Operating System U Now Solicits Community Ideas

[FLHerne]

The name could be worse .. System D springs to mind

Not 'System D', 'systemd', in the ancient fashion of UNIX daemons. If $PURPOSE'd' is a stupid name, a good chunk of your core system is stupidly named.

On-topic, this does sound like a Dunning-Kruger thing - someone without the distro-maintaining experience to know how much work and trouble is involved, who's come up with an 'awesome idea'. Happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt whatever money they get through Kickstarter will see much use.

[silix]

A man should be judged by his deeds, not by his age.

true, but the problem is not the age
the problem is the disingenous train of thought that goes from making a new linux distribution (that probably only some ten's users people in the world, including the project founder and his friends, will ever use), to adoption by oem's and consequently, $$$

these guys forget or dont know that for an OS to be preinstalled on OEM machine it must be
- convenient (how much does it cost to implement it? can it be made as a single system image to be deployed on millons of machines of varying hw configuration, at little to no added cost at the manufacturing process level? )
- market effective: if a "de facto standard" os has a userbase of, say, 90% of the desktop segment, and i make desktops, i can assume a 90% chance for a possible buyer for my pc's to in turn want the "industry standard" OS - thus preinstallating it gives me a 90% confidence i will actually cater to the market's needs with a single product
even more so if said os is not a fragmented platform but rather a unified self compatible one, if it ' s an easier to use and a more consistent desktop than alternative Os's, if most if not all industry recognized applications are available for it anyway

now, as much as gnu linux is a niche as far as the desktop is concerned, some distributions actually have a chance to be oem-preinstalled, because they are the most relevant in the whole linux ecosystem and thus have a kind of industry recognition outside that niche
but a fork (thus a subset of the userbase) of an already geeky one (thus a niche of the niche)?

not to mention the second disingenous train of thought according to which wayland is what will make a distribution perfect ad easy to use ... disregarding the fact that there's a heap of stuff the user will notice (and to intervene on to improve the UX) before a core, under the hood component such as a wayland compositor (with the wayland protocol not perfect yet, either - minimize, anyone?)

[chris200x9]

This WILL fail with NO funding. I said it in the other thread kickstarter is not indiegogo there is no flexible funding, it's all or nothing. Theres no way in hell they can raise 150K on just ideas with no real work shown, hell most half finished things can't raise that much.

[jmcknight]

Technological hurdles/near impossibilities aside, I find there to be something really sort of sketchy about this. They're wanting to raise $150,000 for a forked project and otherwise looking to cash in on Arch when I'm positive that collectively, the Arch project hasn't seen that much money in donations in the entire time they've been an active distro. I find that this devalues Arch and the many years of work put into it all because someone with more ambition than smarts thinks this is going to actually go somewhere and compete with RHEL and Ubuntu.

As previous posts have mentioned, I'd like to see some community involvement and some sort of proof-of-concept because as it is now, they're asking for funding based entirely on ideas and ambition with nothing at present to show for it.

This is a lofty idea that's going to go nowhere. If you have any inkling to donate money to Operating System U, throw the Arch Linux project some of your money instead. They're the ones doing the hard work that's supposedly going to give this project ground to stand on.

[ChrisXY]

http://www.operatingsystemu.com/

We are revamping the website and project. Some notable changes are xorg instead of Wayland and Majaro instead of Arch. We are also delaying our kickstarter 15 days.

Seems a little bit more sensible. I still don't really see them succed though.

[JustADirtyLurker]

^^^

WTF? Revamping the site saying that they move the target from Wayland to xorg and from Arch to an Arch derivative?
It's official, this "project" is completely useless now.

[RoninDusette]

Wow.... A Google Docs Spreadsheet..... They are really breaking the mold here. :\