Am Dienstag, den 04.01.2011, 20:58 +0100 schrieb Christopher Roy Bratusek: > But as some have unvealed today, it's not the real reason, marketing is the > magic word and to provide a desktop "made from one", and some other less > valid > reasons (eg.: even if you allow modularization you can provide great user- > experience as modifications made by the user bother him/her not you). >
The »Desktop made from one« is a long lasting dream of almost all developers of integrated desktop environments. »THE GNOME« doesn't exist and won't exist ever. What folks are using is mostly the desktop which the distributors ship as default. Have a look at the most important GNOME-reseller Ubuntu: There will be no gnome-shell by default, they have decided to use Unity. Well, due to it is also clutter-based, there will be similar problems. Moreover, the help browser doesn't show the usual overview of the GNOME docs, instead users see the Ubuntu Help Center, and there's no way to browse to GNOME's Desktop User Guide. Most distributions have such »features«, which lead the user to accept his distribution as a unique OS, and to accept GNOME as a second stage free gift. Could be that the gnome-shell won't flop because of misusability, but because of too less users take notice of it. It can't be the goal to win new users with a »bleeding-edge new desktop experience« and, on the other hand, to ignore the other ones which want to keep the well-known desktop principles (kernel, X11, WM, DE) which allows them to put their own desktop experience together, if they like it (!). And, we shouldn't speak about »selling« GNOME. We don't sell it, we provide it. That's an important difference. If we would sell it, we had to concentrate our efforts to ship new hardware with an OS with very nice and exiting features. But because we provide it, we must recognize more than these users and their moneybags. As I already wrote, one of the most important advantages of GNOME is its modularity, which doesn't preclude integrity. A desktop as strong bolted as Windows or MacOS which forces people to use this and not that is misplaced. BTW, all these thoughts are from a user's point of view. I'm not a developer, just a translator, and I have subscribed to this list actually by accidence. But it is very interesting to see how decisions for the future are seem to made, ignoring a considerable number of long-standing users. It is more than a handful, be sure. Cheers, Mario _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list