future

[Thilo Pfennig <tp alternativ net>]

Hi,

I would suggest to rather pick Fedora as a basis of a GNOME OS. Why?
Because Debian is a very large distribution and is not focused on the
desktop as Fedora seems to be.

Fedora has copied some of the Debian way with its community basis. What
I would like to see in the future would be:

 * A distribution that comes out as regular as Gnome is updated.
 * The installation procedure must be part of the desktop.
 * Gnome-System-Tools should be one integral part of this Gnome Distro.

The thing is, that today with all the USB hardware it is is so
important, that users on Linux Desktops do not have to do much more than
a Windows XP user. Advanced Linux users know how easy it is to set up an
fstab entry for a usb storage device (might be a camera). That is not
really something the user must do by hilmself, just to fetch some
pictures from a digital camera.

What I mentioned before, the "Gnome-System-Tools"(GST) seem to me very
important. I would suggest, that they are they are integrated in Fedora
as it should be - and that Gnome and Fedora coordinate the progress of
technologies. As long as these mechanisms or packages are free software,
there should not be a problem for other distros. They might add there
own logos or extend GST somehow. 

I do not believe that the classic distro approach can live up to date.
This approach is: Some distros package free software and put their label
on it and sell some CDs/DVDs with some manuals. And I think companies
like Fedora already think the same. It has cost the acceptance of Free
Software too much that different Distzros did not work together well on
some critical points (installation, system administration). In the
future i hope to see more similar technics at these points. I think one
of the reasons for the success of Knoppix was the decision to focus on
one Desktop (they choose KDE) and to combine with good
hardware-recignition. 

A good desktop distribution should always focus on what the user might
want to do. I would also suggest that it is possible to edit
system-config-files with gedit (maybe from within GST) without many
knowledge. Nautilus could recognise sytem files and ask for the root
password (btw. why not a sudo mechanism-> user password) if one wants to
edit something like "/etc/pam_smb.conf".

For most users getting Gedit to write to root-only-writeable files is
very complicated (logging in as root should not be what we want users to
do!)


So, just wanted to share my thoughts here. 

Thilo







 






-- 
Thilo Pfennig <tp alternativ net>
Alternativ.net