Hi Jaqui, On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 19:56 -0700, J. Greenlees wrote: > 3) No picking one GUI as the default, ALL gui options needs to be > included by default.. > [ so that any new application can be tested against use with all of them ] > 3a) best is to just go with a minimalist gui as default, G.N.O.M.E. and > KDE both definitely not viable. they both have very different backends > providing needed services for a desktop, so a distro that goes with > either is stealing the choice of desktop for developers / end users. I don't understand your line of thinking here, Jaqui. How many (non-web) app developers use their app with every GUI toolkit available? How many (non-web) app developers use their app with more than one GUI toolkit available? I think 0 for the first one, and very, very few for the second. I think there is a difference between the desktop environment a developer uses vs. the GUI toolkit(s) his applications target, and I think you might be confusing the two a little bit. For example, if I'm a developer for a mobile device (say for the Maemo platform), I'm not necessarily going to use Maemo to do my development work (and I'm not sure I could!) All this aside, how about web application developers, who I'd argue are really far more common than OS or even rich client developers these days? They want a desktop that works and works well for their workflow. I don't think they care to choose from the 21 flavors available. > A Development distro would, by design, have to foster the freedoms of > Free Software / Open Source Software and let the end user have ALL the > choices available for ALL application options. Having a choice available doesn't mean we get to shirk the responsibility of picking sane defaults. Overwhelming the user, even if they are a developer, with the equivalent of a 500-item questionnaire is not really very considerate :( There is no lack of choice in free/open source software. Part of the challenge of making it usable is filtering those choices to the sanest / most useful / most frequently-used / most widely-used. > Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Slakware, Madriva, PCLinuxOS, > Gentoo .... all fail to meet this, they all pick a desktop as default. > Every existing distro does. You have to. ~m -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
