What Might UserLinux Look Like?

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."

Comments

Re:UserUtopia?

[Neo-Rio-101]

I think there needs to be more unification and simplification over the way things are installed in , not only Linux, but the BSDs as well.

I think everyone agrees that rpms suck. Most of the good code comes in source tarballs - configurable for any *nix... but this is where the user experience falls apart. What person is going to want to dig out the command line to compile source code, and will he or she know about all the ocnfigure options... and then, will there be dependency issues (or should the source contain the dependencies too?). Then there are the legal issues of bundling dependancies... and then there will be future commercial Linux apps which won't want to include source code.

In an ideal world, packaged installs will be a compressed single file, containing all source code, configurable on any *nix like normal source code EXCEPT that now there's a graphical interface so that setting compile options, creating desktop shortcuts, and "Make clean, make install, make uninstall" now all work under X with a point-and-click.

PLEASE! Will someone serious about standardizing Linux installs do something about this... or desktop Linux will never take off.