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How Would You Refocus Linux Development?
buddyglass writes "The majority of Slashdot readers are no doubt appreciative of Linux in the general sense, but I suspect we all have some application or aspect of the platform that we wish were more stable, performant, feature-rich, etc. So my question is: if you were able to devote a 'significant' number of resources (read: high-quality developers) to a particular app or area of the kernel, and were able to set the focus for those resources (stability, performance, new features, etc.), what application or kernel area would you attempt to improve, and what would aspect you focus on improving?"
Find out all the things at take too many clicks, or require editing text files and make them "Just Work" in a simple and easy way.
Admit it, wine sucks and there are lots of programs that will never be ported. I want wine to be integrated and almost invisible, like the Classic interface in OSX.
http://elektra.g4ii.com/Main_Page
I think it's at least worth trying such an implementation. Ok... now bring on the "It Windows again" haters...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Whilst I totally agree with what follows after the semi-colon in this sentence am not so sure about the part prior to it. All we're seeing is that people do not want to be forced into changing settings--am assuming, on their desktop machines--using the command line. This does not mean we should 'bury' the command line, or stop using text files to hold settings! In fact you've made my point for me:
Aye, there's the rub! The user should be able to choose between a GUI configuration interface or editing a text file: everyone's a winner! Also a GUI should be able to read/write text configuration files whilst handling seperate user changes to those files gracefully.
In fact I'd spend a lot of the money on getting everyone (or as many projects as I could) to agree to a configuration file format that could easily be interpreted by an application. A one-size-fits-all library could be written to get the settings from file into memory and back again, then it would just be a matter of organising that data into a front-end that's meaningful for the user. The real joy is that with a standard file format, and library to support it, a rudimentary GUI for a new application could be created in minutes.
This is a very conservative viewpoint, why can things not change? Why can't we have the best of both worlds, with both GUI configuration tools and text files?
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Ubuntu wins on all of those points except 5.
Unfortunately, it still has a way to go on #1 (have it autodetect all my hardware and just WORK). I handed out a few Ubuntu CDs.
On the first (a cheap Acer laptop) it complained about the wireless chip. No real options for the user, other than to get a new laptop. But it did work.
On the second, it attempted to make a W2K machine dual-boot, and (going with all the defaults) instead made it no-boot (Win BSOD). The user then attempted to reinstall Windows, which blew away everything. Now, I'll grant that the user made things worse, but what would you expect them to do? And how would they know?
On the third, I attempted to test what had happened on the second, by just grabbing a random used hard drive (containing some version of Windows) and installing Ubuntu on it, accepting all default choices. Ubuntu choked. (Possible causes: multiple partitions, fragmentation, Win swap file in the middle of the area Ubuntu wanted.)
So I reformatted the drive and did a clean W2K install. Ubuntu installed over that very nicely.
So, my impression is that Ubuntu is not really ready for the general public to install, not on a Win machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with fragmentation, Win swap files in inconvenient places, and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, this HD is hopelessly fragmented, fix that and move the swap file, before Ubuntu can help you." Bonus points for instructions on how to do those things. Double bonus points for creating a batch file that will run on reboot and do those things for you.
Don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is the best of the lot for the naive user. But the install isn't ready for prime time yet.
I'd budget $1M/year for a minimum of five years for full-time work on the Hurd. No, it isn't Linux but it is an alternative kernel with interesting features that is sadly stagnating.
No, it doesn't have interesting features. If it had interesting features it would not be stagnating and lacking in developers. OpenBSD is an alternative kernel with interesting features and that is why it has enough developers and support to be usable.
There are no end of unfinished OS projects with a couple of developers that move to a completely different kernel every six months and will never, ever be finished. I don't see how the Hurd stands out from them. I foresee your $5M funding nothing except a huge amount of meetings, committee decisions, politics and rewrites. You'd be better off selecting a random microkernel based OS project on Sourceforge and giving it to them. They might actually produce something.
I don't want to discourage anyone from working on the Hurd if they find it interesting, but giving them $5M and expecting something useful to come out is just ridiculous.
Why is it that all the developers seem to be able to code to a standard API - but they can't even come close to agreement on the way a program is operated? Maybe it's time to create a UI standard for Linux apps?
Probably because there are no universal UI guidelines that fit in every case, and no one knows of the "best" way to design a UI. There are almost certainly better UI models that will be found in the future, and part of open source development is trying to discover those models. Modal dialogs with "Yes, No, Cancel" may not be part of the optimal solution (it's hard to imagine them being the best for any task, really), so exploration into other representations and interaction models is a good thing.
For one thing, modal dialogs are essentially points in the program flow where the user is forced to make a decision. In many cases, the decision can be made automatically or simply removed from the program flow if the correct UI model is used. All the dialogs warning about saving documents before closing programs are probably the worst thing to happen in UIs since their creation. The proper solution is to save and version everything the user does, and never lose work (to the maximum extent possible) when the application is closed or crashes. That requires support from the filesystem and a UI design that emphasizes the versioned nature of files and data. Forcing users to "log on" and "log off" and closing all their applications and opening them up again is another genuine UI mistake that's a holdover from the days when memory was so tiny that overlays were popular and it was simply a necessity of operating a computer. There is no reason that modern operating systems should not present a persistent interface to the user. Hibernation is the closest thing to persistence that's currently available, with suspension a close second, but neither are truly persistent. They still rely on the old model of individually managing each piece of data.