Well I've used both Red Hat and Debian, and while I'm not an expert Linux user by any means, rpms and.debs seem like pretty much the same thing as far as functionality goes. The real reason people like Debian is not because of the package format, but rather because of tools like apt-get which allow you to quickly and easily retrieve and install packages and all of their dependencies with a single command.
Now I know that there are plenty of tools out there that use rpms and give you similar functionality to programs like apt-get or dselect, but I think people just like the fact that in Debian they install these things by default and are built specifically with them in mind.
Anyways though, for a new distro that's just come out, it seems like it wouldn't really matter whether it's Debian Based or Red Hat based. You can get the same functionality with either package format, it just depends on what tools you include with your distro.
I love your idea of an Open Human Interface Standard for Linux apps. I have both a Linux box and a Mac, and I've found the Mac to be much more usable as a desktop system. The only really big reason I can see for this however, is that there's no standard interface for how Linux programs should work. Sure, it can be tough to install and configure sometimes, but that problem should disapear over time as distros start getting more intelligent about that stuff. User interface though, that's another story. If someone could come up with a standard that everyone could agree on....
The trouble with HFS is that, as your disk gets bigger, small files tend to take up a LOT more space. HFS was designed with very small disks in mind. Even on an old 3GB disk I had, a single file - no matter how little data was actually contained in the file - would take up at least 49 kilobytes! Another potential problem with HFS is that you can only have a maximum of something like 65000 files on a volume.
Now HFS+ on the other hand fixes both of these limitations, and it even has journaling support. However, from what I've heard, HFS+ support is still rather sketchy on Linux, and I have no idea about support on Windows.
Personally, I think something we should be seeing at some point in the future is speech recognition that is smart enough to understand complex phrases. For example, you could say something like "Check my email, and if there's anything from Bob, read it to me". Right now we have fairly good speech recognition, and we have fairly good text parsing, but as far as I know, those two technologies have not been effectively combined yet.
I'm not sure if these even count, since they have more to do with X11 and GNOME than Linux in general, but here are two things that I wish my Linux box could do.
First of all, I think it's silly that you are required to restart the X server in order to apply changes in your monitor resolution. When you're running Mac OS or Windoze all you do is pick a new resolution and it instantly changes, so why you do the same with X11?
And second of all, I would really appreciate better cut/copy/paste functionality. Maybe it's just the particular applications that I've been using, but when even gaim doesn't let me copy and paste text I start getting a little bit annoyed.
I suppose these are both pretty minor things, but if they're such minor things then I would imagine they should only require minor solutions....I'm a bit of a Linux newbie though, so I could be totally off about that last bit.
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Now I know that there are plenty of tools out there that use rpms and give you similar functionality to programs like apt-get or dselect, but I think people just like the fact that in Debian they install these things by default and are built specifically with them in mind.
Anyways though, for a new distro that's just come out, it seems like it wouldn't really matter whether it's Debian Based or Red Hat based. You can get the same functionality with either package format, it just depends on what tools you include with your distro.
I love your idea of an Open Human Interface Standard for Linux apps. I have both a Linux box and a Mac, and I've found the Mac to be much more usable as a desktop system. The only really big reason I can see for this however, is that there's no standard interface for how Linux programs should work. Sure, it can be tough to install and configure sometimes, but that problem should disapear over time as distros start getting more intelligent about that stuff. User interface though, that's another story. If someone could come up with a standard that everyone could agree on....
Who ever said anything about improving our situation? As far as I'm concerned, it's just really freakin' cool!! ;-)
The trouble with HFS is that, as your disk gets bigger, small files tend to take up a LOT more space. HFS was designed with very small disks in mind. Even on an old 3GB disk I had, a single file - no matter how little data was actually contained in the file - would take up at least 49 kilobytes! Another potential problem with HFS is that you can only have a maximum of something like 65000 files on a volume.
Now HFS+ on the other hand fixes both of these limitations, and it even has journaling support. However, from what I've heard, HFS+ support is still rather sketchy on Linux, and I have no idea about support on Windows.
Personally, I think something we should be seeing at some point in the future is speech recognition that is smart enough to understand complex phrases. For example, you could say something like "Check my email, and if there's anything from Bob, read it to me". Right now we have fairly good speech recognition, and we have fairly good text parsing, but as far as I know, those two technologies have not been effectively combined yet.
I'm not sure if these even count, since they have more to do with X11 and GNOME than Linux in general, but here are two things that I wish my Linux box could do.
First of all, I think it's silly that you are required to restart the X server in order to apply changes in your monitor resolution. When you're running Mac OS or Windoze all you do is pick a new resolution and it instantly changes, so why you do the same with X11?
And second of all, I would really appreciate better cut/copy/paste functionality. Maybe it's just the particular applications that I've been using, but when even gaim doesn't let me copy and paste text I start getting a little bit annoyed.
I suppose these are both pretty minor things, but if they're such minor things then I would imagine they should only require minor solutions....I'm a bit of a Linux newbie though, so I could be totally off about that last bit.