More economically compatible, for sure.

But don't forget...

More culturally compatible. Every child has a parent (or two) thats been trained in millitary life. They have, to a degree, so trained their children in that life.

More male involvement. I have seen a number of DODEA schools, and all of them have more males in a single school than most districts have in total. This is a huge cultural difference.

DODEA schools are not cause driven. From what I have seen, you have far fewer causes competing for time with actual academics.

Yes, but for the time, it actually worked on OS2, where it didn't work on the Windows boxes of the time.

The killer feature for OS2 was the experimental API for off-loading tasks to a server. It was possible to have a beefy OS2 or IBM server and allow for much lower-powered workstations to hand discrete compute jobs off to the server and then have the results seamlessly handed back to the client. I had a client that used this for a particular database. This allowed the OS2 boxes to run the application at some 20x the speed of the identical boxes running Windows.

The same client has a testing version of Lotus circa 1992 that used this API and was amazing for its time. It was also possible to use this to have the same spreadsheet worked on by up to 20 people at the same time. For the time, this was mind-blowing stuff.

...Linux on the Desktop? It's just as elusive!

About half the sand mined for concrete is not of the proper grade for it, and gets used for other things. When the sand particles are too round, they make poor concrete.

The same basic issue exists with biochar. You can make biochar out of any organic, however, you face the same rounding issue. Coffee grounds produce fairly uniform biochar with the sharp edges needed for the mechanical interlocking that gives concrete its strength.

There is some work being done on hot mixing coffee ground biochar in concrete, and that is producing very interesting results, including better self-healing concrete.

There is a solution to that, but I left that out of my post as I am thinking of starting a company with this idea and the undisclosed business model.

Tell us you can't think outside the box, without telling us you can't think outside the box.

That what I propose is so hard is why Linux lost the desktop.

Integration of services is the secret sauce to success. I never said it would be easy to do.

My point is that the domain provisioning needs to "just work", without the need for a tutorial, and with sane defaults.

And I agree with you, REALM is a great way of doing this. But on the standard distro, the system should detect the existing domain, and then run the command automatically, with just the account info as the only parameter.

The reality is that a "standard distro" can't support ever OSS project. It's just not possible.

The path forward for your theoretical project is for the project to release a version that "just works" with the system, that is, that does all of the integration for the user, then it goes into the Intermediate repo, or the project keeps its own repo and the user adds that repo. Lots of options for that issue.

Did you see the part about select the industry and system roles? Be it a home tinkerer running a cluster of Raspberry Pi's to learn about parallel computing, or a K-12 school.

Isolating a network segment with 2 nics has been around forever. I was first doing it 20 years ago when the K12LTSP was a great way to get computing power into the hands of kids. LTSP is now a great way of getting small clusters running for experiments and whatnot, it's a great way of booting terminals to use as POS systems in stores. In the case of stores, the POS systems SHOULD be segmented off, as anyone on that network can open any cash draw without generating any record if you know how (something that might just come from having supported a lot of small business networks over the years). It has a lot of advantages you don't get with other OS's, and segmenting a network that way makes it a lot easier. In these cases, it absolutely does not take a network engineer. But it also starts to get users closer to where they would need one.

Part of what you miss is that this needs to not just work for a large swath of people (and right now, Linux is too big a jump for most users). But it also needs to be a training ground for some of the more interesting things.

The longer answer is that none of the current distros should be it.

Any official distro should be better than what we currently have. The good news is that the parts are available. The real question is, do we have the will?

An official distro MUST:
- Be fully integrated by default. All apps, all packages.
- Be designed for the home user -> small business user.
- Have use models that fit home, power users, and small businesses.

The distro should support a single NIC and a dual NIC design (dual NIC to isolate a useable network)

As I see it, a SAMBA4 domain would need to be at the center. Be it on a stand-alone WS, or on the home server.

All apps and packages would need to be packaged so as to automatically integrate them with the domain. This means that all SQL users would be added as SAMBA domain accounts. The CUPS server would need to be configured to use the SAMBA domain by default. The Apache web server would, by default, install with SSO. Drupal/Wordpress/whatever would, by default, install with SAMBA domain integration by default.

Users should be able to select their industry and get sane defaults for it. For example, if Bobby is setting up a system for a restaurant, Chromis (and I just picked a random OSS POS system) should be automatically set up for it. Chromis should then use the SAMBA directory for user log-in.

File servers, Remote access servers, VM server, web servers, LTSP cluster, applications servers, (you get the idea), everything that normally ships with this distro should support this integration.

By default, this system should have standard ways of doing thing. It should have use models for everything. This makes it a lot easier for users and powerusers to actually get things done.

Android/Iphone integration is a must.

And when I say by default, I mean no extra steps need to be taken by the end user to do it.

Once a server is installed, any additional systems should be able to just link to that one to get all basic installation and integration done. /home should be shared or cached.

OK, now that we have the supported packages taken care of, now we let users that have a need at the unsupported stuff. An intermediate repo with packages that have the ability to integrate with the directory, but that the user will have to follow a tutorial for. This lets users build skills in a manageable way.

Next you have the Universe repo. This is not enabled by default, but has everything, including the kitchen sink. But it's up to the end user to get it working.

Do that, and we have a system that would actually start taking share from, well, everyone.