Re: Introducing DoudouLinux
Thank you Ben for your detailed analysis and relevant comments. I think
we're agreeing on most subject if not all.
DoudouLinux is indeed a very interesting project with some overlap
with
Debian Jr. I hope we can mutually benefit from interaction.
Thank you. We'll work in this direction!
I notice that support for Squeeze is missing even though we're now
five
months past the release date.
This is what I was telling to myself before reading your mail. We were
not able to publish DoudouLinux based on the new Debian stable in a
short time. There are several reasons, one being that we are a young
project and had to make a more polished OS before dealing with the
Squeeze migration. Another one is that we want to fit a single CD. Our
first Squeeze build is currently sizing 850MB and we still haven't
decided how to make it fit 700MB.
To me it now seems obvious that DoudouLinux CD cannot use Debian Jr.
package selections as is, but only a subset – because of the CD
constraint. In the future we intend to offer a multi-language DVD, which
could use Debian Jr. package selections.
Philosophically, I think DoudouLinux may be mostly in agreement with
my
vision for the Debian Jr. project, and if not in outright
disagreement
on some of the other points, at least not so far off […]
The same for me.
"It aims at making computer use as simple and pleasant as possible
..."
Not that I disagree with this, but "as simple as possible" was not
one
of Debian Jr.'s original goals.
This was also my feelings when I read the Debian Jr. page and certainly
the main difference in philosophies. Our goal is to reach the standard
family, which doesn't know anything about computing. Moreover, with the
emergence of smartphones and their easier interfaces, we believe that
computers have to change. Finally, we also want to compete with any kind
of tech-stuff for children, which means we really need to do our best to
make it attractive.
This is why we want it to be dead easy as gaming consoles or
smartphones. The question we are still working on is how to lead later
children into looking at the OS internals while avoiding them asking
themselves any question about its use. They also have to understand that
computers are fully programmable, unlike gaming consoles.
Why shouldn't adults enjoy simpler, less cluttered desktops
that put what they want to use most often in the forefront and tucks
the
rest out of the way, but makes it easy for them to find again. And
isn't
that what we want for children too? Yet somehow we seem to tolerate
that
such horrendous interfaces that fail to accomplish this are
"acceptable"
for adults.
I totally agree :). One of our wishes is to provide in the future a
version for teenagers, another one for families and why not for seniors
(supposing that we really need to make different versions for these
audiences). Of course we would reuse a similar simple interface. The
reasons why we are targeting children are mainly the following:
* I started to look at how to adapt computers to children few years
ago, when my children were very young and were starting to look at the
computer.
* The only children OS'es currently existing are gaming consoles –
which are just computers, the world is still lacking a standard,
widely-used, computer OS for children (of course many attempts based on
Linux have been made, this is not the subject of this mail!).
* This is an opportunity to accustom children to Linux/FLOSS and
understand that it's just working. They'll then grow with the idea in
mind that Linux works and rocks – supposedly. By the way, they may
transmit this feeling to their parents ;).
I like to say that many large companies do not hesitate to brain-wash
our children. Why FLOSS should not do the same? So let's start spreading
FLOSS to the youngest ones :).
NB: to me Debian is the best candidate. This is a community-only
distribution, one of the most famous ones, this is actually an universal
operating system ;), and it is supported on many different hardware
platforms (we are looking at porting DoudouLinux to ARM).
I wanted those
helping children to have a similar desktop to children, but observe
carefully what pleases children and what frustrates them to feed back
improvements into the *overall* improved quality and ease of use of
Debian, leveraging, if you will, the experiences with children into
improvements for the whole community.
Sounds good. Unfortunately I fear that many projects are just competing
on numbers of features, instead of ease of use, learning curve,
accessibility, coherence, low resources and so. I must say I don't know
the potential Debian has to change this.
However I don't know if our initiative is what everybody needs either.
There are people who say yes, people who say no, telling that children
can use a standard computer easily. I tend to think that our design
principles are universal (provide the user only features that are really
needed for him to do his job) and could guide any developer in his daily
work. Just look at how many features you're regularly using in your
desktop environment and you'll see the gap!
I felt that to try to
reduce it to the lowest common denominator: the unskilled novice
parent
or teacher, we would end up with the blind leading the blind, which
would not benefit either the helper or the child.
My feeling is that today computers are taught as being a modern
typewriter that can optionally send mails and read the news on the
Internet. They are much more than this and this is why we, as
developers, need to spend time in giving children the opportunity to
discover what computers really are. Especially because many companies
want us to just use computers and chain us up to their expensive
services.
I do hope what I've said above
makes some sort of sense, though, and is useful to help continue to
make
Debian better for children in the years to come.
Surely it does!
Cheers,
JM.
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