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?"

Comments

Make everything "Just Work"

[vonFinkelstien]

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.

Re:Three things.

[__aawkdb2598]

• Visual coherency and a refined GUI. Taste in UI's vary between people, but most linux GUIs that aren't very minimalist tend to suffer from wasted space.
• In interests of making linux more accessible, more configuration utilities that don't require specific knowledge and in-errant editing of configuration text files.

WINE

[jstomel]

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.

The Elektra Project

[Thaidog]

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...

Re:Might I Suggest...

[jeevesbond]

This topic is 12 minutes old and three post have already suggested we bury the command line; part of what makes Linux so fast, flexible and customizable is access to virtually every setting from a text editor.

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:

If you are looking for a completely GUI drive *nix I would say OS X is your best bet (yes, I know you can use the CLI in OS X, but you never have to unless you so desire).

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 not something that needs to be changed, instead change your mindset that this is not Windows.

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?