Re: Announcing GoboLinux 016 alpha

On Oct 13, 2016 7:19 PM, "Hugo Barrocas" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Agreed on the sane recipes.
> Provides a cleaner and faster instalation, and afterwards each user
> can install/compile whatever he/she wants, but at least the
> LibreOffice suite would be nice to have.
>
> "The ISO is already at 1.5GB". Right, I also noticed that.
> What I'm failing to understand is how the ISO from Gobo014 was so
> small with 700mb CD size, loaded with full KDE3 and lots of apps, and
> now it got a whole lot chunkier to 1.5gb, but it only has a stripped
> off Awesome and almost no apps?
> I'm not a programmer, so it looks somewhat strange.

It does. There were some duplicated files and some files including
debugging information in the alpha, so that bloated the ISO up and was easy
to spot, but it's still not as small as it could (should?) be.

The goal for this release was not to provide a full desktop experience
out-of-the-box, but to have a base system from which one can then tailor to
their needs.

With that in mind, the reality is that Gobo is not suited for non-technical
users, so being able to use the terminal is a practical requirement. Not
including a file manager stresses that (a technical user can get one
running easily, as you already did).

Maintaining a full desktop is a lot of work nowadays, and the moment a user
sees a graphical file manager, they also expect device automounting,
mime-types properly configured across all packages, etc etc etc... and they
are right. But we can't commit to providing that now.

We used the basic ALFS system to get a system with build tools running, and
then BLFS to get X and some more utilities.

We ended up compiling some more stuff that we personally often use and
which are easy to compile (Gimp, ffmpeg), but the more I think about it,
the more I think there was no objective criteria for picking them.

Right now I think a good point to stop would be to have the hardware
essentials working (video, sound, network, printer), a terminal and a
browser (in order to find stuff, read docs, etc) and that's it. With this,
a user should be able to tailor the system to their needs.

Less packages means a smaller ISO, less maintenance effort, and that
hopefully means more frequent releases. :)

One simple thing I think would do wonders for improve the first-time
experience would be to pop up a Tutorial doc (like the "at a glance" page)
when the desktop first starts.

-- Hisham

_______________________________________________
gobolinux-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-users