Willisburg.org

Found something in today’s Slashdot that I rather quite enjoyed reading. The Linux Desktop Distribution of the Future by a gentleman who calls himself “I’m Batman!” He seems to have tackled a lot of the more technical end of a lot of the file structure and system structure issues I had ideas on but struggled to find any good solutions for with my own ideas.

The man appears to have encountered a lot of the same issues I’ve banged my head against with Linux, and it’s refreshing to find another person who’s willing to not just point out the warts, but offer some Compound W for the issues. The only things I’m not sold on myself is the idea of placing the end user’s files in a database that can be corrupted and difficult to access outside of the functioning OS, and his ideas for the desktop UI as it’s almost too simple. The desktop reminds me a lot of Windows 3.11 with a Win95 or OS X taskbar and a search field. There seems like too much digging involved to get at *anything* outside of using the search tool. Not to say my ideas could be any better as it’s hard to get feedback to something that can’t be demoed with real people.

That being said however, there are a couple UI ideas that I’d like to change with my own design and am not entirely sure how to approach it yet… especially with the search menu. On one hand, I like the ability that placing the search tool as accessable by clicking the application name menu gives you for providing a consistant placement to target for the function, but it’s counter-intuitive to the end user because the application name tells them something about the application and does not suggest or infer that clicking on it will give you search functionailty. It’s something that’s definitely going to require a bit of thought and redesign with.

Update on the current Linux desktop madness:

The media playback issue has been resolved! Yay! I did some digging in Guitoo (apparently now Kuroo) and found a few packages that brightened my day. I now have support for Windows Media, Quicktime, DiVX, RealMedia, and a handful of other codecs that just made entertainment and web browsing a little more pleasant. In the process of installing all these extra codecs, support for Flash animations drastically improved as well. Although the plugin worked for playback, I never got any audio unless I launched AOSS before Firefox, and would have to close it out, kill AOSS and relaunch everything after viewing about three flash pages to get the audio back. Now I don’t have to do that and I just get audio like I should. I mean, what a concept… something just working like it should without jumping through hoops. Simply AMAZING!

I’m still miffed about the madness I have to go through to get the Wacom tablet working. Install and configuration is not intuitive at all, and actually quite frustrating… I’ve abandoned the idea of getting it working. Here’s a novel concept for the Linux community to consider for hardware installation: PROVIDE GRAPHICAL BASED TOOLS FOR CONFIGURING YOUR HARDWARE THAT INTERACTS WITH AND CHANGES YOUR GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE. Good to get that off the chest. It infuriates me that I have to edit *text files* to get a *pointing device* to function… or to enable and configure output from a video card for another monitor… or… or… ad nausium.

I’m still on one monitor (instead of three, or even two), I still don’t have any good graphics applications that are relatively easy to use and support any of my old CDR/AI/PSD/SWF files, I’m without my Wacom tablet, I still can’t undo whatever madness and K-Menu fouling that Gnome did when I emerged it, and I’m cranky from the heat.

On the bright side, cheesecake numero dos came out beautiful… perfect even. Here’s hoping the neighbors like it.