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What Might UserLinux Look Like?

Posted by timothy on from the it-will-be-green dept.

Lucky writes "This story at Linuxworld talks about some of the potential features of UserLinux, as well as Bruce Peren's proposed community desktop project and its potential features. There's some exclusive commentary by Perens there, too."

2 of 528 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Where was Bruce? Oh where was Bruce? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3, Informative
    It's really not necessary to be so dramatic.

    I wrote a character-mode installer that fit on one floppy, and was the best installer in 1996! It's not 1996 any longer. I think character mode would still be OK if it were easy, and that's where the new Debian installer is heading. It partitions your disk if you want it to, and so on. But it is built so that it can get a GUI front-end too. I think the developers are going for functionality before eye-candy.

    I don't like developers who bear contempt for newbies. But the place to handle them is somewhere other than where the developers are attempting to do their work. This is why you need a layer over Debian.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  2. Hehe, amusing by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Informative

    I understand most (95%+) don't have constant contact with Mac OS X, much less play with the developer tools...

    But what you just described is how Mac OS X's Interface Builder works! The widgets, guidelines, interface paradigms, and look and feel are encouraged and enforced by the UI; the menubar, window layout, widget placement, texturing, widget types, etc,

    It's not perfect; developers can still intentionally (or unintentionally) violate the HIGuidelines, but it's a lot harder than any other IDE I've ever seen.

    --

    GPL Deconstructed