> high up on my list of priorities. I'm aiming for "usability", which in my > opinion, KDE & Gnome doesn't significantly contribute to (or at least not > to the point where I'd personally be willing to invest the effort to > include them). Of course, this doesn't mean I'm against listing > individual Gnome or KDE based programs where there are no non-KDE/Gnome > alternatives (see ktuberling, for example) as those can be put on a system > without loading the entire desktop environment onto it to make it work > (just the libraries are required).
In term of usability I don't agree with you. Let me explain, if we considere the list of package listed in Debian-jr, the usability among these packages is a nightmare. Just consider, the save-a-file operation. If you go from Xpaint to Gimp to freeciv to mozilla to Emacs then Lyx the kids will have to learn 6 different paradigm to save a file. Nothing to blame on Debian-jr but this is these kind of usability problems that Gnome/KDE project try to solve by providing good consistency interface. I have used GNU/Linux environment with young student for several years, and these usability problems make them feel GNU/Linux is not an easy to use system. (Here some ideas on http://cran.seul.org/~hilaire/korea/ofset/) Now it's understandable you don't want to spend time on packaging that software but I guess that most of them are already packaged. Hilaire -- OFSET - Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching http://www.ofset.org
