LinuxPlanet: .comment: Luddite Linux; The Role of the Modern GUI

[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]

“People were interested in making computers easy to use long
before there were graphical user interfaces. They succeeded. You
did have to know some things about how computers worked if you were
able, say, to save a file and find it later. You still do. The
route Linux took was far different. … That whole text-based phase
of development never really took place. …the broad range of
console productivity applications never appeared, because the jump
from guru command prompt was directly to X. Why? Because
Microsoft said that was where users wanted to be. Programmers and
users believed Microsoft.”

“I… have a stack of machines in the other room, with various
monitors (even an EGA) and 386 and 486 processors of various
speeds. The hard drives are all big for their day and all under a
gig. I rescued all of them from the dump. … All are capable of
running Linux, but they’re a little thin for anything other than
use as maybe a firewall machine or something. … There are
millions of machines like them. They could be doing good work at
schools and in charitable organizations. But there is no software
available for them.”

“Nowadays, it seems as if everyone who has a CD burner is a
Linux distributor. It is possible to have favorites among the
distributions–I certainly do, though I haven’t tried them all–but
there is a certain sameness to them. How lovely it would be to see
someone strike out in an entirely different direction, not to
support the hottest new hardware but to maximize the utility of
Linux on low-end machines. I betcha it would be possible to put
together a distribution that would cook along on a 386-16 with 16
megs as well as DOS ever did. A little menuing program and a group
of useful applications–some are already written–would make it
user-friendly. (And this Luddite Linux, as I’ll call it, would
simply scream on a fast machine.) Graphical programs? Can you say
runtime X?”

Complete
Story