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What I would like to see out of PLD

  • May. 2nd, 2005 at 7:42 PM
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aredridel
  • GNOME menus that only contained relevant programs. No lftp, no bc nor dc, perhaps not even the standard X stuff like xterm, xeyes nor xcalc.
  • An installer that doesn't suck. All distro's installers suck these days, PLD's not the most, but still. I want something that lets me partition with fdisk, and then install some pre-set package lists. Being able to customize the installer disk with set listings would be nice.
  • Metapackages for major stuff: a gnome metapackage that contains only but all of the main GNOME release. A KDE metapackage that installs the main KDE release, and a tetex metapackage that installs the whole tetex release. Sometimes I do want to test software as the authors intended it, after all.
  • Theme metapackages.
  • A different init system, preferably as an option. I'd love to see simpleinit coexist with SysV style. Some noop functions in combined scripts would rock.

Comments

( 10 comments — Leave a comment )
bluesbodger
May. 2nd, 2005 07:54 pm (UTC)
Psst... look up what Apple's doing with launchd. I think it's got potential.
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aredridel
May. 2nd, 2005 08:16 pm (UTC)
I was reading about that. Lookin' into it.
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robin_roe
May. 2nd, 2005 08:54 pm (UTC)
On point one, who/what would be the decider(s) of relevancy? Relevancy to whom?

Metapackages are in several distros already... The one i can think of right now is Debian.. :)

Theme metapackages - If we're on the same page, it [i]would[/i] be nice to have a "metatheme" that would include the corresponding sub-themes for say, gnome/firefox/windowmanager/kde/xmms/etc

Why a different init system? It's not the clearest, but my Debian box's init system works well and is adequately comprehensible.
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aredridel
May. 2nd, 2005 09:01 pm (UTC)
SysV, frankly, sucks. It's baroque, in the worst sense of the word.

It's slow, serialized, and brittle. A single process that hangs on startup makes you reboot and fix it, rather than fixing it after boot.
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aredridel
May. 2nd, 2005 09:02 pm (UTC)
Yeah, metapackages just need to be added to PLD.
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aredridel
May. 2nd, 2005 09:03 pm (UTC)
I'd like to see all command-line stuff removed from the GUI menus. There's a terminal for that.

Things that really should have an old .Xclients file to start properly (like preset positioning, things like that), or that work best with window managers that aren't GNOME's, shouldn't be in GNOME menus.

Ideally, I'd love to see the menus be switchable between what they include: I'd love to right-click, properties, and check "Show KDE apps", and uncheck "Show classic X apps", or whatever.
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didzej1
May. 3rd, 2005 01:57 am (UTC)
Some of that could already be possible if the gnome-panel and kicker (or whatever is used to show the menu's) would implement it - most terminal apps have Termina=yes in their .desktop, Qt apps have Categories=Qt; etc. If the app authors would stick with that it wouldn't be hard to just switch on/off a particular category...
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(Anonymous)
May. 9th, 2005 03:19 am (UTC)
Frankly, authors have nothing to say when it comes to .desktop files. PLD provides its own desktop file replacements for most graphical apps.

BTW: I agree that stuff that launches a terminal (except for the terminal itself) should be removed from the menus.

Other than that - all the root-only apps should either have sudo wrappers or should be removed from regular users' menus.

I'd also vote for switching the default GNOME theme to the new clearlooks engine, as PLD default is plain ugly and hardly usable.

-- Patrys
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aredridel
May. 9th, 2005 08:31 am (UTC)
Yes! Or, I'm really liking the refinement of the Milk 2.0 theme. PLD could be -classier- than the rest, y'know.
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(Anonymous)
May. 11th, 2005 03:31 am (UTC)
I kind of understand you here, as I happen to be using Milk 2.0 ;]
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( 10 comments — Leave a comment )