About a month ago an article written by Mathew Garret, The Desktop and the Developer, was published which made some ripples throughout the community (or at least was referenced through various sites). Here is a summary of his observations:
I’ll be the first to admit the polish is probably going to be the last thing being focused on. Why? Because being a minimalist means only the base requirements are necessary and anything else is just fluff and getting in the way. However, this doesn’t mean good ideas may not come out of this venture. First things first we put forth some ideas we’d like to see in a final product. These can be viewed on our Trello Board. To highlight just a few:
It is also important we maximize the use of open source technologies. For the first go-around we want to have functionality there. If something deviates or we decide we want to simplify an item we can go about and do it, but really we don’t want to re-create the wheel if at all possible.
One interesting decision made early on was to follow the KISS principle. This falls right in line with our favorite distribution Arch Linux. Not only is it extremely customizable and rather light weight, but the rolling releases are great for bleeding edge development.
While we do intend to focus on developers in general we realize we also want to promote collaboration and contributions to open source technology. With that said more than likely a lot of the tooling given priority will be those focused on workflows of developers who contribute to open source (i.e. issue tracking on GitHub or BitBucket will come before internal issue management systems).
We encourage any and all feedback during this process. Just email us at team at revolvingcow dot com or on the Trello Board. The more feedback we have the better custom fit we can achieve.