also going this way, but I have never used it) but there must be a substantial change.

Take the configuration utilities that come with MDK 9.1 and the hardware detection tools available (kudzu). All the applications and utilities are there ... OpenOffice, Gimp, Eclipse, KDevelop, JBuilder, Yahoo Messenger, Mozilla, lICQ, GAIM, all the applications used in everyday computing are already available, so the problem _must_ be something else, and I agree with the parent post that is a matter of form (or presetation) more than anything else.

What would I do if I had a distribution? I would highly integrate all the available applications in a simple and _intuitive_ environment (did I just described MacOSX?)

Re:Just Buy OS X and get it over with.

[Reality Master 101]

I probably would buy it, if Apple would sell it to me. We already know they have a version that runs on Standard Hardware.

Unfortunately, Apple requires me to buy a big box that I don't want along with my copy of OS/X.

That means a big fat NO SALE.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[RealAlaskan]

However, I would love to see a good distro that:
1. Does not use RPM for package management (I've had RPM screw up way too many times in the past).
2. Has a decent GUI installer
3. Can configure all of my hardware without me tewaking it (I'll understand for some of the latest/greatest hardware, like my AIW 9700 Pro, but for instance, getting wireless setup on my laptop with both RedHat 8.0 and Slackware 9.0-pre was a pain)
4. Very configurable

Knoppix?

Seriously, Knoppix seems to have everything but a ``push me to repartition the hard drive and install automagically'' button. That link makes it look as if getting that magic button wouldn't take much effort.

What I've been saying for the last year....

[ebbomega]

Since I started using linux (and I've been very happy with it) I've been saying a few things around "what it needs" in order to be a full-on desktop computer. Apps aren't the problem (Openoffice is great, mozilla/galeon/konqueror are great, Evolution is great, sylpheed is great etc. etc. etc.). The problem is overall use.

First of all, it needs a good package system. RPMs almost do it. Apt is great, but hasn't yet been implemented in a decent distro with user-friendliness abound (Not to mention debian stable trees are in serious need of more consistent updating. Gnome 1.6 just doesn't do it for me.)

Basically, what's in dire need is a decent implementation of a software installer. Something similar to RPMs with a decent program-specific gui. I guess what I'm really hoping for is self-extracting shell scripts. But the main problem I have with this is running them from a graphical mode. These days, I use mandrake's software installer, though that does nothing to help configure the programs themselves for my personal use, something that InstallShield has a definate advantage of. The Software Installer has a great implementation of urpmi and handles dependencies rather well.

Package management is the main difference between distros and is the one thing that makes one distro better/worse than another, other than installers. Frankly, though, I think that Mandrake and Red Hat installers have gotten to the point where they're about as good as a Windows installer. They just need a "really dumb user mode" that holds your hand down the whole way.

I dislike what the author of the article says about removing legacy support. This is what really bugs me about Lindows and Xandros: They're more user friendly but they do so by eliminating a lot of the advantages of linux other than the very low-level "keep it from crashing" stuff. I think the important idea is to render all the low-level uber-user stuff obsolete but still keep it available. Removing Legacy support falls right underneath this category. One of the main issues people have had with MacOS releases and Windows is that they only work on top-of-the-line hardware and the like.

Yeah, sure, some stuff _should_ require top-of-the-line hardware. I don't expect that UT2003 should run on my old 486. But the OS that runs it should, imo. Cross-compatibility for legacy hardware is probably one of the main reasons linux came into being and is one of the main reasons for its stability. This is what open source is thoroughly about: Making something everybody can use.

The main thing that linux needs though if you ask me on a developer standpoint is a user-friendly and powerful software package manager. Rpms and debs just don't do it. However, the _really_ important thing in getting linux to the end user in a nice package is simply to promote its use. The more it gets used, the more support there will be for it, the more support the better drivers and the like there will be. One of the main problems I've seen with people using stuff like Drake or Redhat is problems getting their hardware to run perfectly (under X and the like, soundcards and so on). There need to be better auto-detection and driver support, as there always has been. Probably the main reason I'm still using Linux today as my primary OS is that the first time I used Mandrake, _everything_ got detected right off the bat. Of course, I had problems with the software in 8.2, but by the time I got to where I am now, in 9.1, the ONLY problem I have is with getting wine running (Bamboo doesn't have the wine with glibc support, and I'm getting a plethora of other problems with the Cooker build).

So yeah. I guess that's all I wanted to say about that. Distro's are getting very close to being a feasible alternative for the desktop to Windows. It just needs more exposure and fewer people writing Windows-only apps.

My #1 desire---

[Cerebus]

I'd do away with packages & installers altogether in favor of directory-based applications a la RiscOS and MacOS. You can how this could work with the ROX project.

Drag 'n drop installation! Think of the possibilities! Of course if you have OS X anywhere you don't have to imagine it...

Better Documentation can be most useful

[konputer]

Instead of going and creating yet another Linux distribution, it would be more useful to create a very well-organized collection of inforamation on various programs that typically come with Linux distributions.
This would include basic setup instructions, troubleshooting, and everything related to that. In the applications section there would be data sheets for each application/group of applications, listing its data files and sizes, dependencies, suggested system requirements, and features in comparison to similar programs.

Choice/No Choice

[tacocat]

Interesting article. Some thoughts.

• Single Desktop: it's either a good idea or a death wish
• Changing the directory tree: Why? No one cares about the directory tree. The names would only confuse people. Just educate users that there is a HOME.
• Single applications: He mentions using only one FTP client and so on. Bad idea. But I think that the selection process for RPM and DEB packages could be improved upon by grouping like applications together. Example would be to group all the FTP clients together with a description for each to let you decided.
• Development community: Gentoo is not the best example. They are too hard core in their attitude to be a good example.
• Killing off legacy hardware: Most of this is done already

All that aside, I think a Distro should emphasize the following, in order:

1. Stability
2. Installation/Uninstallation accurate and complete (IMHO Debian excels at this)
3. Completeness of install -- anything installed should work to a basic set of defaults. Often times there is a lot of personal configuration to be done
4. Security: A lot could be said by simply asking if the existing hardware is in a DMZ or a protected LAN. Then act accordingly.
5. Software Selection: Give them what they want

Re:Drag + Drop installs

[qa'lth]

20, 15 years ago, when disk space and RAM were at a premium, this argument held water.

However, in the MODERN world, we have >100 gig disks for $200 usd, a gigabyte of RAM can be had for $150.. It doesn't really MATTER anymore.

Of course, it would be far too hard to have all the libraries call on global configs, with backwards-compatible config files. Far too much effort to do something bright, or reasonable..

Try Knoppix

[Cato]

Knoppix is a Linux distro that pretty much does what you want - it tries hard to detect almost any hardware and seems to succeed pretty well. You can try it out just by burning or buying a CD, no need to install on your hard disk until you're happy it does what you want. It's also Debian-based so 'apt-get' will get you the latest packages and figure out dependencies. Not so easy to install on an HDD but overall I'm very impressed - the closest I've seen to a plug-and-play Linux CD. See http://www.knoppix.net/ for more information, but beware that the site is not as polished as the distro.

If you have DHCP on your network, it auto-configures everything, so within a few minutes (takes time to boot KDE from CD) you have a working Linux workstation even if the PC normally runs Windows.

Re:How about somebody else's distro?

[Alan Shutko]

I wish there were _any_ operating system that would do that. Unfortunately, given the proclivity of hardware vendors to make new devices which need new drivers, the proclivity of OS vendors to remove support for old hardware, and the proclivity of users to demand that both very old and very new software work perfectly, I don't see this situation happening anytime soon, for any OS.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[iabervon]

Debian is also good for the user who doesn't want to deal with installers. My experience with Debian has been that "sudo apt-get install " will reliably install just about all of the programs I've tried (the main exception being valgrind on stable). RPM is a nice idea, but you have to actually find RPMs, which is a pain.

It could really use a nice index (not a list; an index, where you could look up "Web Browsers, m-something") of available packages. It could also use a nice index of the packages you have installed.

For that matter, it would be nice to be able to type "apt-get install some clock" and get a nice clock. Not a particular clock, since the user obviously doesn't care, but one that some maintainer likes. And it should appear in menus as "clock", not as whatever the clock package is actually called, because the user doesn't want to know. If somebody wants "xclock", that's available to, as "xclock".

When an application wants a web browser, it should run "web-browser [url]". That's a symlink in ~/bin to the user's current favorite web browser, or a symlink in /usr/bin to the system's favorite (or only) web browser. Maybe it should be possible to configure the application to do something different, but people probably wouldn't. We've had $PAGER for ages, and symlinks are even cooler than environment variables. My editor of choice is $EDITOR filename (actually a small shell script which does this).

He sounds like the former BeOS CEO. Still at it.

[mnmn]

Only BeOS was more sophisticated with the GUI glued into the kernel. It was the most beautiful OS I had ever seen (havent seen OSX yet) and it somehow didnt make it. Lycoris Xandros Lindows etc are trying to push for the desktop but underneath its all Linux. With that comes the painful lack of standards, not even installation or LSB standards, and all the mess. Each of these distros is an island in itself with its community, packages, interface etc. You cant put ones package and install it on another, or take a user of one of these distros, put her on another and expect her to feel at home, and we're talking about the same OS. Anyone who even dreamed of porting J2EE or websphere to slackware say, knows this.

All these new OS companies are falling apart because of the inherent lack of a few things in Linux. RedHat, SuSE and Linus could help here, SuSE did chip in with their LSB, but it was obviously a bad investment. If a company like RedHat can be confident of their success, and create good industry standards without fearing being overthrown, the Linux desktop can finally take off. People could choose one distro, click n run any app developed by some teenager in his basement and it will work just fine. This will move far more users from Windows to Linux.

The BSDs could have done this but they seperated much longer ago. FreeBSD remains the biggest and have quite a clean system on their hands, ready for any major changes or making inroads in the industry.. but the same resolve that gives them the energy to build the most robust OS doesnt let them risk changing the direction of BSD too fast, for BSD is now a culture, and not of being a desktop OS of the masses. Thats why the author here chose FreeBSD. Apple can simply port OSX to x86 and be over with it, dangling it out like darwin is just rubbing salt on the pains of the already desperate crowd.

All the while the geekdom is sick of dual booting and cleaning spyware from the crashing windows installation. Linux is very very big out there, its almost made it. But it has such a long way to go to really reach the stratosphere.. or rather on everyones computer. It was this hope that pushed the tens of thousands of developers to code for the Free OS from version 0.01 to 2.4.20.(and all its associated GNU tools). We're not there yet.

I wonder what I'm doing in my windows partition now. I could be writing this in Linux+opera....

nutz

[cdn-programmer]

I think the artical speaks for itself... if he made that distro available I would not touch it and I doubt many others would either.

1) I am quite happy with the present directory structure. I do not want a bunch of symlinks - they are confusing and utterly unnecessary.

2) His idea of what apps to include probably will not coincide with mine. For instance - is he planning on including emacs? How about gcc and g77?

I'm sure he thought about gcc but I'll bet he forgot about g77.

3) He never mentioned the most important aspect of a distro - that is its upgradeability. This is the reason I switched to Debian... Debian can be painlessly upgraded.

I have an old machine with RedHat 6.1 in it. I bought a copy of Mandrake 8.0 Mandrake is NOT installed (does anybody want it?). The reason is the question of doing an upgrade. I _KNOW_ that the moment I try to upgrade that redhat box that it will break all over the place. If I wipe the drive I lose 3 years of work. In fact - if I were to take it out from behind the firewall - it would be hacked within the hour!

For me it was cheaper to go buy ANOTHER computer and leave the old one as it was.

4) He made no mention of security.

5) He has missed the most important areas where Linux needs work. I'd like to offer My Humbol Opinion. The work needs to be in the area of the functionality of a loopback mount. We need to be able to stuff a directory tree into a single file and have the OS mount it automatically - similar to the loopback but with the following difference.

When you do a loopback mount - the whole file system sees it. I want a mount where ONLY a single process tree sees it. This allows one to EASILY create a chroot jail for a user.

Several years ago I tried with Kurt Seifried to create a true chroot jail in linux - we failed.

This automatic mount to a single application could be say bash mounting into a given file or it could be a daemon mounting into a file or it could be an application mounting into a given file. This would make it possible to stuff a complete app into a single file which can be unzipped and pointed too. By doing this, different versions of an app could be simultaneously present in the machine and a user could switch back and forth with a simple pointer change. The pointer could be a symlink.

We are already partway there with the loopback and chroot. Where the problem is stems from the apps that are NOT chrooted. As an admin when I install say something like wxWindows - I would prefer to see only one file. As a user I prefer to see all the files in the package.

This is one step away from a true Virtual Machine for Linux - which we also need. Probably it can be done using User Mode Linux. But I think it should be supported right in the distro.

IMHO - the present filesystem was designed to be lightweight. When disks were 40MB it probably made sense. Now that disks are past 40GB I don't think it makes sense. When they pass the TB mark in a couple years - well - IMHO they are almost unmanagable now.

The underlying reason that this author cannot un-install the apps is because the apps are allowed to spew files all over the system. Most sysadmins don't even know where the files go and they simply trust the developers came up with a reasonable organization. If we go to a filesystem that allows us to force an app to live within a single file - then we can easily remove any old app - we simply delete the file it lives in. People can easily deal with a single file - where the problems come from is when we have 1000's of files and the make clean doesn't work right.

IBM had this concept fully developed years ago under VM/TSO. It was called a Partition DataSet back then.

If we had this concept in linux then for instance X-Windows might live in a file called XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS and we might use something like ln -s XFree86_4.1.0.1.PDS startx

If so - then when startx is run - the PDS is mounted and the

I've always supported that argument

[mnmn]

But I keep getting flamed that X is good enough.. its certainly not, for a desktop system. Its overly bloated, although switching to version 4 improved things and building more hooks that can use video drivers' speedups.. Beside removing the networking code, and optimising it for my duron, theres also the window manager layer there. I'm now strongly against it..

Should we have an option of incorporating the window manager at compile time, that should improve things too. And then the internationalization is a mess and thats improved too. This is true of Linux in general as well where people still see VT100 and have to remap their keys for functionality. Thats legacy bloatware X could do without.

Now if you move the video driver into the Linux kernel, replacing say the experimental framebuffer drivers, we would (1) have a great platform for console games with really good driver support, (2)make the X leaner and more general. This also removes the need for starting lots of code in userspace, imagine different X servers in different virtual consoles switching as fast as virtual consoles.

I would personally go with the QT interface with motif and gtk wrappers on TOP of it for porting older apps. By now X should no longer be called X since its so different. I would go with an optimised architecture rather than the legacy one incorporating the fonts and video card accelerators into it (many of these are too fragmented and in modules for X4)

What about no install program at all?

[Wayne Gramlich]

The whole concept of distribution installation is getting a little frayed around the edges. Installing a distribution made sense when everybody had CD drives and few people broadband connections. It is making less sense now. It will make even less sense 5 years from now. Why not do something new for a change? How about a distribution that is only available on the net? How about using a P2P caching file system?

Think in terms of something that is a cross between NFS (20 years old) and BitTorrent. For example, when I access:

/global/redhat.com/rh10.2/usr/bin/{some_program}

it goes off and downloads and locally caches the binary. If it needs any librarys, it downloads and caches them as well. The bottom line is that the user only downloads those files that they actually use and they do not have to decide beforehand what they want. Just use it! If it isn't cached on your disk, the system fetches it. If you want to upgrade, just change your path from:

/global/redhat.com/rh10.2/usr/bin

to:

/global/redhat.com/rh11.0/usr/bin

No install program needed, just start using the new bits. When a cached file hasn't been used in a year or so, it just gets deleted by the underlying system.

Please note, the Open Source community does not have to figure out how to charge for files downloaded, unlike some big commercial software companies out there. Thus, the Open Source community can make it easier to install and upgrade than the commercial counterparts.

Yes, I'm glossing over a bunch of very important issues (security, multiple platforms, configuration files, load distribution, etc.), but it is time for people to start thinking about doing things in new ways rather than the way we were doing them for the past 10-30 years. I'm suggesting that we actually innovate for a change.

-Wayne

My Idea - break up /usr/lib

[Xife]

It is a huge directory and you can never tell what libraries go with what programs.

Would it be possible to have linux search something like search the following:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH = /apps/*/libs/;/shared/*/libs/;/system/*/libs/

I would hate having an LD_LIBRARY_PATH 50 miles long even more than the rats nest of libraries in /usr/lib.

I'm pretty sure you can't use wildcards, and libtool is just a huge verbose listing, and is black magic compared to a wildcard.

Re:Drop X

[shellbeach]

Um. Yeah. Let's scrap X and using something completely incompatible. Furthermore, let's scrap gtk+ and qt instead of porting them! So almost every single application with a gui ever written now doesn't work in your new system. No GIMP, no mplayer, no XMMS, no mozilla/firebird, no konqueror, no evolution, no anything ... well, not unless you fork them and rewrite them to work with your new system.

In reality, I think you'll find that we're fairly much stuck with X. And while ever there's gtk+ and qt, we're fairly much stuck with two major competing toolkits. The problem is, I don't think you can have the freedom of open source on the one hand, and at the same time somehow expect everyone to use a single toolkit and not have someone decide to develop their own. In fact, even if you write a whole new graphical windowing system from scratch I'll bet someone will write an alternative tool kit. Or more likely will port gtk and/or qt over to your new windowing system so that all their favorite apps work again.

And as far as X goes ... what I'd really like to see in terms of criticism would be something more than sweeping statements. You claim "x is just pretty goddamn slow all-around", yet on my ageing hardware, X, as judged through XFree86, seems to perform more than fine. I don't notice it being any slower than windows on the same machine. Do you have any concrete examples to demonstrate the problems with X? I'm genuinely curious here!

In Soviet Russia...

[EChris]

...Distro owns you!

Seriously, aren't there too many distros as it is? The more we fragment Linux, the more our efforts are divided and the more work gets duplicated. In the name of what? Vanity?

I think we should pull together more, honestly, and quell the confusion so maybe Linux can finally grow up.

Chris

Re:Drag + Drop installs

[kwalker]

Yeah, until a common library (Let's call it zlib, or if you prefer openssl) turns out to have a buffer overflow or other security bug in it which has been there for years (Let's say that happens today, or has several vulnerabilities patched a couple of times in a single month), and you realize that it happens to be included 45 different times on your system. Or even better yet, each one has some slightly different tweeks applied to them so you can't just replace them!

Shared libraries aren't just for saving RAM and harddisk space.

Re:"What Linux Needs," my reiteration.

[a302b]

Actually, I've found that that having everything begin with "K" or "G" has really helped me as a new linux user. It helps me determine which programs function better under the KDE or the Gnome GUIs.

Re:Drop X

[shellbeach]

X + twm loads quick even on my old AMD K6-2 450 MHz. Not that I use twm, but I have tried it to see how fast it is in comparison to KDE/Gnome.

You might be interested in combining IceWM with ROX to get a good looking "desktop environment" without the bloat. (You will have to play around with text config files for IceWM, though, which is not everyone's cup of tea) ... but I actually find IceWM runs faster than twm or fvwm* - and it has many of the features of KDE.

Re:freedom of choice

[pi_rules]

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.

Your post got me thinking... and that's sometimes hard to do.

People hate tutorials. If they actually liked learning stuff they'd read all of the documentation that abounds before they went through the install. I know I sure as heck didn't know what the differences were between AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment/twm/fvwm/Black box/KDE/Sawfish when I first installed Linux, and I sure wasn't going to wait around to get that bugger installed. I was excited.

Don't "tutor" them -- "market" to them! Instead of giving them a flat text blurb about what you've got with a couple of screenshots make it an all out "advertisement" for it. Turn the whole package management deal into a friggen shopping spree for users. Maybe women would get more into it even :).

Turn it into an experience sort of like purchasing a nice new suit or something. The installer is a salesman of sort. In the beginning you pick the general purpose of the install (all workstation -- server people don't need this stuff). Find out what's important to the user up front: small and zippy, big and flashy, not too different from Windows or a Mac interface, and take them from there.

"Well, sir, to be honest with the window manager (jacket) you picked you've got plenty of options when it comes to reading your mail (a shirt)... you have Kmail, Balsa, and good old mutt and pine still. If you like the Evolution look though we'd probably want to change your window manager to suit it though, perhaps Sawfish?" Something like that "feel" to it. Without some stupid animated sales guy resembling clippy walking you through it. Actually, maybe a clippy would be good for it. I don't know.

If you keep it entertaining, and not too bogged down in the details people might actually like the experience of picking out their suite of tools.

In summary: A friendly Debian

[Rysc]

I've scrolled halfway through the posts and haven't seen anyone say it, so I will: He's describing Debian.

Okay, not now Debian, but a friendly Debian. His /system/commands "idea" is a clunkly thought out version of /etc/alternatives. His "One bog site where you can download packages that are guaranteed to work with your distro" describes the official apt repository nicely. His description of dependancy hell sounds like the experience of a RPM user--I wont say that Debian never has pckage problems, but I will say that I've only ever seen them in Unstable--on my Debian system dependancies are never an issue.

I don't mean to sound like a Debian-loving zealot (though I probably am...) but 50% of what he wants Debian already does. Of the rest:

The revamped directory structure is a must. I've looked at it every way I can, but as far as I can see the old unix layout (while close to my heart) is not going to make desktop users happy. I've heard all tha counter arguments (and made most of them myself) so don't bother. I dissagree with his names, and I don't like the way MacOSX does it either, but something has to be done. Even if it isn't renaming (people can learn any names, after all) it should be depreciating certain practices and/or not allowing them. I know there are good reasons for /bin and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin (and on Debian at least their uses are clearly defined) but one bin directory for users and one for root should be enough. (The argument is (of course) partitioning. Mount /usr ro! /bin is on / so that the system always boots and everything else can be remote! I don't have an answer; maybe the HURD and its fancy merging directory thing will be the solution.) Debian can dictate such a change, if it could be agreed upon.

Limiting choice. This is a Very Bad Idea. limited choice is never, ever good--this is my firm conviction. But that doesn't mean there can't be sensible defaults. Make everything work automatically and TOGETHER automatically, and have all of the choices there for those who go looking. Maybe limiting packages on the install CD is worthwhile... but the choice should always be there. Debian limits nothing, and its default setup does not work perfectly... but it has potential. I can see it pulling itself up by its bootstraps and becoming a system that works together with itself.

Graphical installers. I'll say it one more time, I've said it before: screen one of the installer should be DOS/curses style and say "Easy install or Advanced install?" This is not to say everything he said about having the graphical install have advanced buttons isn't true; that's necessary as well. What this means is that the idiots can pick "Easy" while I pick "Advanced" and I get my sure-to-work-on-this-VGA-piece-of-shit installer complete with cfdisk partitioning and all of the gory details. There should never be a total reliance on a fully GUI install. Debian's installer is awful and could use some kind of option like this.

Liscense. BSD-style is nice, but GPL is Free. Non-GPL is not an option.

Kernel. This is another point in favor of Debian. It's (at least potentially) kernel agnostic. Linux today, NetBSD tomorrow, the HURD on Friday. A truly Complete Debian would allow you to pick any (supported) kernel you wanted at install time... be it Linux, or *BSD, or whatever. Doesn't matter.

As far as source goes... the debian way seems good. apt-get source. You can't do it by mistake, and it's not like archive material so few would get it "because it's free". Bandwidth problem largely solved (or at least not seriously aggravated) and you don't piss off zealots like me.

I will close by saying it again: Don't reinvent what Debian already does. Build a debian-based distro (a script could repackage many applications to use any new dir layout you choose). What this guy wants is a Friendly Debian and a little bit of proprietary code.

What Linux truly needs is:

[master_p]

It needs something new, something fresh, something that really rocks the Linux community's world.

The file system is a nightmare for a normal user. This has been covered in exhaustive detail by hundreds of articles, but if I'm going to run my own distribution, I'm going to make a sensible directory structure: /users, /apps, /system, /hardware, /downloads, /logs, /servers, /shared, and more. Then, using symlinks, we're going to recreate the current basic layout of the standard Linux/BSD filesystem to assist developers in porting applications.

If he wants to do something truly revolutionary, this is what he should do: throw away the notion "file system" and introduce the "information store". Let me explain: Although what he proposes (a file system hierarchy that makes sense) is probably the next step, it is widely known that the most important problem for computers today is that there is no uniform way to manage digital information.

Most applications have lots of code in them to save/load information to/from the filesystem. Most code is similar, and I have some experience on this, since in the company I work most apps share some code, but most importantly they share the logic to save/load data.

But the today's filesystems are really dumb. It's up to the applications to manipulate them. As a result, there is no way I can find any special information I like using a search utility. For example, if I wanted to find all the pictures that contain a picture of my child, there is no way to do that using Windows Explorer. And there is no way to formulate complex queries on the file manager level in any O/S of today.

So, in order to do away with all the problems and really innovate, the filesystem must be turned into a database. But a simple RDBMS system may be not enough. Why not turn it into an object-oriented database ?

Most applications have an object model in them. By "object model", I mean about a tree of instances of classes that represent digital information. Most popular apps like Word or Excel reveal their object model to the users through scripting engines (VBA for example) so the app can be extended in run-time without the need to re-compile the application.

If the problem is studied close enough, you will definitely see a pattern: "object model", "tree", "information". So why not code this at the operating system level ? Instead of having files, each file could be an object. And this object could contain other objects, making possible the organization of the information in a tree. Trees is most natural way to represent information, that's why almost every app has a tree (and that's why a tree control is one of the most important controls in gui libraries).

In order to extend this system further, the operating system should define a 'component object model', that is a binary interface to interacting with objects. Each object would be represented by a class, and the class's code could be kept by the file system and invoked when needed. Of course, this means throwing away the concept of "app", since the focus is now on the component.

Each object would manage its storage the way it likes, using the operating system primitives. Each object could contain other objects. Since the whole mechanism is strongly typed and the O/S would keep meta-information about the objects, the most basic problem of the computer is solved in an elegant way. A computer is about information I/O, search and computations on the stored information. This is a part which concerns most applications and it could be assisted by the operating system.

The object-oriented information system paradigm fits nicely with modern object-oriented languages. A programmer could make components using Java, C++, C#, VB, or any other language that supports effectively OO.

Let's see an example: the mail system.