Focus.  What are we talking about here?

- Cloud mining?
- Application development?
- Maintaining a distro?
- Developing an app?

In order:

1.  Been done.
2. Requires great depth of expertise.  I see consolidation in the development sector, and suspect this is why.  Not many people have what it takes to compete with Wolf0 in that regard, I suspect.
3. That's the problem.  Not so much with Windows.  In which case I would say we are already there; I mean, how hard is it to download a binary and double-click it.  In the linux world, we are dealing with a fluid and unpredictable situation. Nobody is really sure what combination of kernel, window manager, display manager and desktop will work with which graphics card, with this week's version of amdgpu-pro, let alone what will work next month with whatever version of X gets dropped on us (or enlightenment), or how AMD plans to deal with it.  Could be some interest in developing something like "Steam OS for miners." If you can deal with all that.  
4.  Now we're talking.  

I do think there's a demand for a graphical front-end to the mining software that's currently being developed. A scalable solution would be pretty awesome.  

Beyond that, I think the whole thing is moving away from X and company.  I think we are looking at a future where mining software works directly with hardware, through OpenCl I guess, in the multi-user environment.  Arguably we are almost there.  Right about now, if you look at Wolf's software, you only really need the graphical environment for ease of installation.  Once you get it installed, you can drop down to multi-user and it still works.  That was true for fglrx too.  If I'm right about that, they've been moving in that direction for a while.  

And you're right.  People gripe about how hard it is to make stuff work with whatever graphical environment they happen to like, but aren't wiling to wrangle the command line, which to many of us seems like the duh-obvious answer.

So if you're thinking about pulling back from the text console, hooking into the API and coming up with a better user interface, I think there's some demand for it, and you don't have to beat the developers at their own game.  In fact, I suspect they would be delighted to see you succeed.  

If you're just trying to get your foot in the door, make an app.  Me, I'd make one for Steam OS, gotta figure there's a lot of college kids out there with free electricity and a brand-new turbo-nitro-double-oc II graphics card that's looking for work. Gotta figure AMD isn't going to kick Steam to the curb, or vice versa.   Or an android app, I dunno.  I don't think I'd try to make a whole OS ala Steam, but if that's your dream, go for it.  Especially if you have experience with network administration, network security and development.  

If that's even what you're thinking.  

Look. When I was in business school, the goal was to get your business plan down to an "elevator pitch."  You're in Vegas staying at the Trump, and lo and behold the Don sashays onto your elevator.  You got however long it takes to get to whatever floor you're on to make your pitch. and one chance to knock it out of the park.   That's what you need to be shooting for.  You aren't there yet. Which is kind of not good.  People in the business come to this forum; you get maybe one paragraph before they blow you off.  If you have any of the expertise I mentioned, don't think out loud.  Come up with a plan and pitch it. 

Oh that's just your locale settings.  Sometimes goes by "language settings."

I work primarily with xubuntu so your experience may be slightly different. But you know how after you first install, it starts griping that your language settings need to be updated?  You have to take care of that right away.

So the first task is to get your network settings right so you can connect to the internet, then deal with the language gripe right away.  iirc you have to update/install twice before ubuntu is happy.  

How to fix it after the fact (like if you dismiss the warning without dealing with it) is not well documented. You can try settings - language support and see if it gives you the opportunity to update.  Search the ubuntu forums, just copy/paste the error message, or search under locale or language settings.  Or, reinstall and deal with the language issue.  Not quite time yet to show ubuntu who's boss; that comes later.  You'll see. For now just do what it says.  

Fix the locale issue and then turn off upgrades, the most aggravating thing about plain-vanilla Ubuntu, other than that ridiculous Unity desktop, is that it'll sneak in major upgrades (like from 16.04 to 16.10) that may not work with your hardware and drivers.  Depends.  Things are very fluid right now.  Just get amdgpu-pro installed; if you can get it to "take," things get easier from there.  

Great job with the benchmarks. 

Things are looking up in the linux world, the new version of sgminer is tight, and works well enough under the various flavors of ubuntu 14.04lts (so far so good with xubuntu, although I wonder if mint 17.3 might be a tad better) and catalyst 15.  I think that has potential to give new life to the less expensive cards on the list.  It's easy enough to order a case of 480's off NewEgg, harder to find those bargains on ebay.

I picked up a bunch of 7850's with elpida ram for ~75 each on ebay.  Building up an el-cheapo special rig. $75 per card.  $20 MB.  $12 HP server PSU (900 watts yowsa).  $10 CPU.  Fingers crossed my crappy $10 ram works.  I dunno. 1.2 Kh/s for $472 is kinda cool, in a pathetic dorky linux sorta way.  Well let's say $482 with a nifty wooden crate, cuz I'm not doing the milk crate thing. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

I dunno that linux is any faster.  More tools in windows to fine tune the cards; with linux you gotta flash the rom (or not) and figure out the whole intensity/worksize/wathamacallit thing. (OGAG let the cat out of the bag the other day; r=c*w*4, where r is rawintensity, c is number of compute units, w is worksize. 4 if you're running 2 threads, 8 if you're running one.  There's like 40 hours of my life I want back,) Main thing is, less overhead. Gotta match that with the right cards I think. 

Not completely convinced the 7850 should be crowned the el cheapo king, but it's gotta be close

Got four 470's all roided up on a new bios flash, Cortana finally choked it down like I knew she would (although she fought back, guess she likes doing things her own way).  Ima pointing them your way.   

I love small pools.  I guess it all nets out eventually but I dunno, it's fun running to the computer first thing in the morning to see if anything hit, like running to the window to see if it snowed.

Also kinda funny watching the pool hoppers show up.  I was like 25% of this one pools total hash for about a week there, They hit like three blocks all in a row at 3am US time, next thing you know the hash went from like 13K to 70K.  Still there.  Don't think the dude has looked at his server in a month, wonder if he even knows.

Good luck! I imagine it was a lot of work setting this up, but I think monero is gonna get legs.  BTC isn't going to last forever but cryptocurrency will, I think.  Who knows what it'll be but I think monero will have its day in the sun. 

Cortana.  Other day she was like, you aren't hanging out with that slut ubuntu, are ya?  My thing is, next time recognize my devices right off the bat and I won't go looking for attention somewhere else.  It's like, linux understands me.  I'll give her another chance. 

Back to work.  Gotta figure out what a ssl is.

That's on the 290, not the 280.  World of difference.  Great card but it sucks up some power.  Also I think it depends on the card.  Problem with my 280 I think is cheap card, cheap memory.  Got lucky with the 290.  90 bucks on ebay.

Re: old cards.  Wonder if clustering, like slurming them would make any difference.  

ETA: google up Stilt's comments on 280/x cards, I think the original post is at the overclockers forum but it's been copied a bunch of places.  A lot of those things apparently were made quite cheaply, and just can't keep up.  On top of that it's hard to do much with the ROM's.  If you get one with elpida memory, it won't need much if any work.  Mine had a mix of hynix and elpida, flashing it didn't do much. Pushing the clocks just makes it worse.   My MSI 7950 crushes my Sapphire 280; had to flash the rom on the 7950 (hynix) and it likes the GPU clock at 1100.  For those who are having trouble tuning their 280's, might be worth running it thru GPU-Z and see what ya got.  Hynix isn't necessarily bad but can be.  Stilt says look at the sensors; the cheap cards only have a few basic sensors.  Some of those cards are just duds, I think. Mine sure is. Sgminer works right out of the box, with little to no tinkering, on my good cards.  No amount of tinkering has done anything for that frickin sapphire.

Amazing the amount of work that's gone into SGM 5.5 over the last few months.  Compiles and runs in Linux like a charm.  "What do you mean you can't find OpenCL, it's right **** there!"  That all went away.  Documentation went from like zero to pretty darn good.  All the noob tutorials are now officially defunct, which is probably just as good.

Would personally recommend Xubuntu in version 14.04 if you have a card that'll work with fglrx; my older gen cards are killing it.  290x hashing 700-740 with no mods, 7950 500-520.  7850's getting 340, well in excess of what they get under windows/Claymore.   SGM just screams in 14.04.  It'll run from console, SSH, mosh, you name it.  All on some, like $30 army-surplus motherboard I got off ebay.   I've tried about umpteen distros over the last few weeks.  My advice, for xmr anyway, is keep it simple.  Go with some ubuntu flavor (I'd do xubuntu or mint, except for cinnamon), don't go nuts on your config file.  Every card I've tried so far likes 2 threads, and it'll pretty much always run with a raw intensity of 512. Except for my 280, which I agree is kind of a conundrum.    

Can't say I'm as thrilled with 16.04, which is kind of a pig.  Somewhat interested to see where radeon goes with this.  Bet they ditch X altogether.  Bet everyone does, except ubuntu.  I won't miss it.