Re: SEUL: The outline of an end-user distro

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Dennis Leeuw wrote:
> 
> IMHO, a distro for an end-user should be plain, simple and always the
> same. This might be obvious, but anyway...
> 
> I think we have two different kinds of end-users. First there is the
> home-user and second we have the office-user. Both are two differnt
> types, with different wishes. To name a simple difference: the home-user
> expects a simple PPP configuration, while the office-user wants a simple
> network connection.

I think you're missing quite a bit of differentiation here.  There
aren't just home- and office-users; there are also school-users,
artist-users, scientific-users, etc.  To keep things manageable, you may
want to define two generic configurations--occasional-net-connect and
permanent-net-connect.  Then you could have further "profiles" for the
various uses.  For home, there would be games, simple productivity apps,
personal finance programs, "edutainment" programs, etc.  For general
office, there would be more extensive productivity apps, time management
programs, accounting programs, etc.  For school, productivity apps,
courseware, graphics, school administration programs, etc.  I'm sure you
get the idea.

On the seul-edu mailing list we toyed with the idea of a distro for the
educational community, but decided that it made more sense to package a
bouquet of useful programs as a profile that could be used with whatever
distro the user chose.  That way we didn't have to be concerned with
lots of non-educational things that many other groups were already
working out.

> A more healthy discussion on this point to me is the following: Since we
> seem to agree on GPL, and non-commercial, how do we feel e.g. QT from
> Troll and the KDE desktop?
> 
All of our seul-edu-developed programs will be GPLed, but I personally
think the qt license is close enough to OSS to be of little concern.  I
still think that GNOME has more long-term potential, though.  Actually,
I lean toward GNUstep over either of them, myself.

-- 
Doug Loss                 A life spent making mistakes is not only
Data Network Coordinator  more honorable, but more useful than a
Bloomsburg University     life spent doing nothing.
dloss@bloomu.edu                G. B. Shaw