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View Full Version : [Thinking out loud] Improving Desktop Operating Systems



keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 04:43 AM
I thought about forking Gnome and working on it all by myself; that was a dumb idea. It would take me years to not only learn all the necessary programming languages but it might also be all in vain of no one uses it or acknowledges it.
The basis of this idea was fixing all the problems I see with current Gnome. To get rid of the Mono whiners on both sides I would code up most of the Mono applications in Vala and Genie to get the same program with same or better speed and no controversy.
I would also have replaced applications such as Totem with Gnome-MPlayer where I saw fit to improve the user experience.



I thought about getting a good number of people who don't like the way things look for desktop Linux and make a group called 'Team Upstream' and recklessly fix all the broken things and dogma that slow down or stop desktop Linux from being its best.
This could be a practical idea, but it would be a good deal of hard for me to carry out this for various reasons. Some being I don't think more than a few dozen out of the thousands if not millions of the people who whine about Linux (as an OS) are willing to help make it better.
Not only that, but the handful who could help me (People like Conklavis) would be a touchy resource because of time and money. Time and money would be short; there are dozens of companies willing to advance Linux for the servers but not for the Desktop and even if we made things better if Linus Torvalds and any other project maintainers decided not to accept them then that would fragment the Linux Desktop even more and be no better than the patches most distributions have to stick on their releases.



After a good deal of researching I have discovered another workable solution. Haiku OS. It may just be exactly what I was looking for, but I need to look into it a lot more. It would be helpful because I am planning to put my all into helping and developing MPlayer and have a fully multi-threaded program would make my job amazingly easier because I would spend less hours poking around old crufty code for optimizations and be actually innovating with new features.
Haiku would be a fresh start, if I had a radical cool new idea and I wanted to do it then I'm sure the small (compared to Linux) development team would be happy to let me do my thing. This allows me free space to roam and make things better than they already are.
Haiku builds upon my favorite philosophies which are from Gnome, make the application so intuitive so that anyone can use it, and elegance everywhere.
From Arch Linux, the KISS method, and do things correctly from the start. From Ubuntu, your users are humans, not machines. Sculpt the machine to work for the human, not the other way around.



I thought about ReactOS, no good. I wouldn't find working on a Windows clone fun. I thought about FreeBSD, it would be too complicated for me to introduce to anyone. I've introduced dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people to Ubuntu. FreeBSD? IMHO more of a Unix hacker thing, people like my cousin would be lost for years.
Inbreeding the ideas to create a new idea? Improve Haiku so much that I force the three still standing original distributions (Debian, Slackware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and their derivatives to acknowledge to improvements and do their part to help out Linux side. Or lure developers from Xorg and Gnome, and other interesting projects with the freely licensed MIT code they can "steal" and improve Linux with.

CharmyBee
October 20th, 2009, 05:02 AM
QVWM could use updating, *hint hint hint*.

keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 05:11 AM
I only program for what explicitly gets my attention. :p

keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 07:01 PM
Continuing my research I found out that next generation stuff that will land in Linux is being heavily and quickly developed for Haiku now. Gaillium3D among them. This stuff is taking a long time to add to Linux and even when it gets released there will be a wait for distributions to include it and it'll take a good few months/years for us to relieve our dependency on xorg.

It seems as if it would be GREATLY better for me to work on a project where next generation things are developing now which allow me to work with new technology and improve the future today. It would take months/years to get rid of the old 16bit and lower features/problems of xorg and make it modern day desktop ready with my programming skills along with a small team of people who may or may not even be accessible.
I'm going to join the Haiku forums and maybe the mailing lists too to get more information and get more involved. Nothing in the Linux world has truly excited me as much as Haiku does.

Not Nouvue, not DirectFB, not Wayland, not Ubuntu 9.10, not Fedora 12, not Chromium, not Gnome 2.28, not even Arch Linux.

RiceMonster
October 20th, 2009, 07:03 PM
Why is all the text OP centered? It makes it very annoying to read.

Tibuda
October 20th, 2009, 07:04 PM
Is this trolling or what?

NoaHall
October 20th, 2009, 07:10 PM
How much experience do you have in programming?

keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 07:13 PM
Why is all the text OP centered? It makes it very annoying to read.
My bad, I thought the centered text looked cool. I also thought it made it easier to read than text blocks. Fixed now.

Is this trolling or what?
I'm not trolling this time, I assure you.

How much experience do you have in programming?
I learned some BASIC in highschool, I'm looking into Python and C so I can do some serious programming soon. In other words, I'm a noob.

openfly
October 20th, 2009, 07:13 PM
Where are our GL desktops!? XGL... WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU!!!!

keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 07:16 PM
Where are our GL desktops!? XGL... WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU!!!!


Xgl is an X server architecture designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was finally removed[1] from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.
I wonder if I might have found this on Google or Wikipedia....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XGL

openfly
October 20th, 2009, 08:04 PM
And still we have no NAVI OS derivative.

keiichidono
October 20th, 2009, 09:05 PM
And still we have no NAVI OS derivative.

What are you talking about?