I'm not the target audience for this software, but I'm starting to realize I'm not the target audience for a lot of tech coming out lately. But when I think about the energy, resources, and tech that goes into making a text editor out of browser technology, it depresses me. What happened to the days when all you needed was a good C library and maybe something like ncurses?

Yeah, I know, get offa my lawn.

But all these additional layers cause complexity and slowness and latency and so on. And the end result isn't much better than what we're doing at present.

I find the whole thing depressing, even if it's a technological feat. Reminds me of that XKCD cartoon called 'Abstraction' :

An x64 processor is screaming along at billions of cycles per second to run the Xnu kernel, which is frantically working through all the POSIX-specified abstraction to create the Darwin system underlying OS X, which in turn is straining itself to run Firefox and its Gecko Renderer, which creates a Flash object which renders dozens of video frames every second ... because I wanted to see a cat jump into a box and fall over. I am a God."

PS - nice work Pipedot rendering block quote! This site is gorgeous.

Hi Koen - I made that example up, so it wasn't Xubuntu I was thinking of (which I would mentally group together with the other Ubuntu variants anyway). But I do remember several niche distros that really boiled down little more than visual styling.

Actually, Xubuntu seems to be more popular than ever now that many Ubuntuers have rejected the obligatory Gnome3 upgrade. Nice time to be XFCE!

Just checked in on it, because I used and liked the service in my pre-Google days. http://my.yahoo.com. Somewhat heavy on the eye-candy, but that's their audience these days. And it works pretty damned well!

Checking in on it made me notice their home page looks a lot better than before, and their search engine delivered better results than I was expecting.

Not sure what their new CEO is doing, but she's doing something right and I hope she continues to do more of it.

Given the fact that until a few years ago, smartphones were a luxury item mostly used in Europe and moreso in the USA, app developers quickly went for the "develop first for iOS and Android second" approach, leaving Android apps for later, and when they emerged they were frequently of sub-standard quality.

Now that the Android tsunami is overwhelming iOS maybe we'll see that change. I'd posit that Android's relatively more open ecosystem makes it more appealing for developers, and if other handset makers (Blackberry, I'm looking at you) continue to provide compatability layers that allow Android apps to run on their OSes, I think we'll see things swing in the other direction before too long.

McCracken's article isn't all that good over all, and I think again it's an attempt to conflate one writer's personal experience into an industry-wide trend that other statistics probably don't support.

openSUSE (and formerly SuSE) is my go-to distro usually, though I use Bodhi and FreeBSD a lot, too. I think SUSE has had trouble differentiating itself from other big distros like RedHat but still does a good job and not because of its distro manager but because it's been able to establish itself as an enterprise grade distro with good support and good reliability.

But have a look at Distrowatch and there are hundreds of niche distros that seem to offer little added value. "... is a distro based on Ubuntu with an XFCE desktop styled to look like a Mac." Really? We need a whole new distro with all that entails (quality control, package management, etc.) just for Ubuntu+DE+Theme? Those are the ones that seem to melt into the sunset.

Others are niche but provide either a new approach, a new technology, or fit a unique niche very well. PuppyLinux is a good example - awesome on low spec hardware. Scientific Linux brings in a lot of non-mainstream tools useful to a certain community. GRML tried to appeal to a small niche of ZSH lovers who prefer the console to XWindows, and when that sort of fizzled, tried to appeal in a different way (that doesn't seem to be taking either). There was another distro - now long gone - that decided to offer a very limited set of packages useful to businesses (office suite, RealPlayer, a couple of other things). Who wants to standardize on a distro that intentionally reduces your possibilities to do other useful things? I could use RedHat and get all that plus more.

Ultimately it takes a bit of branding and marketing, not in the "advertise the f*ck out of it" way but in the "show how this distro is different, serves a real need and/or fixes a problem you are currently experiencing" way. Not all distros do that.

I actually learned about Pipedot via the comp.misc Usenet group (I'm RS Wood over there) so here's a second vote in favor of adding the comp.misc feed to the feed page. There's a decent amount of cross-fertilization between sites at the moment, and I'm hoping that friendly competition leads to more and better conversation and commenting for everyone.

It looks great. I actually found it by accident yesterday when I was trying to get this site's RSS feed (found that too). It reminds me of linuxhomepage.com but better because it's customizable.

By the way, no one asked but I've been visiting this site on Android browsers, Opera, Safari, and now Chrome and it renders well in all of them. Whatever you're doing, you're doing right.

Time to drive some more traffic to this site.

I'll reply to my own comment here just to say, the more I look at this site and compare it to other sites, the more impressed I am. Gorgeous attention to details, and visually appealing in every way. I'm not a huge fan of the font used in the title, but that's about the only criticism I can come up with (and it's based on the fact it's a bit too similar to something I'm used to seeing elsewhere). Love the subtle shadows under the boxes, the clean curve on the box corners, and the sizing of the icons in the top right. Really impressive work.

Plus the clean CSS makes it easier to replace the whole thing with ponies and rainbows once a year, which would be nice.

I knew "quite a bit" about the soylentnews.org project, but for some reason didn't know about this until it was mentioned yesterday on Usenet (comp.misc, where a bunch of us have been hanging out).

Got to say: I am extremely impressed! I don't know enough about the internals to comment on that, but the site looks and feels great, and you've done some fast work! I dig the favicon, the site's graphics are sharp, and the whole thing is impressive.

Count on me to keep getting the word out - need to drive more traffic to this place! I'll be at Soylent too, of course - now I have more reasons than ever to not actually do my job while I'm at work.

Very impressive - congrats.