[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Michael Saunders]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Ian Linwood wrote:
>
> As an intuitive, user friendly interface, later Windows environments
> are excellent, as is OSX. But imitation must not exclude innovation.

They're only "intuitive" because everyone else says they're
"intuitive". When you sit down and look at these interfaces, though,
or get a professional application (not OS UI) designer to look at
them, they fall apart. Start to shut down and stop? Dragging a CD into
the Trashcan to eject? It goes on and on. People just assume that
Windows and OS X are "intuitive" because they're already familiar with
them. They're not _bad_, but they don't compare to the likes of RISC
OS or even BeOS in terms of careful and consistent design.

> I suggest what would help a great deal, would be if Linus would
> decide that a GUI interface should be part of Linux and either
> KDE|Gnome be sucked into the Linux kernel standardising the GUI
> interface for Linux.

This will NEVER happen under Linus Torvalds; he's rightly said that
throwing more stuff into the kernel is pointless and dangerous. Having
your primary UI layer directly coded into the kernel means that
graphical applications can potentially take down the whole system.

Besides, you're asking for standardisation (a fair point) but what has
that got to do with folding stuff into the kernel? You can standardise
without anything like that. Syllable, for instance, has one single UI
and toolkit, and yet it isn't in the kernel. The kernel is for process
management, hardware support and various ancillary bits.

> Someone with a core influence needs to embrace this kind of
> expansion, otherwise Linux will remain a hobbyist|geek OS.

That's so 1998 :-) It can't "remain" a hobbyist/geek OS when it's
being deployed to 500,000+ machines by Sun in China. It can't when IBM
are slowly moving their desktops over, and putting over $1 billion
into Linux research, development and marketing.

No, this year's smear is "Linux is full of copyrighted IP".

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk