Does anyone, especially the devs, have any opinion about what he has written in his article? Can his proposal be more usable than the approach Gobolinux currently adheres to?
Take a look here http://osnews.com/story/19711/The_Utopia_of_Program_Management
Personally I don't see any advantages in that proposal over what we have. Instead he wants to lessen the modularity by splitting base system (what goes there?) and applications.
Also I don't see the use of moving user settings out of $HOME. Sure, it removes some clutter with dot-files, but I'd rather have $HOME/Settings for that. That way I know that all my settings are in my $HOME and are easy to back up.
I totally agree with you on having $HOME/Settings or even $HOME/.Settings (hidden) folder rather than moving user settings out of $HOME completely.
Yet, I must confess, that the idea of having a clear distinction between "System" and "Other things" at some point has already crossed my mind several times. It may be a bit alien to Linux ideology, but it works almost flawlessly in *BSD world, and PCBSD especially that goes even further - at a direction similar to Gobolinux in some ways.
Yes, I think it makes the most sense to keep a Settings directory in the user's home directory. I'm strongly in favour of arbitrary program relocation. I think the user should be able to freely move program directories around, into subdirectories, the Desktop, his home directory, or wherever, in whatever way he likes. I'm working on some support tools for a system like this in pockets of free time (which are unfortunately very few).