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SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

symphonyos.com

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Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#31

Post by keithpeter »

ryanq_do wrote: post #28
keithpeter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could find a volunteer with a little time to just add a list of packages and functions available from the live image to the Web site? That would help the distro collectors to decide if this is interesting or not.

Distrowatch has a partial list here: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=symphony Symphony showing up on the front page of HN was a total surprise to me today. As a sole developer my focus right now is on the new build and next month's release. I agree that the site is way to sparse and could be much better (it was thrown together in one evening) but focusing on the site would only take away from the limite…

Get a volunteer on it. Someone who wants visibility and to develop some documentation skills. You stay with the main focus. Your HN exposure has convinced me to try the iso!!

Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#32

Post by keithpeter »

ryanq_do wrote: post #26
keithpeter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote from Wikipedia page about the OS "At first, Symphony OS was based on Knoppix. Since its May 2006 release it is no longer based on Knoppix, but rather on Debian unstable, and features a functional hard drive installer." Debian Sid is viable as the basis for desktop use, but there can be issues now and again and they can persist for a week or two. Just wondering at the target market for this one. Always fun to do…

The current release available on the website is based on Debian Wheezy and was released in January. A new release, with a completely re-written desktop, based on Ubuntu will be coming out next month. The wikipedia page is out of date in many places

Thanks for clarification. Wheezy is mega-stable at present. Good luck with the transition to Ubuntu!! Quite a job.

Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#34

Post by keithpeter »

destinyislands wrote: post #30
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #21

Yay! Another F*cking linux distro to learn about! Linux distros may not be as common as JS frameworks, but they're almost there. Just install Arch and have done with it, people. It's like having your own distro, but without all the annoying bits.

What's your opinion of Arch vs Ubuntu? I've done Ubuntu for servers but haven't spent much time with Linux as a personal OS

Disclaimer: I'm a civilian. I just use Linux on a couple of laptops.

Arch is a rolling distro with fairly recent applications. Updates most days. Applications and system files stay in testing for a period then get pushed out. Very occasional breakage. Installer is bare-bones and uses linux commands a lot.

Ubuntu is a 'staged' distro as you well know. I imagine you were using Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu on your servers (10.04, 12.04, 14.04 and so on). The same applies to desktops so 14.04 has pretty stable packages. Ubuntu have announced application upgrades within the LTS period recently. The intermediate releases are supported for 9 months and will therefore have applications nearer to the most recent stable. Not too many updates once you get out of the immediate release period.

You might want to have a look at Debian. Unstable is not as quick as Arch with updated applications &c but pretty close. Stable is pretty stable for a couple of years at a time. Repository is huge.

Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#35

Post by fak3r »

I was very interested in this back in the day, in fact, I wrote a HOWTO to get the desktop bit run under Ubuntu: https://fak3r.com/2006/01/31/howto-mezzo-desktop-on-ubuntu/

I'm sure that's not going to work anymore, but I got a lot of questions and comments about that post, there was significant interest. Here's hoping a new release comes out in January and people can try it out.

Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#38

Post by david-given »

ryanq_do wrote: post #27
david-given wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any videos of the new Mezzo in action? It occurs to me that my post was unduly dismissive. I totally believe that most modern UIs are horribly broken, and I completely sympathise with the 'burn it all down!' approach. But forcing everybody to change their workflow because reasons is, I believe, not it. (Though I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.)

Many of the concepts we built into Symphony have since become common in major desktop and mobile environments such as fullscreen menus and hot corners. The project started in 2004 when I as a web developer wanted to start playing in the Desktop space and decided to give it a shot with the tools I knew. These days it's a personal side project that I wish I had more time for. I do not have any videos of the new build i…

Mmm.

I loathe hot corners; every day or so I accidentally lock the screen on my work macbook because when I fling the mouse pointer out of the way of what I'm looking at it hits a corner.

I also loathe full-screen menus. Screens are big, and having the entire contents of my screen be replaced with an information-heavy overlay is a non-trivial perceptual context switch which instantly causes me to lose my place in what I was doing. You underestimate how cheap a right-click menu selection can be; press, drag a small distance down, let go. And if the app's designed properly you can right click anywhere.

(Which, to be honest, most apps aren't. I grew up on RISC OS, which was driven entirely by context menus, and did this stuff right --- each app was a single context target. Modern apps have different contexts for every tiny UI element. Web browsers are particularly bad; I can't count the number of time I've done 'Open in new tab' rather than 'Back' because the mouse just happened to be on a link rather than a text area.)

My point is: one size doesn't fit all.

Re: SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful

#40

Post by ank_the_elder »

jbssm wrote: post #12

I fail to see how a desktop UI based on HTML5 can be marketed as "light".

Absolutely. If anything, it should be tight, native code with little bells and whistles and tuned for speed. HTML5, its DOM model and Javascript are hardly fit for embedded / old / constrained environments.
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