7 Jun
2022
7 Jun
'22
5:28 a.m.
On 7 Jun 2022, at 00:53, Henry Bent
<henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 5 Jun 2022 at 21:41, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com
<mailto:crossd@gmail.com>> wrote:
The other day, I needed a Linux machine for work. I grabbed another
NUC and put Arch on it. A vastly different experience: much more akin
to installing 7th Edition than Windows or macOS. Oh! And I missed a
step, so I had to pull some shenanigans to fix that.
Gentoo is even more arcane, but that's essentially an "I want to do everything
myself" distribution. I suppose my point is that there exist a full range of
distributions, from the truly masochistic Linux From Scratch to the most hands-off/static
ChromeOS Flex. I don't believe that any other "OS" has such a wide range
of offerings. This is obviously both a wonderful feature and a confusing nightmare,
depending on your audience.
Lest it be thought that all is sweetness and light in Linux-land, there were years of
fairly intense competition involved in getting installers to the point that you can start
with a downloaded image, burn it to a USB, boot it, run it, and (optionally) make it
persist over a reboot, all with very minimal need to understand or care about the many,
many things going on under the hood.
More recently, installation has become more-or-less settled technology (and so things like
Arch have arisen that specialise away from that experience), and there’s increasing
competition around the end-user experience. Distributions like ChromeOS or
https://elementary.io/ or (from the BSD world!) https://hellosystem.github.io/, are
attempting to provide a more seamless user experience than the standard GNOME-or-KDE
duopoly that has until recently focused on being competitive with decades old
Windows/macOS.
Perhaps that’s something OpenSIMH could take from this history: a focus on painless
installation and a decent UI!
d