Re: LiteStep and Linux?

What makes Litestep... Litestep is simply a plain text based 
configuration system that loads plugins and provides access to Windows 
shell resources for those plugins.  Litestep is a *replacement* shell 
(keep that in mind).

The thing that people don't understand is that *underneath* of Litestep 
is a standardized OS and shell services that doesn't vary much from one 
person's desktop to the next.  So regardless of how archaic Litestep may 
be to some peoples view point, they can still work with it because 
everything else on their OS is familiar (notepad, explorer file manager, 
alt+tab, download-able install packages etc).  There is no learning 
curve beyond Litestep.

Now jump into Linux... a whole different story.  There are desktop 
environments (DE) out there that are also a plain text file 
configuration that load plugins.  Not really any different than what we 
see in Litestep.  The biggest difference is what is running under the 
DE... the resources provided.  Because the OS setup could be any 
combination of distro, window manager etc, this type of DE does not get 
a lot of support or plugins written for it, and the plugins that do get 
written for it are probably not going to target the same resources you 
have available on your system.

So, the big fellas, KDE, GNOME... the ones that have included the 
kitchen sink, well for these a lot of plugins have been written.  But 
like Explorer, the target audience doesn't want to mess with 
configuration as much, and therefor the configuration can't be free-form.

Remember I mentioned that Litestep is a *replacement* shell?  Well, you 
could take a KDE system as your "standard", and replace the KDE 
configuration system and plugin architecture with a different one, 
utilizing all other aspects of a KDE install.  As when replacing 
Explorer in Windows, one would have to offer interfaces to the KDE 
services etc.  With that, you would now have a replacement shell for KDE 
systems (whether that replacement shell was written in the vein of 
geoshell, bblean, or litestep is besides the point).

"Litestep for Linux" is an oxymoron.

chris


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