infoworld.com — "Instead of standardizing each and every Linux distribution on a common core, developers from various distributions could come together to standardize a new, single distribution...the sole purpose of this lean, stripped-down distro would be to get a fresh machine up and running with the Linux of your choice."
Mar 28, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jer2eydevil88Mar 29, 2006
It's a start... Linux needs to stop emulating Windows and excel in its own way, Mac OS X is not similar to the Windows experience and many people find it easy and intuitive. Linux needs to find its own way of doing things quickly and easily, then the users will follow the geeks to nirvana.Of course Linux could keep up its Windows emulation in the look and feel of the GUI and pretty soon we will be left with another os/2.
spinesplitterMar 29, 2006
they also use the winamp commands (zxcvb) BTW :)
mfearbyMar 29, 2006
All of those package formats should fork into separate projects with the aim of making a better packaging format. I say this in jest, but sooner or later, there'll be yet another package format (probably to be called YAP or something just as witty and meaningful) to add to the zoo. It's a sad state of affairs, really, and if Apple didn't charge a fortune for their hardware, I'd be using a Mac right now!
ericandertonMar 29, 2006
Wasn't there talk about a win32 compatibility/kernel layer for windows-based hardware drivers? Seems to me this is the right ticket, as its impossible for linux to get solid support on hardware that's newer than 2 years old, if the vendors aren't willing to provide linux drivers. At least it would help with penetrating the newer hardware market for linux.(installing debian on my NForce3 based system has been a nightmare)
jqp123Mar 29, 2006
In my opinion, the best shot Open Source has at the desktop isn't even Linux, it's PC-BSD.<a class="user" href="http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=vision">http://www.pcbsd.org/?p=vision</a>This is the only project that I'm aware of that actually understands what's wrong with Linux and aims to fix it.
broncho24Mar 29, 2006
Installing firefox? You gotta be kidding! How is taht hard when its in the distrobutions package manager? Heck most distros come with it even. If you want the latest version get a repository. Though keep in mind latest isnt always greatest.
geminitojanusMar 30, 2006
"You're gonna have to talk to the hardware companies about that one. There's nothing stopping them from releasing free software drivers. Or at least specifications to make it feasible for us to write the drivers..."There's also nothing stopping you from creating a company, buying access to those specifications (and/or, as most companies will instead make you do, sign an NDA to see the specs), writing the driver, and release the driver for free (read: not Open Source) and sell support for it. But we don't see you or too many companies jumping in line to do that now do we?"Umm... there is a universal installer. [snip] It is called tgz"Bulls**t o-meter reads, 100%. Even if an application ships with its source (and commercially, most programs /won't/), it's not always going to use the same build tools as available on your system (see GNU Make, NMake, Jam, SCons, (N)Ant, CruiseControl, etc) and will likely require a hundred trillion library dependencies that your system doesn't currently have the headers for (let alone the libraries themselves). So, instead of being one tgz, it's 15tgz's, and possibly multiple hours of waiting for the compile to finish. I believe this is called "Gentoo". "Wasn't there talk about a win32 compatibility/kernel layer for windows-based hardware drivers?"Only for certain drivers. And its a terrible idea all the way around it, seeing as you're now chaining Linux's drivers on Windows driver model being consistant, and you're reducing performance by using the additional layer of translation, and you're exposing Linux to one of the worst sections of code written on the Microsoft Windows platform, the device drivers. If you thought some Linux drivers for obscure hardware were weird, you haven't seen anything compared to some of the abortions that exist inside of older NT kernel drivers.For goodness sakes people, we have a common installer on Linux platforms already. The .deb and .rpm formats are accepted standards and are virtually interchangable and could be made even more so if the Debian-ites and the Redhats/SuSE guys sat down in a room and ironed out the wrinkles in their interoperability. What really lacks in Desktop Linux are easy to use, every day applications like powerful word processors (though they're getting better), spreadsheet programs (again, getting better), presentation software (not getting better at any appreciable rate), simple image generation software (I swear, sometimes I think this section of Desktop Linux applications are actually moving /backwards/; why doesn't someone buy a one-time BSD-style license for Pixel from those insane SkyOS guys and give us all a break), and other things of this nature. Furthermore, Linux applications lack refinement, and often look very ugly and cluttered as opposed to other applications on other platforms, simply because the toolkits used to generate these applications predicate it. There is nothing on the planet stopping Desktop Linux from working as fluidly as Windows or being as beautiful as OS X, especially with the number of developers out there working on these projects. The problem is organizing these developers in a meaningful way. The organizations that are actually making huge advances in Desktop Linux are the best organized projects (Mozilla, GAIM, parts of KDE (especially KOffice), parts of GNOME (especially Evolution)). the other projects could all stand to look at these projects as examples for organization, deadline and infrastructure.
abhituxApr 15, 2006
No digg. For such a crappy article. How did it make it to many diggs?