I'd like to see a women's distro
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Sander_Marechal Sep 28, 2007 2:06 PM EDT |
I don't think that a women's distro is all that bad an idea. Not a distro *for* women though. That's quite pointless. But I'd love to see a distro *by* women. Or at least one where the "benevolent dictator for life" is a women. No matter how hard you argue, there simply are differences between the genders. I'm sure that the priority and focus of such a distro would be different. Less eye candy and toys but more polish and usability perhaps? Maybe even something revolutionary, like the first Mandriva was and Ulteo keeps promising to be. Who knows? Oh, and far superior networking and network configuration ofcourse (I'm looking at you TC :-) |
| dinotrac Sep 29, 2007 6:29 AM EDT |
I think you are hitting on something. If we presume that women are not merely carbon copies of men with a few parts rearranged, we allow for the possibility of subtle variations that don't show up or don't show up as strongly in the male geek crowd. What comes to my mind is recent discussions over the Linux scheduler and desktop vs. server orientations. I wonder: would a distro put together by women emphasize things just a little differently? Would we get something more of our non-geek friends might find appealing? Beats the crap out of me, but, if wide acceptance is our goal, it seems counter-productive to have so many of the decisions made by a rather small and narrow segment of the population. Mind you, girl geeks may not be any more representative of the population than boy geeks are, but any broadening (no pun intended -- but enjoyed nevertheless) of the influence pool has got to help. |
| tuxchick Sep 29, 2007 8:07 AM EDT |
Here is what would happen. As soon as a working development site was set up with a bugtracker, version control, dev and user lists, distribution channels, Wiki, and so forth, they would be inundated with floods of "OMG!!!WTFF!! grrlzorz!! Plz I can haz pics? w boobeez? LOL." And that's just the G-rated crap, I won't post examples of the X-rated spew that will inevitably rain down. |
| dinotrac Sep 29, 2007 8:31 AM EDT |
>And that's just the G-rated crap, I won't post examples of the X-rated spew that will inevitably rain down. Sigh. |
| azerthoth Sep 29, 2007 10:13 AM EDT |
Unfortunately I can see TC's version happening as well. Still it would be interesting to see the direction a distro would take with a female "benevolent dictator". Even if only in the form of a discussion of what women would do differently. Hard to do even that discussion though without the "boobeez plz" brigade interrupting and destroying what in other ways could be a positive idea. Its times like these where I am ashamed of humanity in general. |
| Scott_Ruecker Sep 29, 2007 10:23 AM EDT |
Quoting:..they would be inundated with floods of "OMG!!!WTFF!! grrlzorz!! Plz I can haz pics? w boobeez? LOL." And that's just the G-rated crap, I won't post examples of the X-rated spew that will inevitably rain down. Carla, Yes there would be the initial flood of crud from the din but that doesn't make it not worth doing. I believe that a and/or any distro put together by a Woman and/or Women to be a noble cause and a positive reflection on Open Source. It would be one of the coolest things about Linux...an operating system built by Women..how awesome would that be? :-) |
| tuxchick Sep 29, 2007 10:40 AM EDT |
Well Scott, you know what they say about pioneers- they're the ones with all the arrows in their backs. It would definitely have its cool points as a project to inspire more girls and women to get involved in FOSS, and as a showcase of the possibilities in FOSS. Just don't kid yourself about the the size and intensity of the backlash. It will be horrid. |
| hkwint Sep 29, 2007 1:35 PM EDT |
Well, if 'spamming' (unwanted messages) were to be the only problem, that could be fixed, not? There are ads on LXer forums as well, disguised ads might appear on Wikipedia, and someone smart could write a bot to submit ads to Ubuntu bugzilla. There are the 'you want to see (my) boobies'-mail in my inbox as well. You see, not only women suffer from those sexist remarks; men might as well. You don't want to know the number of mails I receive for certain enlargements. This might lead to me thinking there's something wrong with me; and on the other hand, women who receive those same mails might think all man with small sizes must be very unhappy -- those ads are only spread if some men use those stuff, so obviously males do care. You also don't want to know about the mails asking me if I care to hook up with 'married moms'. Honestly, I'm being fed up with that kind of mails. It is proven the non-realistic role models the advertisers force upon us make us unhappy, and spam is part of it. Probably, in the hypothetical case I was female and they would know, I wouldn't get those mails, right? While the ad with the female (our servers won't get down on you neither) is insulting to women, in my opinion its also insulting to males who sit behind the screen 'above average' as well. So, while a women-only distro could lead to problems, a male-only distribution could lead to enlargement- hook up with moms- our servers won't get down on you neither- spam. I see it like this: At the places there's abuse, something needs to be done about it. That's the reason there are logins and passwords, why there are anti-spam-tools - and so on. Sure, the pioneers will receive a horrid number of arrows in their backs. That's why they need to build 'protection' against the stupid people shooting those arrows. Moreover, the more targets there are, the less arrows they will receive per person. As a remark: I did study applied sciences for about one year and a half: over fifty men and only three women. As far as I know, nobody made any sexist remarks about that fact; they were accepted equally as my male colleagues. So I know it _is_ possible, though it might not be likely. Normally, I wouldn't care to go into this kind of details, but since it involves a question I sometimes ask myself: 'How would this world look if more women were in powerful positions?' I felt I had to. I do believe women would make less war, though I'm not sure. Back to Linux-distributions: It would be far better if women were equal represented in the developers of a certain distribution, but if they are being chased off by other devels, they only can start their own distro. Look at the Gentoo-management conflict to see how a management/devel-team with only man in it might lead to conflicts, mainly because of big egos. Nothing granted, but it might have gone different if there was more diversity in the management/devel team. BTW Distributions need women, women don't need "womenized' distro's". I recall there just has been a survey in which it appeared almost no women do want a 'ladyphone' with the pink case and fake-diamonds. The same will probably be true for Linux-distributions. |
| techiem2 Sep 29, 2007 1:56 PM EDT |
On the topic of men harassing women on the net, xkcd hit it the other day. http://xkcd.com/322/ Enjoy. :) I as well think the idea of a "distro for women" is rather silly. I do think the idea of a distro by women is interesting, but as pointed out, the process may be rather tough on its starters unfortunately. |
| jdixon Sep 29, 2007 2:57 PM EDT |
> Probably, in the hypothetical case I was female and they would know, I wouldn't get those mails, right? Those emails are sent out blind. They don't care who gets them as long as enough get through. My wife gets them all the time. |
| tracyanne Sep 29, 2007 4:36 PM EDT |
A distro by women would be an interesting project, it would be interesting to see what could be done, and what we could do better and or different. The stupidity that Carla talks about is a far too likely occurrence. But shit like that can be for the most part deleted. I guess it depends on the women involved and whether they are prepared to accept that it WILL happen and are prepared to live with it in the short term. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 29, 2007 4:43 PM EDT |
Quoting:And that's just the G-rated crap, I won't post examples of the X-rated spew that will inevitably rain down. Well, they have invented wonderful tools for that. Things like "The Ban Hammer" and spam filters and what not (most spamfilters are bayesian and can be trained. If you can train a filter to respond to V1@gr@, you can train one to respond to "OMG titties!" and marriage proposals). Like hkwint said, it's not like women are the only one's targeted with unwanted messages. And like Scott said, no-one claimed it would be easy. But I'd just love to see the result. And IMHO it wouldn't need to be a distro run by women. Just as long as it's a women calling the shots. If a women is in charge and she has 10 male developers backing her up, I doubt there would be as much crap posted as when you'd have a distro run entirely by women. I'm not interesed in a distro fully ran by women. I already know they can code. What I'm interested is a distro where a women sets the priorities and tells the devs what has to be done for the next release. |
| tracyanne Sep 29, 2007 8:54 PM EDT |
One of the things I'd like to see in a distro is better documention in the package management system. That and a seperation of the libraries and the applications that use those libraries. This is one of the main things that people I introduce to Linux complain about. They love the idea of the package manager, and being able to install almost any application from a single point, but find the fact that you need to know what you are looking for to find what you are looking for a real pain in the arse, and frankly so do I. A package manager with better search such that one could look for specific types of applications - and yes I do know that urpmi and synaptic have categories, but even when you use these you get the libraries as well as the applications you are trying to find. A clear demarcation between libraries and applications would be really useful. Perhaps dividing the view into three panels "Categories", "Applications" and "Dependencies" would help. Another useful change would be good descriptions of the applications - Things like "a clone of xyz witten in Python using the klmno libraries" isn't all that helpful to someone simply trying to find a application to install and run, especially when that person is new to Linux and Free Software. |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 30, 2007 1:38 AM EDT |
Quoting:Perhaps dividing the view into three panels "Categories", "Applications" and "Dependencies" would help. It would help in more than one way. Imagine removing an application. If packages were split out like you said, you'd be able to automatically remove it's unused dependencies as well. It would need one extra option though. "Install as application", so that I can tell the package manager never to remove a certain package, even though it thinks it's unused (e.g. because I use it for software that I build myself and is not managed by the package manager). Come to think of it, the best place to mark a package as an application or a dependency is probably not in the package itself, but in the dependency list of another application. That's because you'd still need to support speudo-packages (e.g. install package "gnome-desktop" and it installs all the applications and libraries that make up a default Gnome desktop). One package might install Yacc as a dependecy, but some user might install Yacc because he actually uses it himself. |
| jacog Sep 30, 2007 2:22 AM EDT |
I might have a solution to the "photies plz ov b00bz" problem. I refer you to a web site I regularly go to for game reviews... http://fourfatchicks.com/ ... The site is called Four Fat Chicks, and they review games that are story/narrative heavy. Now, I have no idea if indeed the staffers there are "four fat chicks", but I imagine they don't get much of the abovementioned problem. So there... you just name your distro something that might dissuade these peeps. Of course, it won't work for intellectual pervs like myself. :P There's nothing as hot as a big pair of cranial lobes. *duck and cover* Haha... I am reminded of a "I'm not at the Linux expo to get hit on" article from a few weeks back. |
| jezuch Sep 30, 2007 5:42 AM EDT |
Quoting:Imagine removing an application. If packages were split out like you said, you'd be able to automatically remove it's unused dependencies as well. You don't need anything like that for automatic removal of dependencies. Aptitude had it for ages and even APT itself got it implemented recently. When you install a package, you install it "as an application", as you say, and the dependencies are pulled and marked as "automatically installed". When you remove all packages that depend on an automatically installed one, it gets removed too. I love it, because I hate having an unused package on my disk. What I'd like to see is a more visible concept of an "application". Right now we have a somewhat opaque pile of packages. If someone tells you "install OpenOffice", what should you look for? Sure, there are metapackages that depend on all important pieces, but that's not it. I think that using Debian's concept of source packages would be helpful here, but that might be too corase-grained, maybe. I heard that some package managers try to do something like this, but I haven't tried it. I'm a hardcore Debian user and I don't really care ;) |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 30, 2007 6:58 AM EDT |
Quoting:even APT itself got it implemented recently Ah, that's news to me. Let me guess, it's not in Etch but in Lenny? Quoting:What I'd like to see is a more visible concept of an "application". I think that Ubuntu's "add/remove software" is pretty good in that regard. |
| jezuch Sep 30, 2007 3:41 PM EDT |
Quoting:Let me guess, it's not in Etch but in Lenny? I'm afraid you're right :) |
| tracyanne Oct 01, 2007 1:52 AM EDT |
Quoting:You don't need anything like that for automatic removal of dependencies. One of the problems of the automatic removal of dependencies is that often packages you don't want removed are removed, this seems to be typical of RPM based package systems, at any rate. I'm not sure what happens with debs. I'd like to see more work in isolating the libraries that are actually need to be removed, and leave the ones that are used by other applications. I guess the problem is that often an application level package gets installed simply because it supplies the needed libraries for some other application, and when you remove one or the other, both get removed. This seems like a rather insane way of doing things, to my mind. |
| jezuch Oct 01, 2007 4:43 AM EDT |
Quoting:I guess the problem is that often an application level package gets installed simply because it supplies the needed libraries for some other application, and when you remove one or the other, both get removed. This won't happen with APT if the dependencies are specified correctly (which is usually assured at build time by debhelper's dh_shlibdeps). It's sort of like reference counting in programming :) As long as there's a package which depends on a library, this library will stay installed, even with automatic removal. (well, that's the theory - and my experience so far - but there may be bugs, corner cases and stuff) |
| azerthoth Oct 01, 2007 9:33 AM EDT |
jezuch one of the big "corner cases" where dependency removal breaks down with apt and aptitude is meta packages. Heck even changing kernels from I386 to K7 will leave you with apt looking for and installing packages for the wrong arch type. Sure 99.9% of the time it honestly makes no difference but that .1% can kick you hard if you aren't aware of the underlying issue. |
| jezuch Oct 01, 2007 5:02 PM EDT |
Yes. That's why I'd use aptitude for this ;) It has smarter conflict resolution algorithms than plain APT, and you can tweak things interactively. |
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