Linux Distribution for Programmers and Web Developers(semicodeos.com)
semicodeos.com
Linux Distribution for Programmers and Web Developers
http://www.semicodeos.com
42 comments
This so much.
The only time i see it making sense to release a full-blown distro is for marketing reasons or making a more unified aesthetic experience like for example Elementary (which certainly has its own issues, but that is another story) or for a very specific purpose like Kali or Tails. There are, however, a jungle of different software and solutions out there so sometimes I appreaciate a "curated" list of de facto software to test. Having to install a whole distro for that, virtually or otherwise, might be the definition of overkill.
As always the problem is in the possibilities: The different systems (both distros and user installs) are so differently configured, that a script most certainly will mess it all up.
The best solution I can see (at least for my use) is to expand the dotfile-approach to encompass applications and more advanced settings too. But I guess it has certain security a related issues?
As always the problem is in the possibilities: The different systems (both distros and user installs) are so differently configured, that a script most certainly will mess it all up.
The best solution I can see (at least for my use) is to expand the dotfile-approach to encompass applications and more advanced settings too. But I guess it has certain security a related issues?
Even a distro-specific script would do the job in many cases.
Elementary is a good example of where some kind of advanced script/package setup could possibly replicate what the developers have done.
What you mention regarding extending the idea of dotfiles to encompass applications/settings is exactly what I'm hoping will start happening rather than this saturation of distros that don't necessarily bring a lot to the table. As for security issues, yes that's always going to be a concern when you add new packages, but no reason why there couldn't be some improved process in place to let users know when they are straying off the path.
Elementary is a good example of where some kind of advanced script/package setup could possibly replicate what the developers have done.
What you mention regarding extending the idea of dotfiles to encompass applications/settings is exactly what I'm hoping will start happening rather than this saturation of distros that don't necessarily bring a lot to the table. As for security issues, yes that's always going to be a concern when you add new packages, but no reason why there couldn't be some improved process in place to let users know when they are straying off the path.
And there's already a solution available for that:
https://www.debian.org/blends/
In essence: upload package/packages with what you need to your upstream distro and make a metapackage that includes them along with anything you need from the upstream distro.
It's a win-win:
Users can install anything from the usptream distro, not just what you can offer them in your tiny distro.
Maintainers don't have to waste effort on maintaining a full-blown distro, they only maintain packages that customize the upstream distro towards the niche they care about.
In essence: upload package/packages with what you need to your upstream distro and make a metapackage that includes them along with anything you need from the upstream distro.
It's a win-win:
Users can install anything from the usptream distro, not just what you can offer them in your tiny distro.
Maintainers don't have to waste effort on maintaining a full-blown distro, they only maintain packages that customize the upstream distro towards the niche they care about.
So you want a standard way of creating packages for ALL linux distributions? No problem, we have that.
In fact, we have 3 :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(package_manager)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage
In fact, we have 3 :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(package_manager)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage
Arch Linux is a major one these days.
Can we please stop giving personal assistants female names/traits? It does not create a positive message for equality and diversity in tech. It's quite frustrating and uncomfortable to see the phrase "just command her to do tasks for you" on a promotion for a Linux distro.
SemiCode OS takes this way too far. Just look at this incoherent dump of objectification from the website: "Sarah is Your New Girl Friend She will take care of you , helps you in your work ,just open terminal from any where and call her . and she will be there for you"
Really? It's a tool. It doesn't need a gender and it certainly doesn't need to be personified as a submissive woman
SemiCode OS takes this way too far. Just look at this incoherent dump of objectification from the website: "Sarah is Your New Girl Friend She will take care of you , helps you in your work ,just open terminal from any where and call her . and she will be there for you"
Really? It's a tool. It doesn't need a gender and it certainly doesn't need to be personified as a submissive woman
> In a 2011 paper, they reported that both women and men said female voices came across as warmer. In practice, women even showed a subconscious preference for responding to females; men remained subconsciously neutral. “Men will say they prefer female speech, and women really do prefer it,” MacDorman says. [1]
Some of the wording for SemiCode may be overly sexist, but there are good reasons Alexa, Siri, Cortana use female voices by default in most cases, even if SemiCode's tool does not use text-to-speech itself. [2] I think your outrage is a bit over the top, to be honest.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/why-siri-cortana-voice-interfa...
[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-compute...
Some of the wording for SemiCode may be overly sexist, but there are good reasons Alexa, Siri, Cortana use female voices by default in most cases, even if SemiCode's tool does not use text-to-speech itself. [2] I think your outrage is a bit over the top, to be honest.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/why-siri-cortana-voice-interfa...
[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-compute...
Both of these articles phrase very nicely the reasons for my dislike of female-gendered assistants.
"The late Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, who coauthored the field’s seminal book, Wired for Speech, wrote that people tend to perceive female voices as helping us solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. We want our technology to help us, but we want to be the bosses of it, so we are more likely to opt for a female interface." [1]
"According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman's voice." [2]
The predominance of female voices is based (at least partially, the biological argument is certainly interesting) on history and societal norms that place women beneath men in competence and authority. Thus my dislike comes from a desire to get rid of these subtly ingrained social ideas of male/female authority/submissiveness. The tech world has a far-reaching influence, so I think it needs to be conscious of the implications of choices like the "gender" of an assistant.
My personal preference is for a completely gender neutral interface, because I want to treat my computer like the tool that it is and not like another human. I think the best course of action is to give the option and let the user choose which they prefer.
The reason I called out this instance is because it goes too far. Yes, I can rationalize that people have a preference for female personalities for a variety of reasons, but the author of "Sarah" has blatantly sexualized a programming tool. This makes no sense to me. Especially as a publicly available distro. (The quality is definitely wonky for other reasons, but that is not an excuse). This extreme case reflects on the less egregious things I dislike about gendered computers in general.
"The late Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, who coauthored the field’s seminal book, Wired for Speech, wrote that people tend to perceive female voices as helping us solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. We want our technology to help us, but we want to be the bosses of it, so we are more likely to opt for a female interface." [1]
"According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman's voice." [2]
The predominance of female voices is based (at least partially, the biological argument is certainly interesting) on history and societal norms that place women beneath men in competence and authority. Thus my dislike comes from a desire to get rid of these subtly ingrained social ideas of male/female authority/submissiveness. The tech world has a far-reaching influence, so I think it needs to be conscious of the implications of choices like the "gender" of an assistant.
My personal preference is for a completely gender neutral interface, because I want to treat my computer like the tool that it is and not like another human. I think the best course of action is to give the option and let the user choose which they prefer.
The reason I called out this instance is because it goes too far. Yes, I can rationalize that people have a preference for female personalities for a variety of reasons, but the author of "Sarah" has blatantly sexualized a programming tool. This makes no sense to me. Especially as a publicly available distro. (The quality is definitely wonky for other reasons, but that is not an excuse). This extreme case reflects on the less egregious things I dislike about gendered computers in general.
Well my preference is to be helped by helpful women. Go build your own distro if you want to be helped by a faceless robot. I'll take Sarah, Siri, and Cortana, thanks.
If you don't like it, build a better product that competes with these devices. No one likes a whiner, especially one who thinks they are the centre of the universe and their personal preferences should dictate the course of the "tech world", as you put it. Your ideas are absurd and do not match the biological reality of humans, sorry.
If you don't like it, build a better product that competes with these devices. No one likes a whiner, especially one who thinks they are the centre of the universe and their personal preferences should dictate the course of the "tech world", as you put it. Your ideas are absurd and do not match the biological reality of humans, sorry.
I feel like a distro with lots of extra things installed from the start is the opposite of a distro for programmers, as is baking in some off-brand voice tool. The perfect distro for me would be an OSX (not MacOS) clone running on a debian backend without the walled garden that is Apple.
Elementary OS
There are actually quite a few tutorials on youtube that show how you can get a OSX-y UX by installing a few packages and themes on Ubuntu and Debian.
I don't really understand the rationale, but hey whatever floats your boat
I don't really understand the rationale, but hey whatever floats your boat
You might want to polish your presentation a little bit before making it public. And by a little bit I mean a lot. Spend a few bucks and hire a copywriter service.
The constant capitalizing is very distracting. (I Don't Know How Else One Would Describe This Style.)
I honestly can't see an appeal for this.
From the screenshots, it appears to be Ubuntu/Debian + Gnome 3 (most probably not the latest version too) + a LOT of preinstalled packages.
My bets are, there are very very very few developers out there, that would need all those packages installed.
So what was the rational behind this?
I mean, this could easily have been a script or a desktop app that let users choose the packages they wanted and installed it on a distribution of their choice.
Nothing against you or this particular project in general (I did like the terminal based assistant but I doubt if I'd ever use that in general), but I can't seem to see it's significance/use-case.
From the screenshots, it appears to be Ubuntu/Debian + Gnome 3 (most probably not the latest version too) + a LOT of preinstalled packages.
My bets are, there are very very very few developers out there, that would need all those packages installed.
So what was the rational behind this?
I mean, this could easily have been a script or a desktop app that let users choose the packages they wanted and installed it on a distribution of their choice.
Nothing against you or this particular project in general (I did like the terminal based assistant but I doubt if I'd ever use that in general), but I can't seem to see it's significance/use-case.
I'm not sure, but I think the target user is a "coding bootcamp graduate", or similar.
The landing page misses some very important points:
- Is it a standalone distro?
- What is the kernel version?
- How about 3rd-party packages, drivers, etc?
And the most important
- Why do I have to use it instead of another well-known distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora?
- Is it a standalone distro?
- What is the kernel version?
- How about 3rd-party packages, drivers, etc?
And the most important
- Why do I have to use it instead of another well-known distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora?
This must have been created by someone who has never used Linux:
> Includes Most of Popular Programming Languages Compilers, top Editors and best Integrated Development Environments.
so basically
> Includes Most of Popular Programming Languages Compilers, top Editors and best Integrated Development Environments.
so basically
$ sudo apt install gcc npm python3 emacs24
You forgot to include an editor. ;)
I don't get why he's installing an operating system within an operating system. (I use Emacs).
The only distribution I've really enjoyed using for development is Antergos (Arch derivative) because all my packages are up to date.
The only way another distribution would catch my eye is if it targeted a specific hardware platform. Like, if a group of developers built a Linux distribution around Dell's XPS laptop line so that hardware support was perfect.
The only way another distribution would catch my eye is if it targeted a specific hardware platform. Like, if a group of developers built a Linux distribution around Dell's XPS laptop line so that hardware support was perfect.
Yeah, I don't really get it. Then again, most distributions are pretty redundant at this point. I mean, how hard is it really to install Debian and type 'sudo apt-get install whatever'? Fancy distros, for the most part, are just repackaged Debian/Ubuntu/Arch, and should be desktop environment "flavors" that you install separately. There are some exceptions, but I find that the most derivitive distros purposely remove crap from even the most barebones Debian or they are very single-purpose. If I need a workstation OS, I am going to tailor it to my exact needs. Makes no sense to me to use a lesser-supported distro if I am just going to rip it apart anyway. I feel like more programmers than not will end up doing that. Am I wrong there?
Why should I choose this instead of elementary os? For software only, I can install it on elementary also. Look? I can have better on elementry.
As a time served (11 years commercial, 20+ years hobbyist) developer, I'm out.
I'd rather use my own choice of Linux distro running what I need rather than a baked together mix of stuff with a dodgy site that's been hacked together quickly without QA!
I'd rather use my own choice of Linux distro running what I need rather than a baked together mix of stuff with a dodgy site that's been hacked together quickly without QA!
Their digital assistant Sarah seems to be unique. I don't know any other OS which has it.
http://www.semicodeos.com/sarah/
http://www.semicodeos.com/sarah/
It looks like a wrapper around wolframalpha. It's not that fancy and it's not very useful.
sarah about
Hi I'm Sarah, Your New Girlfriend <3
that's so sad I'm amazed there's no anime, manga or whatever wallpaper
that's so sad I'm amazed there's no anime, manga or whatever wallpaper
Why does clicking blog take me to a "Hello World" application?
this made me distrust the whole thing. I mean if you can't get the blog page zero right, why on earth would I trust you with an operating system?
That's a default install of WordPress
Surely any of the mainstream distros are just as good or better for this purpose and the tools can be simply installed in minutes with apt, Synaptic, Yum, etc.
Is this some kind of high school project?
Is this some kind of high school project?
> Made With Love in Khartoum , Sudan
There's one link I could find to "Compilers" and the page doesn't exist. So much for being "for developers".
Every distro has these features, they are even more advanced. But these are single-purpose-programms, not one blown thing which suggests to do everything.
I don't see any use for this distribution, as a programmer I want to be taken seriously and I know what tools i like to have installed. And I can do that by myself and don't need an "assistent" do that for me. An package manager is good enough.
Besides this sexist bullshit is going on my nerves.
I don't see any use for this distribution, as a programmer I want to be taken seriously and I know what tools i like to have installed. And I can do that by myself and don't need an "assistent" do that for me. An package manager is good enough.
Besides this sexist bullshit is going on my nerves.
Damn no love for arch in the comments!!!!!
> Made With Love in Khartoum , Sudan
No download links to be found on the Downloads page with places left blank for Dropbox and Mega links.
No download links to be found on the Downloads page with places left blank for Dropbox and Mega links.
I get the reason for offshoot distros to exist but I can't help thinking that a lot of the time it would just make more sense to publish a script to add packages/modify the default configuration, rather than Just-Another-New-And-Soon-To-Be-Discontinued Distro, it would probably be easier to maintain in the long run.