A perfect combination for a potential new distro

libervisco · 2006-10-27 21:22:08

Hello everyone. I was an Arch user for more than six months this year until I decided to switch to Ubuntu Dapper. What drove me away doesn't have much to do with any Arch "problems". The issues I've had with it are not Arch problems, it's the Arch Way. I simply grew tired of having to configure and do everything by hand, even certain things I consider routine such as printing, mounting CDs, setting up permissions for normal user to be able to burn CDs etc.

After switching to Ubuntu where everything pretty much just works I've been quite impressed. However, I knew all along that Ubuntu isn't as fast as Arch, and I frankly missed some of the simplicity of the underlying system. Sometimes it really is easier to do something on the command line (not everything mind you, and preferences will differ from person to person on this).

And right now I am kind of sitting on the fence between these two worlds. We have Ubuntu, a distribution with a good looking easy to use "surface" and Arch which essentially does not have surface, but rather a simple, clean and fast system everyone can see. Below the surface of Ubuntu there is no such simplicity and cleanness and some of its complexity is what slows it down.

So here's the idea. What about uniting the two concepts into one? What about creating a distribution which is based on Arch (and hence features its underlying system cleaness and simplicity), but which also has the user friendly surface like Ubuntu. GUIs would not work in a way that would require creating complexity. Instead of creating gazillion of some weird scripts just to support the GUI, the GUI would be created as a direct bolt-on front end to configuration files in a way that this front end would act as a configuration file specific editor. I wrote a bit more on that in this topic.

In short, it would be combining of the two seemingly contradictory concepts into one. User friendly GUIs, preconfigured/automated routine tasks and clean/fast/simple underlying system (which Arch readily offers).

Ubuntu experience based on Arch and boosted by Arch.

What do you think?

Btw, I am not currently in a situation of starting a new distro because of my internet connection (very expensive and not so fast upload), but I'm thinking about playing with the idea locally until I can get better broadband and possibly, who knows, start the project. IF anyone else doesn't start with this before that.

This is meant just for discussing the idea and see where we come up.

Thanks
Danijel

tomk · 2006-10-27 21:33:12

Not the first time something like this has come up, probably not the last either. Wouldn't be for me, but if it's your itch, go scratch it - I promise I'll burn and boot your alpha iso.

Lontronics · 2006-10-27 21:59:30

You could try Zenwalk.

It is Slack based, so the underlying system is straight forward, it is very fast and does have the features you want.
Not bloated as in Ubuntu, but simple and easy 'the Zenwalk way'.

I do like the idea of Arch, but Zenwalk is a good 'out of the box' alternative

Jan

libervisco · 2006-10-27 22:02:59

I think I could use doing a round of tryouts of alternatives that come close to what I describe, like Zenwalk and perhaps Frugalware.

Definitely a good advice before starting anything big.

Edit: Oh and Underground too.

scarney · 2006-10-27 22:04:57

Arch Rules! 8)

i 2nd the vote for zenwalk. an excellent distro, very fast and lean. its still very young though and its package manager leaves much to be desired. and i just cant get past the limits of xfce, still a nice os though.

twiistedkaos · 2006-10-30 01:16:36

I've never had any issue with having to mount / burn with command line. HAL takes care oft he mounting for me, and when I burn a cd(whihc is rare) I just use k3b. Besides, there's pleanty of GUI based applications in the community repo so you don't "have" to do everything by hand.

Romashka · 2006-10-30 08:25:35

libervisco, have you tried Underground Linux?

palandir · 2006-10-30 13:02:31

I don't think that "combining" Ubuntu and Arch would work out well. In some areas maybe, but not in many.
The reason that Ubuntu works so well out of the box is *because* there's a lot of complexity beneath the surface.
If you stripped that down, you'd automatically have to do more things manually.
A program that wants do many things automatically in the background has to take care of many different setups and problems, figure out more things/settings automatically (which might not work correctly) etc... and the result of that is usually more "bloat"/complexity.

I think the "best" way in general is to keep things as simple as possible (it's no fun if your system is overly complex. Take MS Windows as an extreme example. If something goes wrong, you're often fucked (reinstall)), just do the most basic things automatically *but* make it as *easy* as possible for the user to manually set up and customize the rest (it's also no fun if you have to spend multiple hours to get something to work).
And I think that's exactly what Arch is like. It's not LFS, and it's not Ubuntu. It's somewhere in the middle. And I think that position is the best.

Dusty · 2006-10-30 16:40:09

Its not a bad idea, but like the Arch Linux "newbie guide" idea that keeps popping up, this new distro would be for a different audience than Arch Linux proper. So the majority response of this community will be "indifferent".

Dusty

Lone_Wolf · 2006-10-30 20:56:58

I must admit that during the first few months after i switched from Suse to arch , i missed some of their tools, specially sax2 (tool for configuring X11). I even thought of making an arch package for it .... .

Now i have more experience with xorg.conf , i no longer feel the need for a elaborate tool to configure X11.

So my response to this idea : it would be a great distro for many people, but i doubt it will be my distro of choice.

Pajaro · 2006-10-30 22:17:37

why create a new distro?

proftpd -> gproftpd
many stuff -> webmin
cups -> kdeprinting, gnome-cups-manager
powersave -> kpowersave
etc... -> xetc (:P)

Arch is simple. I would start with a GUI for rc.conf + network profiles.

Take the description of installed daemons from pacman database.

Create a database of hardware whose driver is not loaded by dbus (nvidia, fglrx, snd_seq, etc)

So, instead of a distro, just create a variation of the installer CD (larch may do trick)

Etc etc etc...

you feel lazy today? pacman -S arch-gui

Anonymo · 2006-10-30 23:06:13

I was thinking maybe an Automatrix like program for Arch. I don't know how to do it, but if libervisco wants it, he should do it. I think this is a good idea because it keeps compatibility with Arch and doesn't create another distro that is unnecessary.

chrismortimore · 2006-10-31 07:54:47

Lone_Wolf wrote:

I must admit that during the first few months after i switched from Suse to arch , i missed some of their tools, specially sax2 (tool for configuring X11).

In the same light, I still miss debconf... It was cool...

phrakture · 2006-10-31 08:02:15

chrismortimore wrote:

Lone_Wolf wrote:
I must admit that during the first few months after i switched from Suse to arch , i missed some of their tools, specially sax2 (tool for configuring X11).
In the same light, I still miss debconf... It was cool...

When I use debconf (or any other "system config" utility), I typically think "I miss vim"

Pajaro · 2006-10-31 08:46:48

Yo have many guis for many apps, and then you have webmin. Multidistro, multiapplication.

This is not a coincidence. In a web page, the inherent atomization (HTML-JAVASCRIPT-PHP) and independence of processes (EVERY PROCESS IS EXECUTED FOR A FEW SECONDS AT MOST, SO IF ON PROCESS GETS AN ERROR, THE PAGE DOESN'T CRASH... I never had to recompile gmail ) makes it much easier to have clean clear code. And with AJAX the ugly-annoying extra steps of standard web pages disappear.

I've been working in AJAX like web page development for 5 years now.

gmail is not soft, i never found was has of amazing flickr...

give a look to openlaszlo:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/demos#LZPIX%20in%20Legals
there you see how ajax and flash are not that distant as the current Ajax examples make us believe. (I don't suggest to use openlaszlo, another good thing of web based development is that there are a lot of developers ready to go)

Te get a cool and powerful Gui for arch Linux i would:
- make an AJAX based web page with cool effects that you can disable (to make extreme KISS people happy).
- create a plugin system without the need of modifying code anywhere.
- find the way to set up a web server who can access the system wihtout compromising security (webmin will help here)
(- and eventually create a Firefox plugin or a gecko based browser with extended features, but only if security could get compromised)

I will start this project eventually... in fact, i don't know why i hadn't started yet.

If someone wants to join me, please, contact me (send me a pm).

libervisco · 2006-11-02 14:54:18

I've tried Underground and Frugalware so far and here are my opinions.

Underground installation process seems even harder and less intuitive than the nongui Arch install. No offense to the good guys working on the project, but without a bit of honest and constructive criticism there's no improvement. The current installer is just a bunch of rather dumb dialog boxes. When it is copying files it doesn't even have a progress bar so you have no idea when it's going to be finished.

To top it all, I was unlucky enough not to be able to even boot into the newly installed system, and that pretty much blows Underground out of my picture, for now. I have good things to say about the livecd though which looks awesome.

As for Frugalware, it seems overall well rounded. Install is pretty cool except that actual installing files takes way too long. Not sure if I'd blame frugalware or their version of pacman for that. But anyway, after it installs, you can boot nicely and stuff pretty much works good. I still have to setxkbmap to croatian layout in X though and my satellite dsl proxy wont work for some reason (might be me missing something though). Overall Frugalware comes pretty close to my ideal. However it's FPM GUI pacman frontend currently used isn't working out too well, though I hear they're gonna replace it with something else in the next release, so we'll see what happens with that.

All things considered I've decided to start building from Arch again. I am downloading base Arch install and will build my system from it again, but I'll try to set up automations on my own (like those CD automounting) and install any available GUIs for all tasks I feel should be automated. Then I will have to learn how to do a custom livecd and make one out of this install.

Maybe that will lead to yet another friendly repackaging of Arch (like Underground and Iarch) that I might be distributing as a project at some point.

Thanks for all the feedback!

libervisco · 2006-11-02 15:04:55

palandir wrote:

The reason that Ubuntu works so well out of the box is *because* there's a lot of complexity beneath the surface.
If you stripped that down, you'd automatically have to do more things manually.

I am not yet as convinced about that actually. I believe it could be possible to make a system with a thin GUI layer without compromising simplicity of the system beneath it, at least not as much as Ubuntu does. In fact, Debian as it is, even without all the GUI stuff, is pretty complex and many here will probably agree that some of this complexity may simply be unnecessary.

We've been discussing this topic on my forums here (about frontends to configuration scripts) and here (about the Perfect OS) and as you may see there tbuitenh has some really cool ideas about a way to add a GUI to a configuration script *without* adding much of extra bloat. It's that "conftool" thing we're talking about there.

We've decided to write up some specifications for a potential new future distro according to our ideas, even if we don't end up being the ones implementing it (due to time constraints, lack of resources etc.). At least then ideas will be out in the open so if someone wants to start working on it can just go and do it.

In any case, if I do the repackaging of Arch (starting with my own custom livecd) that may or may not lead to the full blown new Arch based OS project as will be specified in that specification.

I'll post the link to its wiki page once we have something to show there.

Mr Green · 2006-11-02 15:53:34

linuxconf

Romashka · 2006-11-02 16:41:42

Mr Green wrote:

linuxconf

Last release: 1.34r3 2005-01-18 12:08:47

chrismortimore · 2006-11-02 16:45:09

linuxconf has been broken for ages. I used to swear by it, then it just stopped working...

Mr Green · 2006-11-02 17:02:16

sorry just remember using it many moons ago .... webmin maybe thinking aloud again

Romashka · 2006-11-02 17:09:38

chrismortimore wrote:

linuxconf has been broken for ages. I used to swear by it, then it just stopped working...

The last time I was using linuxconf was where I was using Linux for the first time - that was Red Hat Linux 7.1 IIRC.

chrismortimore · 2006-11-02 17:25:04

Romashka wrote:

The last time I was using linuxconf was where I was using Linux for the first time - that was Red Hat Linux 7.1 IIRC.

Redhat 7.3 for me.

Mr Green · 2006-11-02 17:31:59

shh you will give away our ages.....

Dusty · 2006-11-02 19:18:48

well there's always the option of adopting this project and making it workable...

Dusty

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-27 21:22:08

A perfect combination for a potential new distro

#2 2006-10-27 21:33:12

Re: A perfect combination for a potential new distro

#3 2006-10-27 21:59:30

Re: A perfect combination for a potential new distro

#4 2006-10-27 22:02:59

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#5 2006-10-27 22:04:57

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#6 2006-10-30 01:16:36

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#7 2006-10-30 08:25:35

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#8 2006-10-30 13:02:31

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#11 2006-10-30 22:17:37

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#13 2006-10-31 07:54:47

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#25 2006-11-02 19:18:48

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