Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tuesday 05 August 2003 18:55, Ian Hickson wrote:
> Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. The number of
> future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing
> users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian
> itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to
> learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks,
> instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions?
More comfort requires more system resources (except for a few really clever
hacks).
Beginners are most likely willing to accept that a few CPU cycles are used for
making their computing time easier - you'll see that they like icons
(animated ones even), tooltips, first-time wizards and so on.
Now, the unix file system layout was never designed to be end-user friendly in
the beginning (the short ASCII-style file and directory names take care of
that), yet development didn't stop.
What Linux and other OSes lack in the kernel space, has started to exist in
the user space. With KDE, you've got a "Home" folder already and a "Trash"
folder. With GNOME, you've got a "Preferences" container.
You can easily write an implementation which fits your needs, e.g. a KIO slave
for directory name translation, or a Hurd translator for system-level
bindings.
Of course, in order to not be flamed from time to time, you should come up
with a nice concept first. You don't have to write the code yourself, but you
do have to invent the user-friendly layer and make it public.
Josef
--
Play for fun, win for freedom.
Hurd^H^H^H^HLinux-Info-Tag Dresden 2003: http://www.linux-dresden.de
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