SymphonyOS – Light, Friendly, and Useful
symphonyos.com
symphonyos.com
The amount of time it would take to add this info must be a pittance compared to the dev hours they put into the OS!
Looks like it challenges elements of the desktop metaphor. The white paper (from 2005) on the ideas behind Mezzo explains a bit more: ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/voyager/docs/MezzoGreypaper.pdf
It looks like it mainly exists as a platform for Mezzo, a desktop environment. I skimmed the design document; it's painfully opinionated, and keeps repeating the tired old cliché that users can't handle configuration options and we should make their lives easier but not letting them change anything...
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.)
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.
(In case you don’t know how: go to System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver → Screen Saver → Hot Corners…)
Development is progressing albeit slowly since my day job takes up most of my time. I am currently in the middle of a rewrite of the desktop environment making changes like moving from FVWM to openbox and rewriting some Perl code that has been around in one form or another since 2004 in Ruby. I am hoping to have a new release out in January :)
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.
Is this related to the symphony framework in any way, or is it just a naming coincidence?
That would help the distro collectors to decide if this is interesting or not.
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 limited time I have available to work on the distro itself. If after the January release I am able to get a few more developers involved I would love to improve the site, documentation and community around the project.
"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 a dist-upgrade on anything Debian derived to see what happens...
The wikipedia page is out of date in many places
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.