"hard core" linux

[Paul A Houle]

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.