Call to arms! A new GUI for Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 09:08:10PM -0400, Aaron Vegh wrote:
> 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.

Well actually I think you are wrong about the open source movement then.
Nothing stops you from either:

1: going and doing it yourself
2: convincing willing developers to help with it for free
3: hiring some other developer to do it
4: starting a company with visionary ideas and getting investors to help
   fund it and hiring developers to do it

The last two options are the most likely to actually get it done I
suspect, although they require funding of course.  Even with funding you
don't always succeed either of course.

There are also plenty of projects that would love input and
participation from graphics artists (making pretty buttons and themes
and picking nice colours and such) as well as people cable of writing
good documentation and even people able to test and find bugs and repot
them sufficiently well that the developers can track them down and fix
them.  Lots of ways to help.  I guess "idea people" just isn't one of
the categories with high demand. :(  Developers doing things on their
spare time as a hobby tend to want to work on something they think
contributes to their own computer use or at least soething they think is
worth while.

The problem here may be that either you haven't found a willing capable
developer who wants to share in your vision of a new GUI, or perhaps
those who think it sounds interesting realize just how much work it
would be and think they have more interesting things to do first.

> 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.

Sounds great.  Having just looked at the web page for croquet (sp?) it
looks neat, although their multi 3d world interface concept to me
doesn't sound practical either from a user point of view or the hardware
resources required to run such a monstrocity.

Lennart Sorensen
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