DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: Lamer friendly DSL
Consider presenting the DSL modularity in a very obvious user interface.
For example in a starting-from-nothing situation:
1. Download and burn DSL CD from a working system
2. Attach pen drive to target machine
3. Boot DSL on the target machine with cd from step #1
4. A pen drive icon shows up on the desktop
5. Right clicking on the pen drive gives a menu that includes "make this drive bootable" option.
6. If needed a floppy drive icon also appears on the desktop and has "make pen drive boot disk" option with a right click.
7. reboot and system comes up on pen drive (shows toram if selected during step#5)
8. pen drive again appears on desktop
9. user can open pen drive and manage files via click and drag with mouse. There is a folder with applications (firefox, xmms, beaver...). Another folder holds absolute base system (all hardware id and cinfigs, networking, ...)
10. To add programs user clicks on MyDSL icon, selects program and downloads to applications folder on pen drive.
11. system reboot
12. new application is now available using the rightclick on desktop action.
For a program upgrade the user should be able to open the applications folder delete the old program, download the new and reboot then have the new program available.
DSL is very close to doing this already it seems. I have no skill in the area of configuring such a system but would do a lot of testing for it...
In general DSL's strength seems to be it's simplicity and customization potential. I'd like to see that extended by making it super easy to add or remove programs. By setting the basic programs in a folder on the desktop clickable pen drive where they could be easily added , removed or relplaced would streamline the customization process for us not-so-savy DSL fans. Sure it would be easy to totally kill a system like this but so-what! Just take 10 minutes and set up a whole new install on the pen drive.
5-7: I'm only guessing here, but it's my understanding that booting from usb is something that is hardware-specific, and I don't think there is any way to determine from within the operating system whether or not it can be done (at least not easily).
11: In Linux, a system reboot is generally unnecessary in any situation short of a kernel change. In DSL the reboot typically restores the system to its default state....having things added through a reboot is contrary to this concept.
Not having to reboot would be cool.
What I am suggesting though is to have an extreemly intuitive , minimum number of clicks, no-brainer type of program management that is at the same time very clean and keeps individual programs as independent as possible.
This is contrary to the general trend of total system integration but isn't part of DSL is about maximizing low resource hardware? It seems that making it easy to strip any paticular DSL to only the needed parts is within the DSL character and goals.
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.
Mikshaw,
I wanted to add my two cents here by saying that I agree with what you said! Robert and John and you too have made many good GUIs for useful scripts in the last year that have made DSL a lot more fun to operate from the Window Manager. That icon tool was a great add.
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