I withdrew this coz as soon as I wrote it I felt that I was being selfish and thoughtless being as so many of you are dealing with the testing platform right now. But I have just had the thought that maybe I should leave it up to you all what you want to do with this, sorry if it’s a bit badly timed, I’m sure I’m an alien and I struggle with human do’s and don’ts, probably sociopathic too lol. Anyway …
For some time now I have pondered the divide between what we in the Linux world consider normal and acceptable, and what they in the ‘other’ world of WinMac ‘need’, in order to successfully install, set up and administer Linux.
My idea is a dashboard that can work on all distributions that allows simple button pushes for things that we take for granted and that they wouldn’t have a clue about e.g. Arch pacman mirrors, pacman cache (default is leave to grow for ever!). How about a button with inxi, dmesg, journalctl all sent to pastebin? And disabling PM for sound cards? It could even check for known issues and incompatibilties that we all just know.
I imagine all this to require enough user input so they learn what they are doing and why, and for this to begin as the handholder for noobs, not necessarily an advanced config tool for experts but who knows?
There are a few smaller distros that have done some of this already and a unified dash would be a way of bringing their talents together but it would need a project exernal to them to create the framework that they can contribute to and incorporate in their distro.
What are your thoughts? Ideas? Do you think there is any point? I’m not talented in this way so is there anyone who might like to be a part of this or has a clue where to begin lol?