Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Lets see
* KDE or XFCE based Fedora derivative.
Yes, one of the silliest things about RH/Fedora is that it comes
with two half-baked desktop environments rather than one complete
desktop environment.
It would be easiest to make a Gnome-only distribution since there
are quite a few packages that are compiled with Gnome bindings. (For
instance, last I looked, Ethereal.) On the other hand, I think Gnome
lovers are more likely to be happy with Fedora as it is -- so a
KDE-based Fedora would have more of a market.
XFCE might be more work, but has the bigger gain of being a really
simple and lightweight desktop.
Personally my feeling about UI are bifurcated. Most of the time I
work out of the shell, but use Mozilla and Firefox heavily. I don't
use graphical file browsers much, except for certain kind of operations
that involve handling lots of files, and even for that I like the
old-school text interfaces the best.
On the other hand, I have an AMD64 machine at home that's used for
web crawling, data mining, gaming and multimedia. For the last two
things, I'd really like a much more consumer-oriented interface (like
MythTV) that is metadata-oriented, not filesystem oriented. My wife
has no trouble playing things with mplayer if she can find them, but I
often get called up during the day because she wanted to play something
and doesn't know where they are.
(MythTV is cool, but it's half-baked and centered around a bunch of
functionality I don't use or need)
My gaming and multimedia habits revolve around files and formats of
questionable legality, so I don't expect Fedora to solve my problems.
Yet, I've got the feeling that the desktop paradigm is tired -- if you
want me to care about GUI's you're designing, I either want something
that's super-streamlined/consumer oriented or something that lets me
have a godlike view of the contents of my machine. Either of those
involves a metadata-oriented interface instead of a filesystem-oriented
approach; everyone in the commerical arena has been promising that for
more than a decade, but we're yet to see anything that really works.
* Fedora for low end systems
XFCE.
It might also be nice to see a server-oriented distribution. One of
my complaints about Linux is that its trying to be everything to
everybody. Right now people are writing stupid things about how Solaris
10 could be a Linux killer, and they miss the point that the appeal of
Solaris 10 is that it does certain things right. If Solaris supported
the same garbage hardware Linux supports (open source or binary drivers
both,) Solaris would have all the problems Linux has. Similarly, the
people who want to run Mac OS X on generic x86 hardware are missing the
point. There's something to say for a single-vendor hardware and
software stack where everything is qualified to actually work.
I've found that kudzu and other desktop-oriented stuff that comes
with RHEL causes problems on servers I run. A server distribution
definitely doesn't need Gnome and KDE, who knows how many half-baked
office programs, all the unfun graphical games and all that.
* Hardened version of Fedora with strict or MLS policy by default
Yeah, SELinux is a wide open frontier. There's definitely a lot of
buzz about things like FreeBSD jails and Solaris zones, it would be
nice to explore the space of what SELinux can do.
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