GoboLinux

Via Slashdot, a spiff article on the radical changes that might be made to create a really excellent, user-friendly desktop machine out of Linux.

The bit that stuck out for me was the pointer to GoboLinux, an alternative linux distro with nice OSX-like package management.

From their FAQ:

GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as /usr and /etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as /Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.

To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as /System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.

To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as “/usr/bin -> /System/Links/Executables”, and “/sbin -> /System/Links/Executables” (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).

I’d love to try that. Sounds cool.