On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Genes MailLists <li...@sapience.com> wrote:

>  Interesting poll - of course some will jump on it as a non-scientific
> and why it's inadequate because it either is too broad an audience or
> too narrow .. :-) Or perhaps with only 600+ participants the std error
> may be too high (what is it anyway if one makes reasonable
> distributional assumptions for the poll takers .. stats quiz :-) ) ..
>
>   however it jives exactly with my own experience where everyone I know
> dropped gnome shell and moved to either KDE or xfce (not without
> grumbling) .. of course my experience is def too small a sample size :-)
>
>  While it may make sense to make KDE the default DE for fedora - I
> suspect that this cannot happen in fedora due to pressures from the
> large number of gnome devs associated with Fedora - or could it? Should it?
>
>  I wonder if moving Gnome shell as a tablet spin and making KDE the
> default laptop/desktop DE would have been a really smart move. Is it too
> late? Perhaps we all really want a phone DE on our 42 inch desktops with
> a touch screen that somehow doesn't cause muscle strain ...
>

Yes it is a very small sample of self-selecting llinux enthusiasts who
were prepared to enter their opinion on that site (as you say of order
600) - however it just might not be too far from general opinion on a
much wider basis if the rumours one hears are anything like
representative. I know this might be considered trolling but that is
not the intention - there surely must be some level of concern that
the things that have been chosen for primary support and development
seem not to have the majority support of users and some of them could
be influential in many ways.

If that is the case then there is a risk that an ostrich like
head-in-sand approach to the views of users may mean that the way
things are planned for the future could lead to a migration away from
Fedora to other distributions which could inflict lasting damage to
Fedora and later Redhat. If I was a senior leader in Fedora I might
want to know much more about what the general feelings were concerning
this issue since the future development direction of where the effort
in desktops should be concentrated could depend on it, and of course
we all know it is impossible to measure with any real certainty.
Maybe I am wrong completely - and Fedora has made all the right
decisions all along and the new projects will just need a few bugs
sorting out and all will be well with superb performance at the next
GA for F17.  I do hope that this will be the case.

Nevertheless there has been a lot of disagreement on several key
projects given several extremely long-running threads on the lists in
recent weeks, which is in itself potentially damaging - and it would
be more valuable if a future path was chosen and agreed by the
majority that had more general consensus in support for which way to
move ahead. That might be none to easy - but dissent in the ranks
extended over a long period of time could cause difficulties. I would
not like to see Fedora lose general support but the decisions on which
version of grub, which main default desktop, which default daemon
startup system and so on, is very important to people who will be
using the distribution on a day-to-day basis - and some proportion of
those day-to-day users are the test team on which development
crucially depends. It is really important to have the significant
majority on-board with the way things are moving.

-- 
mike c
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