The Nightstar Zoo

The Linux Desktop Distribution of the Future.

The problems he points out apply to every OS, not just Linux.

When he talks about application installation and the desktop he is spot on.

Whatever the actual OS filesystem is it should be hidden from the desktop user. If the OS drops all its system files into a randomly generated structure of unpronounceable subdirectories that's just fine as long as the desktop user never has to see it.

The second point is caused by the spread out arrangement of Linux system files. This arrangement is intended to ease the multi-user aspect of Unix system. Unfortunately, it greatly complicates the user view of the system. Existing users are accustomed to having a root folder with a couple of system folders to worry about.

In particular, it is rather important for the system to NOT have desktop shortcuts in order to prevent the common glut of special offers and installers.

For the purposes of easy to access files, it is in the user's interest to allow selected files to appear on the Desktop.

...

Fortunately for me, I'm a hardened Windows 98 user.

I think Linux as a system for ordinary folks is a bad idea. And it irritates people who knwo a bit about computers, too.

Here's some random opinions and ramblings of mine on Linux:

- "Where the Hell are the .exe files?!?" Despite continued exposure to Linux at school, I'm at a loss to locate them. The closest I was able to find were .rpm files that actually do something productive when clicked. All else are shortcut-like icons, I don't where they point to, though.

- I just want to meet the person who came up with the naming scheme for folders in Linux.

And what's the point of adding 'hd' in front of drive letters? I can figure it out whether it's a hard drive! And if I can't, would I care?

- The console should be linked with a name like 'Don't Touch' or 'Danger'.

What genius thinks typing in commands is better than clicking stuff? Commands I must memorize, too.

Another thing is that some stuff can only be ran from the console -- what gives? Seriously!

Why do installed applications seemingly integrate themselves into the system, make themselves their own console commands?

- Why do I have to watch all that ASCII crap shuffle on the screen when I turn the computer on? It's not like I need to read it if it all starts correctly, anyway. See, I wouldn't mind error reports, but why should I care for every bit of useless info the system can dump on the default output? Can't it give me a line like, 'Everything OK. Starting OS.' and be done with it?

- It's slooooooooooooooooow. And eats a lot, too. What does it need all that RAM and processing power for? I wouldn't even mention the GUI being slow, you see, graphical interfaces tend to be like that. The problem is that the console itself has visible typing slowdown. What gives?

- The games on some distibutions are cool. Frozen Bubble!

- It needs a special partition to run 'smoothly'. Exactly, how many normies can actually operate fdisk? One in a thousand? How many knwo what a partition is? Not a lot more, methinks.

- Linux is not any more stable than Windows. I managed to crash it a dozen times. It all depends on the user -- if the user knwos how to handle a system, it won't crash.

- When I push the 'Reset' button Linux frequently damages itself somehow. I don't knwo how. It just displays error messages, something pertaining system damage or disk problems. What kind of effing system doesn't tolerate a hard reset? Hard resetting is not a hobby, it's a way of life, for God's sake!

- Mount? Unmount? What is that for? Can't the system just assume that if it's plugged in then it's mounted? Sheesh.

Now, before you take the above as a personl insult, don't.

I hate Linux, not its users. I still think you lot are a coupla beans short of a full bean bag, but no, I don't hate you.

Thanks for reading!

This is describing a system built for desktop users, not one for power users. Power users should always have access to the twisted innards of the box if they want it.

- "Where the Hell are the .exe files?!?" Despite continued exposure to Linux at school, I'm at a loss to locate them. The closest I was able to find were .rpm files that actually do something productive when clicked. All else are shortcut-like icons, I don't where they point to, though.

- I just want to meet the person who came up with the naming scheme for folders in Linux.

Hell, even Microsoft realized that capitalization of some of the letters is aesthetically more pleasing than cryptic stuff like 'bin' ("What bin? Is this the Trash directory?"). Badbadbadbad.

And what's the point of adding 'hd' in front of drive letters? I can figure it out whether it's a hard drive! And if I can't, would I care?

- The console should be linked with a name like 'Don't Touch' or 'Danger'. What genius thinks typing in commands is better than clicking stuff?

Commands I must memorize, too. Another thing is that some stuff can only be ran from the console -- what gives? Seriously! Why do installed applications seemingly integrate themselves into the system, make themselves their own console commands?

- Why do I have to watch all that ASCII crap shuffle on the screen when I turn the computer on? It's not like I need to read it if it all starts correctly, anyway. See, I wouldn't mind error reports, but why should I care for every bit of useless info the system can dump on the default output? Can't it give me a line like, 'Everything OK. Starting OS.' and be done with it?

- It's slooooooooooooooooow. And eats a lot, too. What does it need all that RAM and processing power for? I wouldn't even mention the GUI being slow, you see, graphical interfaces tend to be like that. The problem is that the console itself has visible typing slowdown. What gives?

- It needs a special partition to run 'smoothly'. Exactly, how many normies can actually operate fdisk? One in a thousand? How many knwo what a partition is? Not a lot more, methinks.

- Linux is not any more stable than Windows. I managed to crash it a dozen times. It all depends on the user -- if the user knwos how to handle a system, it won't crash.

- When I push the 'Reset' button Linux frequently damages itself somehow. I don't knwo how. It just displays error messages, something pertaining system damage or disk problems. What kind of effing system doesn't tolerate a hard reset? Hard resetting is not a hobby, it's a way of life, for God's sake!

- Mount? Unmount? What is that for?

Now, before you take the above as a personl insult, don't. I hate Linux, not its users. I still think you lot are a coupla beans short of a full bean bag, but no, I don't hate you.

Just curious, when was your last exposure to Linux and which distro (or distros) did you try?

Try Dennis Ritchie. I think he's still working at Bell Labs. ;)

Personally, I'd prefer the dh0/dh1/etc. naming convention. ;)

Consoles are better/faster for some things (batch operations on files, for example). Just as mouse-driven GUI input is better for others.

I... don't quite follow you here either. But there's nothing saying you can't give console programs GUI front-ends.

What kind of Windows do you have? Every version I've ever used (that list thankfully doesn't include Windows ME)

It shouldn't be. There must have been something wrong with your installation...

In any case, had you directed that bile against the GUI instead, I would have backed you up one hundred percent. X is a beast that, despite having served faithfully for many many years, should really be put down because it's started peeing on everybody's carpets.

Yep. But just as in Windows, most crashes are from bad hardware drivers...

Procreation. :D

I very much like the idea of Linux, I think the OS itself is ok (great for servers, but not ready for the desktop), but I despise its users. ;)
Not all of them mind you, just the damn zealots (so don't even get me started on Macs ;)). Unfortunately, the zealots are a very vocal maj^H^H^Hminority...

...

Fortunately for me, I'm a hardened Windows 98 user.

I think Linux as a system for ordinary folks is a bad idea. And it irritates people who knwo a bit about computers, too.

Here's some random opinions and ramblings of mine on Linux:

- "Where the Hell are the .exe files?!?" Despite continued exposure to Linux at school, I'm at a loss to locate them. The closest I was able to find were .rpm files that actually do something productive when clicked. All else are shortcut-like icons, I don't where they point to, though.

- I just want to meet the person who came up with the naming scheme for folders in Linux. Hell, even Microsoft realized that capitalization of some of the letters is aesthetically more pleasing than cryptic stuff like 'bin' ("What bin? Is this the Trash directory?"). Badbadbadbad. And what's the point of adding 'hd' in front of drive letters? I can figure it out whether it's a hard drive! And if I can't, would I care?

- The console should be linked with a name like 'Don't Touch' or 'Danger'. What genius thinks typing in commands is better than clicking stuff? Commands I must memorize, too. Another thing is that some stuff can only be ran from the console -- what gives? Seriously! Why do installed applications seemingly integrate themselves into the system, make themselves their own console commands?

- Why do I have to watch all that ASCII crap shuffle on the screen when I turn the computer on? It's not like I need to read it if it all starts correctly, anyway. See, I wouldn't mind error reports, but why should I care for every bit of useless info the system can dump on the default output? Can't it give me a line like, 'Everything OK. Starting OS.' and be done with it?

- It's slooooooooooooooooow. And eats a lot, too. What does it need all that RAM and processing power for? I wouldn't even mention the GUI being slow, you see, graphical interfaces tend to be like that. The problem is that the console itself has visible typing slowdown. What gives?

- The games on some distibutions are cool. Frozen Bubble!

- It needs a special partition to run 'smoothly'. Exactly, how many normies can actually operate fdisk? One in a thousand? How many knwo what a partition is? Not a lot more, methinks.

- Linux is not any more stable than Windows. I managed to crash it a dozen times. It all depends on the user -- if the user knwos how to handle a system, it won't crash.

- When I push the 'Reset' button Linux frequently damages itself somehow. I don't knwo how. It just displays error messages, something pertaining system damage or disk problems. What kind of effing system doesn't tolerate a hard reset? Hard resetting is not a hobby, it's a way of life, for God's sake!

- Mount? Unmount? What is that for? Can't the system just assume that if it's plugged in then it's mounted? Sheesh.

Now, before you take the above as a personl insult, don't. I hate Linux, not its users. I still think you lot are a coupla beans short of a full bean bag, but no, I don't hate you.

Thanks for reading!

In Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, executable files are marked by their attributes, not by their extension. If you do an "ls -l" you should see a column filled with "r"s, "w"s and "x"s. Those are the file's attributes, "r" for readable, "w" for writable and "x" for executable. If there's an "x" beside the file then it's executable.

At any rate, this is pretty much irrevelant anyway since a "Joe sixpack" user is just going to use the package manager to install programs and their desktop environment to run them. Still, if you absolutely positively have to see where your executables are, they should all be in the /bin directories (/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc.)

No, you shouldn't. You shouldn't be messing with that sort of thing anyway if you don't know what you're doing, and with modern Linux distributions you won't have to. Just stick to managing the files in your home directory and let your distribution's automated functions handle the rest. Actually, I'd say that giving the vital system directories cryptic names is a good thing, as giving nice, friendly names to that sort of thing encourages users who don't know what they're doing to start poking around there, which can seriously mess up the system (if they're logged in as root, that is.)

I'd really like to know what you were doing when you managed to crash a Linux system...

It's obviously been quite a while since you used Linux last as nearly all the problems you mentioned have long since been fixed. Maybe you should give it another shot.

Guess it's a personal preference then. I jush find it easier to differentiate drives quicker if they have one letter names than, like in Linux, having to make them apart by the last letter/number. Not ergonomical, IMO.

I installed a game called FreeCiv on a school Mandrake 9 workstation. To my suprise it did what I consider integrating itself into the system -- made a command 'freeciv' that launched it! (Same thing happened to a Linux version of CGoban.) That's crazy! A well behaved application should have minimal impact on system components, right?

What kind of Windows do you have? Every version I've ever used (that list thankfully doesn't include Windows ME)

Huh? I'm only saying that DOS while being similiar in look and function to the Linux console (at least in earlier Windows), doesn't slow down like Linux does. It might be a case of overcrowding the OS with stuff people don't need -- like Windows XP.

I get crashes almost only if I somehow get infected.

Other than that, when I try to run too many applications at once and a RAM cleaner simultaneuosly.

I'd really like to know what you were doing when you managed to crash a Linux system...

My experience has been the exact opposite, with most things being faster in Linux than in Windows.

RAM cleaner?

Err... sounds like it just put its executable in a pathed directory, that's all. No impacting the system in any way. :)

Err... that line should have read something like "Every version I've ever used (that list thankfully doesn't include Windows ME) has, even disregarding everything the BIOS spits out, given me several lines of text at startup". But it seems you managed to figure out what I was going to say anyway. :D

Well, my point was that the Linux console shouldn't slow down, but that X, which well, every Linux GUI I know is built on, is a slow horrible kludge that shouldn't even be allowed to look at a desktop machine. ;)

Ack! You just lost 50 points in the "know how to take care of your computer" category. ;)
Seriously, you almost have to want to get a virus to get your 98(SE) machine infected. That or actually use IE.

RAM cleaner?

Do "most things" include, well... anything GUI-driven? Because then I say you're lying. Or just severely biased.

Are you saying that Linux searches for installed programs and adds them cammands or something?

Are you saying that Linux searches for installed programs and adds them cammands or something?

Heh. My first clue was the mouse cursor. Or maybe Linux users like it to move tortoise-like.

If the executable file is in the search path for executables and you type the name it'll execute the file. This is the same behavior that dos/windows has.

I've never had any trouble with the mouse cursor being "sluggish". (Except when I've crashed the whole chupaqueso of course.)

Here's a stupid question: Was the mouse speed set too low?

As some of you know already, I've mostly been working on (or rather, failing to work on) a test system called LoIS, and some random experiments to practice various techniques. However, I also have a long-term plan for a system, one based on various newer ideas that I found intriguing. None of the plans I have for it are original, really, but they have not disseminated through the programming community to any great degree (one of the Big Secrets of the computer industry is that, for all the sound and fury of various fads such as Java, there hasn't been a significant new development in software design since around 1978. I call this phenomenon 'computing in the Red Queen's square', after the scene in Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen tells Alice how she must run as fast as she can just to stay in one place). Having hung out with some ritual-magick types a lot lately, I've decided (for now) that the name of this system will be 'Thelema'.

My intended interface design is based around a universal viewer/editor/interpreter; an uber-EMACS, as it were. Special-purpose windows or forms will be built by scripting extensions to this (though visual form-building tools will eventually be added to this.

The underlying command structure will be interpreted scripts, of course, just as in Emacs, but there will be various ways to invoke them, primarily through some kind of 'live text' a la Oberon - by allowing any given section of text to be selected and run as a script, the need for a special-purpose shell vanishes. It will be possible, and hopefully easy, to build menus and define icons; in the case of menus, they would simply be ordinary text which has been 'hooked' to automatically invoke a given script and locked in place. It should be possible to edit any menu at any time, and save the new configuration as a preference. Functions and object will be organized into 'toolboxes', which can be reganized by the user as appropriate. There will be no applications in the classical sense; rather, various tools and forms will be combined to create 'frameworks', similar to EMACS modes in concept but more comprehensive and (hopefully) flexible.

One concept I mean to experiment with is layering; within a window, sub-views can overlaid to create a total view, in the same way cel sheets are overlaid to create animation frames. Each layer would itself be a full editor framework, and a single window could contain an indefinite (i.e., limited only by the system's capacity) number of different, independent frameworks. This idea has been used by various imaging editing tools IIRC, and to a very limited extent by XML layers, but has not before been applied generally to the best of my knowledge.

Instead of a conventional file system, there will be a more general document management system, based largely on the concepts pioneered by the Xanadu Project, and influenced by Raskin's work as well. I hope to implement something very similar to the classic Xanadu plan, thoug with a much diminished scope. Documents, when created, will be stored permanently, and tracked by a set of links; when a document is 'edited', what is changed is not the document itself, but rather the link trails controlling how it should be read and displayed. Different trails may share the same material, and conversely, different trails of the same document may exist with completely different content. The links will also track ownership, publication status and visibility of a given trail (though I doubt it will support automatic royalties, something that was always part of the Xanadu concept but which has proven to be unacceptable by most users). Documents can be referenced by their title (or that of a given trail) or by searches of various kinds. There will not any sort of built-in directory heirarchies, though tools to build such things out of links would be easy enough to implement if someone insisted on it.

Programs will be treated somewhat diferently than other documents, but the same to some extent still applies. It may even be possible to apply the document link system to code linking an loading, allowing for a simplified system that would support dynamic libraries as part of it general design. Programs and scripts will be associated primarily with there source code (naturally), and by default the deliverable form will include the source with it to allow for debugging. When a program is compiled, it does not generate a native binary, but rather an intermediate representation containing the parse-tree and other necessary information needed to generate the object code (similar to the 'slim binaries' in later Oberon systems). This will provide a portable format which can be conveniently either interpreted directly, or compiled locally, while still providing for full security checking. While the generated native code may be saved locally, it would not be part of the distributable, both for security reasons and portability concerns - and because it is hoped that it will be possible to incorporate machine-specific optimization in the fashion of the Synthetix kernel.

Of course, in Real Life, chances are I'll never get even half of this done. But it's what I want to do, and I fully intend to try to do it.

Mind boiling it down for the non OS-theory versed? What will the changes and innovations actually accomplish?

And regarding what matters (IMO) in an OS:

1. Ease and Functionality.
2. Speed and Expandability (y'know, applications for stuff the designers didin't think of at first and such)
3. Safety.

Now this one of the few things this guy says that make any sense - the *n?x directory layout is incredibly confusing for new users (computer newbies and tech-savvy alike).

Linux is essentially a multi-user operating system; Windows is essentially single-user; and both are wrong. Windows is too easily hosed by a typo/visiting three-year-old/malicious email attachment/etc. because it provides no safety net for the user at all. You'd never want to delete the C:\Windows directory, and yet you can without a second glance.

Linux, on the other hand, is stuck in the '70s model of many users and an omnipotent sysadmin to handle all software and hardware configuration duties. Back then, it made sense to have a long involved procedure for installing a magnetic tape into the drive and reading the files off it, in order to make sure nothing went wrong; now, it seems pointless to go through the same steps for a CD-ROM. (On the other hand, you can't mess around with system directories unless you're the sysadmin, so this has some benefits.)

What we really need is a one-and-a-half-user system, but nobody seems particularly interested in that. Microsoft somehow thinks that adding a cute little dog to the search window is an important feature for users today, while the Linux folks can't stop arguing with each other over how to do anything. This leaves us stuck with two operating systems with a lot of useless crap that made sense 25 years ago but doesn't now. Both are infinitely frustrating.

That's... a little unintuitive, no? I know I can see those when I type 'ls', but can I see it in a window? I don't know, haven't tried to access any system 'bins'.