Rich Burridge wrote: > > I was talking about things like: > > * look and feel. It's a beautiful desktop. > * ease of use. Most things "just work". > * integration of different desktop components. > > I'm not talking about market share. >
This of course is a personal question that everyone has to answer for themselves; if GNOME made a beautiful just works super-integrated desktop, that did not in the end have that many users (that failed to bring an open source alternative to the general public); vs. if GNOME made a lot of not-desktop-in-the-traditional-sense things and some of them had a chance to reach the general public on a large scale; which would we rather have. I know for sure that if people are honest with themselves, we have a lot of developers on both sides of this question. I'm not sure we're doing either of those things right now though - our current audience-benefit focuses that I've listed a few times don't care _that_ much about "just works" or beautiful or integration. Not as much as Apple's creative professionals audience does, for sure. So we tend to prioritize things like hackability/configurability, diversity of apps, interoperability, i18n, reliable releases, management/security, and so forth over more Apple-like priorities. The de facto audience here winning over the audiences some people might more idealistically have in mind. The "enterprise Linux" distributions have some strong incentives different from the Apple-style priorities as well. Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
