GUI server tools?

[Eric Dunbar]

>         -       i keep reading about how 'intimidating' an interface is...
>                 are there a lot of windows users on this list..its just
> feels like it
>                 i sense a migratory emphasis for 'features' that i have on
> my old platform whilst forgetting some the problems one absorbed was do
> to some the 'features' implemented [i.e. - esmtp on exchange when
> the pix which is from a commodity (firewalls) industry leader (cisco)
> chokes on it (fixup)

I think that's the point of Ubuntu - to make a distro that just
"works" (& for that to work, you do have to make it Windows-Mac-like
in many respects since that's what people know (GNOME and KDE already
have done that to a great extent but now that the hard part's done
(making a functional and somewhat polished menuing/windowing system)
the "desktop" is next)).

>         -       standards erode due to buggy extension implementation &
> complexity instead of simplicity
>                 in order to ring bells and blow whistles that really do
> nothing to make the
>                 system more efficient.

Ugh. Windoze. One nice about Apple is that for _most_ things they have
to be 100% standards compliant since they are a relatively small
market (but, they're no better than Microsoft when they _can_ have
proprietary implementations).

>         -       i DO NOT think it should be EASY to give control of a
> machine to any user.  even 'root' s/be curtailed as much as possible - remember
> this a unix and as such is a multi-user machine and vulnerabilities exist purely in
> that statement.

I agree. It should be very difficult to access root, and there
shouldn't be a need to access root as much as we do (in Linux).

>         -       this is not MAC OS X..this is LINUX...and by
> extrapolation...UNIX

Though, Mac OS X IS UNIX (& Linux is only a wannabe Unix ;).

>         -       duh....it should NOT TRY to be APPLE. OS X is apple's
> baby,,let them pay for
>                 the milk

Different distros, different milk.

My impression is that Ubuntu is trying to be a _usable_ distro, with
usable being 'for the rest of us' (unlike the others which are still
more-or-less tinkerers OSes). If so, there's a lot to be learned from
Mac OS X (and the parts of Windows where Microsoft didn't just lift
things straight from Mac OS & Xerox but made them better (far and few
between but they must exist)).

Eric.