Road of Open Source success - II

In my last post I tried to explain package manager as one of the key ingredients for open source success. Today I would like to discuss about Control Center

Control Center
Control Center is an application used for configuring all the aspects of your operating system along with the user applications installed on the machine.

If we consider windows, user has a Control Panel. But all the configurations are not concentrated over there. Some configurations are accessible by MSC, whereas user applications follow a completely different approach. Sometimes the user applications add a control panel applet; sometimes they store the information in a registry and options are accessible through Tools>Options and sometimes special ini files are used for configuring the applications.

In *nix, all the configuration options are accessible through a single repository /etc/. Different applications have their dedicated configuration (*.conf) files, which are text files and can be easily edited using an editor of choice. This is plain and simple. But for a new linux convert, this might be a daunting task. It is possible for him to mess up the configuration file.

Recently, wizards have set a benchmark in configuration. They are almost foolproof and extremely user friendly. And it's really easy to create a wizard to generate the required configuration files. Redhat has a couple of disjoint applets that allow to configure some applications. Ubuntu is also coming up with a screen configuration applet.

But user needs a unified mechanism for configuring all the aspects of machine. Something similar to yast or drake and recently smart. The Control Center is a small software that will make windows to open source transition easier for a newbie.

Ubuntu is unofficially the #1 but lacks a unified control center.It surprizes me how the #1 distribution can be without a control center. The next two distributions; PCLinuxOS and openSuSE both have it though. There are a lot of distributions out there and majority of them lack a Control Center, some have re branded KDE control center but none of them is complete. We need more and better more Control Centers to excel Open Source.