Interview: Ryan Quinn, Symphony OS

Filed under

DW: Ryan, thank you very much for your time to answer a few questions. First, can you introduce yourself briefly? How old are you? What do you do for living? And what is your role in the development of Symphony OS?

RQ: Well, I live in the US in Dubuque, Iowa, am 27 years old, and have been working as a web programmer and developer for about seven years, first independently and for the last four years for an Internet service wholesaler who sells turn-key ISP services to small and medium sized dial up ISPs. I am the Project Manager for the Symphony OS Project.

DW: With its unique user interface and design concepts, Symphony OS is without doubt the most interesting and innovative Linux distribution in a long time. How did the idea come about?

RQ: About three years ago I began thinking about how I could go about creating a browser driven desktop. Like myself there are a lot of web developers out there who would love to get deeper into Linux but the desktop space is generally a C/C++ world and there can be a pretty steep learning curve there. Symphony OS on the other hand uses some existing software (such as our firefox renderer and fvwm) and implements the rest in a fashion that allows anyone who knows html and a bit of perl to really get deep into the internals of their desktop environment. The second goal was to make it easy to use for just about anyone.

DW: It has been about 6 weeks since you opened the project to general public. What sort of reaction have you been getting from users who have tried out the first public alpha release of Symphony OS?

Full Interview in this week's DistroWatch Weekly.

Please see my Review and/or Screenshots of this groundbreaking os for more information.