This sounds really promising. I know the big thing holding me back from jumping off windows is that the pain of using windows isn't great enough to overcome my tech illiteracy and hesitation over being unable to play certain games or run applications. I don't have anything to suggest unfortunately.

I don't really know any of this stuff, but it should probably feature Kuon.
(also this might be more of a /maho/ thread...)

>>1923
Yeah my main goal with this is to get something together that people like you can use without much headache but power users can also enjoy.

>>1924
We'll need a mascot and a name. I had a name in mind but I screwed up searching to see if the domain was for sale. It was but I didn't buy it that day. When I checked again some asshole bought it and now demanding hundreds of dollars for it.

Also yeah I'm sorry I forgot /maho/ is a thing now I don't visit the boards that often.

I realized my "easy-to-use" GUI might not have been that descriptive. So I'll try to explain what I'm going for. Basically, I'm going for Win2k era GUI for the desktop for regular users. You can have your fancy modern effects of course. But the basic interface will be a bar at the top of the screen, with a "start" icon of the distro's mascot. A sys tray and a way to switch between applications and other desktops using icons in the bar itself. A simple "start menu" with a Win2k/XP like tree. None of this phone-first stuff.

Why? Because people know how this kind of GUI works and it'll be easy for them to use.

The WM/advanced GUI for people that want cmd everything will be more akin to a very customized dwm or something like i3. Currently I'm using dwm for testing. But I'll offer something more easy to configure in the actual release (probably. The easy-to-use DE comes first for obvious reasons).

At any rate. Both DE/WMs will share commong keybinds that can be configured from a simple GUI application or a text file.

>>1924
I agree on thread move, however, I disagree about Kuon as mascot. In my correct opinion, I believe the mascot should be a 2hu as is customary for tech things like this. I nominate Ran, big nerd fox.
>>1926
my body is ready

>>1927
>None of this phone-first stuff.
From concept alone I like this. Without getting too far into the weeds on sperging I think catering to those platforms do a whole lot more harm than good, one only needs to look at Windows 8. I want a computer, not a tablet.
As for the rest of it, I grew up on XP/7 so I'll feel right at home. The other terms you're throwing around are new and from cursory research DWE and i3 are how windows and applications are handled in the GUI?

>>1922
>I really need ideas about what applications to include for people that mainly archive and consume content and from people that create it
Photoshop ;^)

I was writing out a long-winded post about my use case with linux and how I'm not creative-oriented, but scratch that. Just a semi-casual user here.
Daily Pop!_OS user of at least 5 years, Mint+Fedora prior to that. Not one to do much ricing, but definitely not against it.
Regular user of Kdenlive, GIMP, Audacity. Near-daily user of ffmpeg in terminal + yt-dlp for stream archiving and shunting over to a local NAS.

>what applications to include for people that mainly archive and consume content
>pre-installed applications for viewing and managing stuff like your manga, doujin and media collection
I've been waffling on using Hydrus Network for a long time now and finally getting the motivation to play with it. As a Platinum user on Danbooru for over 8 years (and saving plenty of images from boards like these), managing a large image collection has been a struggle for many years. I learned that it has built-in tag services which includes Danbooru, which is exactly what I wanted, so that's a lifesaver. Might be helpful for fellow anons with large image collections.
For those with a NAS, I've been using Jellyfin for my anime stash but I think its media player is kinda ass since scrubbing through a video often de-syncs the softsubs. Because of this, I just watch them with VLC from my local share drive since it just works.

>Support for running Windows software out of the box (pre-configured wine)
This is great, since some software just refuses to play nicely with Wine (not talking about games). For example, something like VNyan using Spout2 in Wine will not port that data into OBS running natively on the system. If you've got some magic to throw into it then that's a big plus for users.

>ffmpeg/MLT/vapoursynth installed by default with a nice GUI application for editing and encoding video
Great inclusion for ffmpeg. Sometimes, programs just throw out a file that's too large. For example, letting GIMP export a .webp image letting Kdenlive export a .gif - both of those create files that are way larger than what I could just get on my own with ffmpeg in the terminal. Handbrake is fine and all but if you've got something that makes custom ffmpeg commands less scary to regular users, then that's also a big plus.
Having spoken about softsubs earlier, perhaps inclusion of a tool to edit those would be nice, since correcting misspellings/typos in some releases proves more work than its worth.

>An installer for less technically inclined
Perhaps the suggestions in this post are merely adding more bloat, but it's convenient if you're talking about a linutil/Ninite style installer. Not sure how feasible that is, but I'm just spitballing ideas at this point.
Sounds like a pretty cool venture overall.

>>1928
Yeah, the Kuon thing was more of a joke and 2hu stuff is probably a good idea. Although the best mascot would be an original OS-tan creation, but those are probably pretty hard to get right.

>>1929
The original reason why I started this years ago was because I was growing very frustrated with the way GUIs were going. Everyday I had to tard wrangle more and more websites then eventually my local desktop itself to work in a manner I'd learned since we actually got viable graphical UIs in the mid-80s. In other words. They threw out 30+ years of research in favor of a new way of doing things. A worse way of doing things. I don't even like the current way GUIs are written when I'm using a table or smartphone. Much less when I have access to a real pointing device and a full keyboard.

So it was a project born out of frustration. I assume a few key important things in my distro;

1) The device is a real home computer (be it desktop, laptop or full blown workstation) with real input devices (keyboard,mouse/trackball and things like controllers, drawing tablets and such).

2) The device is owned and used primarily by one person. Meaning all software assumes it doesn't need a "multi-seat" set-up from corporate/public environments. This allows for many positive improvements in user experience, allows one to remove a lot of recent cruft from the base system and makes configuration much easier.

3) The device is primarily used for multimedia. Be it creating, editing, watching or playing it (and it should do this by default without requiring the user to spend many hours setting it up).

4) The device is used by someone that isn't stupid for lack of a better term. You don't need to be an expert but you do need to be willing to do some reading from time to time (or seek out advice). At the same time; nothing is hidden or abstracted away from the user. If you want to lean over on it like a motorcycle rider on the edge that's fine. Just don't complain when it breaks.

>DWN/WMs
The idea with this is to take advantage of the fact that in UNIX land there are multiple consoles/ttys running at the same time. This means if the primary GUI/DE is borked you can use a simple key combo (ctrl+alt+2 for example) to instantly access another simplified GUI to debug your problem that also still has all your applications running. It also serves as a default GUI for people that don't prefer full blown DE that you primarily use via a pointing device.

In other words. A happy medium less threatening to a novice than the console. Where a user can hopefully debug their problem by accessing the package manager or config options using the same layout as used in the full blown GUI. This is the GUI I've developed first before moving on to polishing the one that most will use as default (e.g. the Windows 2k "clone").

(cont.)

>>1928
>>1932
>mascot / OS-tan
My hope was someone would eventually draw one. I love OS-tans and I think a girl designed to represent this project would be very helpful. As it gives the project an identity, would be easy for others to associate the project with in their mind and would build our "brand". An OS-tan is perfect as it's both a call back to the good old days and represents well the primary use of the OS (creating multimedia). In time this will have all the tools one would need to make their own manga or anime installed right out of the box.

A 2hu is fine to. But something new would be even better.

>>1931
>ffmpeg/video tools
My primary reason for wanting to do this to start with outside of my frustration with the state of modern GUIs was working with video/audio. As setting up a "studio" workstation is a huge pain no matter what kind of OS or distro you're on. You end up having to compile/patch your own kernel, compile ffmpeg with the options you need, run shit in wine which always takes hours to initially set-up correctly and a whole other host of problems (vapoursynth/avisynth is a clusterfuck of set-up. Sometimes just getting it running takes hours mucking around with python or wine). So working with video, audio and subtitles is something I plan to have pretty polished up before the first public preview. I'll try to remember to go into more details later. But yes I am building a GUI to ffmpeg+mpv to simplify things. As all existing ones like handbrake leave _a lot_ to be desired. Mine is closer to virtualdub or other NLE video applications. Using mpv to render the video stream and ffmpeg to process/filter it. Backed by a lot of *synth filters which will be maintained with proper repos instead of forcing you to chase them down all over the web from sometimes 20+ year old dead links.

Following the UNIX way all video, audio and any other kind of multimedia should be able to pipe from one application to another. So in the case of your OBS issue that would be considered a bug and effort would be made to fix it.

>wine
The gist of this is I want to provide pre-configured bottles for common (warez) applications. I would prefer to do full blown repos with said warez applications hosted directly along with the config files. But I don't want to kill this before it takes off. In the future I'm hopeful to add the ability to host repos on something like IPFS where they can never be taken down. That way people could access third party repos that have warez/games for other OSs hosted along with the needed wine config/bottle. In addition to other stuff the powers that be would prefer people didn't host. You could do this now on ftp/http of course. But you'd be playing a game of wack-a-mole with DMCA.

>Installer
At first it'll just be a script and require use of console. In time I'll build a proper graphical installer (or lift one of the existing ones) to walk the end user through installation. You will always have the ability to install it manually like arch/gentoo of course. The hardest part will be partitioning the disks as it has always been. But I do want to provide an easy way to configure the system globally at install time.

>>1931
(cont. last)

I probably missed some of your comments. Sorry it's late.

My last comment for now. I envision the eventual set-up to look something like this;

- Base system
This will be the "core" of the OS. It will be GCC+the GNU tools. Provides a standard POSIX implementation and basic hardware support for all AMD64 systems. Should be able to run all Linux and *BSD software. Small. Minimal. Nothing goes in here unless absolutely needed even by the most minimal of installations.

- Standard desktop
This is the next level up. Provides advanced/modern graphics (e.g. anything that's not the frame buffer) and standard suite of libraries applications and tools to run the basic desktop(s). The "minimal" installation for people that want more than just vim, awk, grep and other CLI tools. Things like ffmpeg, wine and qemu go here as well.

On top of this you could add most anything you want of course. I won't go into details now but you'll be able to access most everything from repos like the AUR and GURU. Although sometimes not directly unless you want to do additional set-up (see: Bedrock Linux). Through simple config files/changes in GUI you can substitute any application you want for another. You can also have as many versions/copies of each application installed as you want and they will play nice together.

The long term goal: The system should become smaller and simpler as the years go on. There are _many_ things about the current set-up I'm running that I _really_ dislike. But they've been retained because they're a PITA to hack around and break some common user configurations at the moment. An example would be dbus. Something I wish to remove all together and can on my personal install. However, some common things like Steam rely upon it. I'm also not opposed to the idea of IPC daemon itself I just dislike the dbus implementation of the concept. Solution? Make a better IPC daemon. I've been helping someone work on one for awhile now. But it isn't ready or stable. Once it's stable I'll switch over to it then provide a way for it to emulate dbus. In time. Hopefully others will prefer ours to dbus and switch over to. There are many things like that in the current base system due to the state of Linux development world.

I'll try to remember to come back and post updates. Thanks for your attention. I wish I had more time to work on this because I would have gotten it out a couple of years ago now if I did. But it kind of turned out to be a good thing. Since some improvements happened in the distro I'm basing it on recently that were good for once. So now is a preferable time to fork compared to years ago. On the other hand. Another project I was pulling a lot of code in from folded recently. Leaving me to maintain that stuff myself.

I am hopeful we will be able to make improvements to the overall *nix ecosystem while avoiding the ideological debates that mostly serve to prevent any real discussion or improvements from happening. But I know the attack dogs will come out in full force when I do eventually publish this. The best thing we can do is ignore them, patch/hack around their nonsense when needed, fork when required and provide a better overall user experience than they do. The last one isn't that hard. It just takes the will to care about the end users and not assume they're brain dead. In other words: We just have to be nice to them and write good documentation.

Also in time this should be able to run on many non-x86_64 archs. It already does. But starting out AMD64 is the only platform that will have published binaries that don't require building everything from source. Speaking of that; One requirement for any package within the repos will be that it builds from source. You will be able to mix and match bin and from-source packages. Also unlike most distros (like Debian) all dev tools will be installed by default assuming something built with them exists in the system.

>>1936
>Also unlike most distros (like Debian) all dev tools will be installed by default assuming something built with them exists in the system.

A small note about this: Coding is "art" to. See: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics

Specifically;
>5. "You can create art and beauty on a computer"

If you want to know about my motivations. Those two links are all you need to know.

Serious answer for default creation programs I typically install:
Subtitle creation/editing - Aegisub (there is a version out there that comes prebuilt with a plugin-repository plugin that lets you easily grab a bunch of stuff necessary for advanced typesetting so use that if you can)
.mkv packaging - mkvtoolnix
Audio editing - Audacity
Video editing - Kdenlive (I rarely use this so there could be better stuff out there)
Video watching - mpv
Raw downloading - Hakuneko (also ftp and torrent clients for accessing certain sites)
Anime tracking - honestly I don't think any of the "Taiga but for Linux" programs can fully compete even if some are satisfactorily functional so just having Taiga on WINE might be the best choice.
VN editing tools are pretty fragmented and often Windows-only so WINE/VM stuff is probably sufficient there.
Image editing - no, seriously, it needs to have an easy way to get Photoshop running, this is the number one reason my main machine still runs Windows even though everything else has been on Debian or a derivative for 10+ years. GIMP (and Krita) are not replacements and if you say they are I will disregard your distribution as the product of a deranged madman.

Also, does ffmpeg allow the creation of keyframe files like avisynth does these days? That becomes really useful for subbing anime when the included keyframe indicators aren't accurate.

>OS-tan
>mascot
I think you should have a logo for the OS, and the OS-tan/mascot different but based on the logo. Preferably created by a user (i.e. not the creator). That's how it usually goes for OSs.

>-other misc. things like pre-installed applications for viewing and managing stuff like your manga, doujin and media collection
I'd been working on a GUI for something to manage my (ero) manga collection: a database search GUI with tags, title, character, etc based searches. Haven't worked on it or used it in a while (been busy with life...). Think that's something you'd include in the distro? I think I have the source code backed up somewhere. Could continue work on it if it can turn out useful. Might have to re-factor the code since it was one of the first huge programs I'd created.

>yet another distro
please anon have you seen how many are already out there, go use gentoo or artix if you hate systemd, whatever

kuon is never a joke!

>>1948
Went out of my way not to talk about init. Someone shows up to defend cancer init anyway. Just like every other discussion on the internet for the last 10 years about Linux.

We don't care that you don't care. We get it. As long as udev keeps working and you can view porn in a web browser you don't care about anything else. Some of us actually use our computers for doing actual work.
>Use Gentoo or Artix if you hate system
Oh boy. Another init+systemd! Such an improvement!

Maybe 1,000 distros exist and they keep multiplying because they're all garbage re-skins of RedHat. You ever consider that? Of course you didn't. You have no idea how anything works.

>>1940
>Also, does ffmpeg allow the creation of keyframe files like avisynth does these days? That becomes really useful for subbing anime when the included keyframe indicators aren't accurate.
You can get keyframes from any video file by simply scanning it and looking for I-frames. It isn't a hard feature to implement and ffmpeg can do it easily. It's just no one has bothered to make GUI for it.

>>1946
OS-tans became corporate creations around the time of Windows 7 when Microsoft killed them by making official ones.

>>1947
I would consider it depending on what dependencies it needs. The goal is to keep the base desktop+system under 700MB so it can fit on CD-R.

>>1940
>no, seriously, it needs to have an easy way to get Photoshop running, this is the number one reason my main machine still runs Windows even though everything else has been on Debian or a derivative for 10+ years. GIMP (and Krita) are not replacements and if you say they are I will disregard your distribution as the product of a deranged madman.
I am not a photoshop expert. But I assume the CS<x> ones are good enough. I will make a virtual package that will pre-configure wine for installation of Photoshop that you must provide the .exe for. I would go all of the way. But if we put that .exe in the repos they'll sue us off the internet before we ever get off the ground.

I agree none of the GNU shit is a proper replacement. I am not a zealot in that respect. I don't care that license something is released under (GPL, BSD, MIT or even commercial). If I have the code or a copy of a compiled binary without source code I feel like I have the right to modify, run and share it. I ignore EULAs to. I only care about them in the respect that they admit they're spying on the end user. In which case I feel we have the right to yank out that spyware code.

>>1950
>Some of us actually use our computers for doing actual work.
says the loonix user lmao