What Linux Needs

Most of my friends are Mac users. Being one of the few loyal Linux users in the group, I often find myself debating the merits of the platforms. At least we can peacefully dump on Windows together, but that’s beside the point. It seems the primary issue for Mac users is UI: how things look, how simple they are at first sight, how everything fits together. Now this is a very visual focus, but I think they often have a point about what Linux lacks: interface.

As an example, I present a recent project of mine to make desktop maintenance easier. As I was discussing this with one of my Mac-dev friends, a program called Hazel came up. It, for a price, lets you set actions to be performed whenever some filesystem event or time occurs. For example, you can set it to automatically sort all the crap that gets dumped onto your desktop, or empty your trash monthly. Looking for Linux variants, I found that with some config file hacking, one could do the same thing using cron, incron and a bit of scripting. Of course, this is only useful to knowledgeable sysadmins, python programmers and people generally geeky enough to learn this stuff. So my project is to slap a UI onto this thing.

Another example is with suspend-to-ram. Right now, Ubuntu handles it decently, but only after I hack some config files and make sure sync to vblank is off in compiz-fusion. This is no solution; it’s yet another example of leaving the hard part to the user.

Right now, Linux needs more of a focus on clean, high-quality, usable UI for the stuff that it already does. In some regards, we have the advantage here – compiz-fusion is more advanced than anything else of its class, and things like the restricted drivers manage or add/remove programs in Ubuntu provide a far simpler UI than any other platform. So we need to press the advantage. Hopefully, Hardy Heron will create a system that basically and legitimately works – without use of the command line.

~ by fearofc on March 15, 2008.