I have spent the past five days cut out from outside world without phone operator willing to repair ADSL. I have spent the past days replacing logos (hate this) and in writing some web pages. At this point having an updated web site is far more important than having a complete web site, a pretty one or even one without broken links. So here is the front page, the flaws page (exposing why I think we need a free distro focusing in the deskop and an incomplete FAQ (provocative) for discussion. -- Jean Francois Martinez The Independence project: because Linux should be for everyone http://independence.seul.orgTitle: Independence Linux: because Linux should be for everyone
"Free software should not be for programmers only, it should be for everyone." Richard Stallman
We, at Independence, strongly believe that Linux should be for everyone, we believe that being free of abusive licenses, crashes and virus alerts should not be a privilege only enjoyed by the IT specialists. This should be a right for everyone. That is why we want a Linux who is easy to use and gives realistic answers to users needs.
Independence is a non for profit Linux distribution made by volunteers. It can be freely distributed under the terms of the GPL>. Indy is not yet another distribution: its spirit is in being made by users trying to help other users, its spirit is in caring about their real needs not about, its spirit is in trying to do something about those 95% people prisonners of proprietary systems, its spirit is in trying to do something about the desktop and the personal computer since this is where those 95% people are. We think a free distribution made by users living in the trenches is needed because both the commercial and the present free distributions have a development model who is fundamentally flawed when considering the desktop and private computers. That is why we started Independence.
First of all it is GPL. We cannot and don't want consider basing on a
distribution with another license.
Second: The people we target
need paper doc and don't go to geek-oriented stores so we had to base
on a distro you can find books about it on common book stores even if
you don't live in a major city or university center.
Third:
Third party software and drivers: most projects and hardware
manufacturers build their drivers and software for RedHat and that
means they will install out of the box on Redhat but will need
tweaking, or even recompiling on other distributions. Even for
Mandrake and Suse it is far harder to get third party prebuilt
software than for RedHat and situation will not change as long as
Redhat is number one. We can make a good desktop distribution from a
Redhat base and get the benefits of being compatible with it,
if would have been faster to make a good desktop from Mandrake but we
cannot change world and ensure manufacturers would ship drivers built
for Mandrake (and thus compatible with a Mandrake-based Independence).
However we plan on introducing features from other distributions when
it can be done without major compatibility problems.
In the traditional Unix world you had a teacher who gave you a
gentle introduction to Unix and when you were in trouble you
called the sysadmin. In Indy we assume the user has no teacher and
sysadmin. You need to be brave to tackle a system in those
conditions. Also between the people I know there is a nuclear
scientist and a mathematician. Thinking they are dumb just because
they don't know much about system administration is laughable.
Enabling Linux for the brave who want to be free :-), ie selfteachers,
and nuclear scientists, who have better things to do than reading
HOWTOs this is not dumbing down Linux, this is dumbing it UP.
Adavanced distributions are in fact broken No, it aims at solving pratical probelms , kids educations. It also aims at users who want to concentrate on their work
Linux has become far easier to use in the last years. However there are still many problems unsolved, specially for use of Linux in the desktop or in the home computer. But what is worse is that the development model of both the commercial and the present non-commercial distributions doesn't lead to solve these problems.
A company who doesn't make money just dies. In the case of commercial Linux distributions the need to make money leads to:
Having tons of software in a distribution leads to higher sales: user
thinks he gets more for his money and in addition, critics in
magazines give higher notes to distributions who have many CDs of
software. But is that useful to have ten window managers in a
distribution? The user will only use one, perhaps two, if we account
for other people with different tastes we will have only thre or four
WMs being really used. The additional ones just confuse the user as
he tries to find what he needs between dozens of window managers, web
servers or programming languages. In addition some of this additional
software could be unmaintained, buggy or quite simply is no longer
state of the art and if user stumbles upon it he will get a bad
impression of Linux.
We, at Independence, have a different philosophy: what we try to do is
increase not the volume but the
usefulness of the distribution
Features increase sales only if they are seen by the user. Between those features the most important are those who are immediately seen by the user since the people who write critics in magazines rarely givse more than a cursory glance to the distribution once he has completed installation. That leads to slick installations and, at times, quite nice configuration tools. It does not lead to making distributions robust to user mistakes, eg X will not start if font server has been stopped by the user, despite this being crucial in a system like Linux where many users have to care for themselves from day one when they have zero knowledge. It does not lead to making it easier to recover from disaster. It could lead to flashy PPP configurators but it rarely leads to including a cache server designing for dial up links or in taking special actions when link is up, eg routing mail and news, and that means increased phone costs for the user. Since robustness and adequacy to real conditions have lower visibility than flashy installations and config tools they have a lower impact on sales and thus they get lower priority in development.
In 1994 or 1995 it was perhaps possible to make money selling boxed distributions since this main channel for people getting Linux. But Linux success has lead to main stream magazines including Linux CDs, while the availability of cheap CDROM burners and high speed connectivity like ADSL and cable have allowed people to download full distributions and make CDROMs of them. These factors have made impossible for Linux companies to live from their sales of boxed sets. Instead they rely on services and support but in these areas the people who are ready to pay are the server people not the desktop people or the private users. A private user will, usually, get info from newsgroups and even when he is ready to pay for support you can only charge modest sums per incident and thus you need many, many incidents and a costly infrastructure to make any money from support to private users. However in the server area, what is at stake for the server owner can reach several millions of dollars. He will not want to take chances and will gladly pay thousands of dollars for support. It is far easier to make money from supporting a few customers paying large fees than from thousands of people paying small fees and able to use newsgroups instead of your support. So while some distributions have used the desktop and private user markets in order to get notoriety, eg Mandrake, the fact is sooner or later they have to reorient towards the server. Or die. This means that the task of adapting Linux to the desktop and to private users cannot be done by the commercial distributions.
Since they don't depend on income from the server side The light could have come from non commercial distributions like Debian, Stampede and Slackware but "user friendly" is not precisely what comes to mind when referring to them. For one part most of their founders knew Unix well before Linux was created and thus their thinking was restricted to "was teached Unix at University with a sysadmin caring for the box" instead of "faced frightening ordeals while learning Linux unassisted" so the need of making Linux easier to use was out of their minds. For another part the lack of a profit incentive have led developers in these distributions to reorient towards what was intellectually pleasant for them instead of what could gain users for Linux: in the home pages or in the founding texts of these projects we read Slackware aims at "being pure Unix", Stampede at "being the fastest distribution", and what Ian Jackson wrote in first issue of Linux journal was about making Debian the best chiseled distribution but there is no mention of making it easy to use or in making it wrestle millions of users from Microsoft. Today Debian has made tools for keeping distribution up to date who are superior to those of commercial distributions but kernel recompiling is still mandatory and AFAIK it still does not recognize hardware. Under Linux, except for monitors, making an installation who recognizes hardware is trivially simple since it only requires parsing a few /proc files and the output of pnpdump. The Debian people has spent on dpkg and apt-get thousands of times more resources than would have been needed to lift the two biggest obstacles to generalized Linux use. The only possible conclusion is they were not interested.
I greatly admire Mandrake, I consider it is presently the easiest Linux distribution and it is full of clever ideas for making it easier to use and more realistic (AFAIK it is the only distribution who sends mail automatically when dial up link is brought up). In many ways Mandrake is already where Independence wants to go. However Mandrake ships a tool for scanning Windows networks who is completely undaequate. Why? Because when you live in a Unix/linux stronghold like the Mandrake developers and you test it against a single Windows target then it works perfectly, you only notice its flaws when you live in a real world network with dozens of Windows computers around you. This is an example of how, even in a distribution as firmly committed to realism and easiness of use as Mandrake, errors are made due to developers living in a different world than users. Other typical errors (mostly not in Mandrake) due to distance between developers and users are: assumming the user has a sysadmin who will keep him out of trouble, assumming the user does not pay the phone and power bills, assuming the user will know how to fix a badly tuned X who lets unused two inches of the monitor or that the user will be happy with a web browser whose display is unreadable due to bad fonts.