Call to arms! A new GUI for Linux

[Aaron Vegh]

> I commend your enthusiasm -- don't lose that ;-)

> 
> I agree that Linux may eventually need such a solution ,
> but what I think it needs today is integration of the desktop
> experience .  Anton Markov , Chris Browne , and others
> present a number of topics in their responses to this subject.
> Of course , if you can provide a revolution then you also meet
> the needs .  Revolution is not something that I know much
> about , nor have many of humans successes been revolutions ,
> and not Linux in many eyes including I believe Mr. Torvalds .
> Sure , there are revolutions on small scales , but us short lived
> folk often neglect the value of doing things slowly and safely .
> 
> Not to discourage you , only to provide my experience , and to reflect
> what many OSS contributors describe , but vision matters less than feet,
> particularly when starting a project .
> 
> It looks like you may have the feet , and be looking for more , but you
> may need to spend quite a bit more effort presenting your vision,
> clarifying (/shrinking) the goals, before leaders will join you .

Thanks Lloyd for taking the time to write back with a very
well-thought out response. I think it puts the cap on my efforts to
create something new, at least through this list. :-(

To all that responded, there's probably not one of you for whom I have
a major disagreement; much of your responses were valid to me and made
sense. However, I am proposing _my_ vision, not yours, and I was
hoping that someone among you would be interested enough to join up
with me and help make it -- or something like it -- a reality.

To those who say that what we have is fine, or that we don't need
another GUI, I do disagree. What we have now is "more of the same",
and not compelling enough to make people switch. The heart of my idea
is to provide something new and different. It won't dovetail nicely
with KDE, and it's certainly not additional functionality.

This is what infuriates me about the whole open source movement;
ultimately, it's a developer's-only club. At the end of the day, it's
the itch-scratching programmers who call the shots, and if anyone else
has an idea, it's invalid because they can't code. Yes, I speak from
former experience attempting to participate in OSS projects. That
sounds like an excellent new thread for this list.

So if I truly believe in this idea of mine, it seems the solution is
to learn to program and do it myself. I'll write back in five years
with my results.

Cheers,
Aaron.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml