What would you like to see in a distro?

[BlahBlah_X]

Hello. I know that there are many distros out there with different goals. I was wondering if you guys see a gap for a distro I could make.

Tell me your desired base, "geekiness", software, and features that you would like to see.

[bigtomrodney]

Honestly I get everything I need from existing distros. The only things lacking are things that are proprietary that I wouldn't want included, and if I did I could use something like Sabayon or Linux Mint. It seems to me that every time I put something on my wishlist it is usually fulfuilled within months, that is with the obvious exception of ATI and nVidia drivers.

[techieMoe]

Honestly I get everything I need from existing distros. The only things lacking are things that are proprietary that I wouldn't want included, and if I did I could use something like Sabayon or Linux Mint. It seems to me that every time I put something on my wishlist it is usually fulfuilled within months, that is with the obvious exception of ATI and nVidia drivers.

I have to agree. There are a handful of useful non-OSS programs I enjoy on Mac OS X, but they're not mission-critical. I could easily do everything I do day to day in one of the major Linuxes available such as Ubuntu or a derivative.

Included Nvidia or ATI drivers is a plus, but I've installed them myself so many times it's hardly a clencher for me. Overall I'm pretty happy with the way the major distributions are going and there's no single stand out thing that I'd like to see added.

[BlahBlah_X]

I was thinking of making a light version of MEPIS with beryl not on default and lighter software. And XFCE 4.4

I think that would be helpful because many people are newbies want to try MEPIS on an old computer and the result is less than stellar.

What do you think?

[techieMoe]

I was thinking of making a light version of MEPIS with beryl not on default and lighter software. And XFCE 4.4

I think that would be helpful because many people are newbies want to try MEPIS on an old computer and the result is less than stellar.

What do you think?

Well, I don't really see how that's any different than XUbuntu, since both are based on Ubuntu and use Xfce.

[oz]

Might as well throw in my two cents...

I have to agree that there's no real need for more new distros. However, most of the current distros have lots of room for help with development.

Another thing that might be useful is package development, or improvement. I'm always hearing users say they can't find a linux package that'll do what some certain Windows package will do. We need more really good native Linux apps. I'm not a big fan of emulators.

[likwid]

I want an enterprise linux clone for sparcs. Probably going to build it myself once my sparc cluster is up and running. (if it ever is lol)

[bidi]

I want an enterprise linux clone for sparcs. Probably going to build it myself once my sparc cluster is up and running. (if it ever is lol)

Last I heard, CentOS had a SPARC port! I checked their website and it's version 4.2beta, so not as up-to-date as one would want but it's a good starting point.

As for the original question, I would like to see a distro that integrate the GNUstep environment! There's a FreeBSD fork out there called MidnightBSD that is trying to do this. There's also two LiveCDs, GNUSTEP and the Etoile project's LiveCD, but besides that it seems like everyone else over looks a project that is more powerful than almost anything else out there.

Another thing I'd like to see is a GNU OS distribution, with the Hurd (as opposed to a GNU/Linux distro). So far the only one around is Debian's attempt, which falls a bit short. I probably want to see something like what Slackware did for Linux, an easy to use/install distro.

[likwid]

The sparc port of centos is old and running a buggy version of SILO, which stops most installations before they even start. There also seems to be a problem with some kernels on the blade 1000/2000's. This is the problem with most sparc distributions right now. SILO has a bunch of bugs for instance you have to cold boot the machine to boot from cd properly. I had other problems too, I can't remember them all but eventually I said screw it and installed gentoo, because it had an updated version of silo and a kernel that actually booted. I am not very impressed. It took about a week to get everything downloaded, compiled, and configured. This would have taken two hours with an EL clone.

If CentOS is doing active development for SPARC, and my 30 blade 100's aren't junk, I will probably offer up the compute power for some building of the OS if they need it (sparc clusters running linux are rare). I'm just waiting on some ram now to test them... Praying I didn't pick up a load of junked boxes.

[Vergil83]

I have said it before and will say it again. No new distro, but innovative new interfaces.