mikshaw
Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004 |
 |
Posted: Mar. 09 2006,20:45 |
 |
I agree with you that the ability to strip it down to bare necessities (if this is what you are saying?) is a good thing, but there are some issues with this that would make it difficult to incorporate nto DSL without rebuilding the fundamental structure of DSL...
1) DSL, according to what the creator himself has said, is intended to be a general-purpose desktop distribution, putting as much typical desktop utility into 50mb as possible. Stripping it further, as part of DSL's functionality, is contrary to this goal. Remastering the filesystem is possible, but it is up to the individual user to do this.
2) DSL's focus is primarily on liveCD/frugal/embedded (running it from a compressed filesystem), making the core of the system uncorruptible and giving the user the ability to return to the original system at any time with a simple reboot. Once you get into making changes to that compressed filesystem, this quality of being bulletproof is gone. Again, The user still has the option to remaster if he wants to change the base.
3) The process of making "an extreemly intuitive , minimum number of clicks, no-brainer type of program management" is also contrary to the basic goals of DSL. For one, package management is virtually pointless in anything but a traditional debian-style installation, which as mentioned is not really the focus of DSL. Second, anything that is made to be "no-brainer" is inherently going to be more complex to create, and ultimately more bloated than simple text files and small-but-needing-some-knowledge programs. The result is that the developers will have less time to focus on improving DSL (killing bugs, improving hardware support, etc) and the user will have fewer applications to use (there's still that 50mb limit).
To be honest, DSL has been steadily becoming more user-friendly, in the gui sense. Roberts in particular has been adding a growing number of gui scripts to help the user configure and use DSL. Compared to what DSL was a year ago, I'm really surprised at how much more no-brainer it has become, while still staying tiny.
I'm not sure if i ranted enough here...I went for a coffee halfway through...maybe i left something hanging. Anyway, this is mostly just my opinion...not meant to be fact, except for the "focus" part, which we've heard from the DSL devs more than a couple of times.
--------------
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
|
.
DSL Market ,
Great VPS hosting provided by Tektonic
