Excellent post, Vince! Regarding usage data, do you think Debian's popcon numbers will yield any useful insights?
Jude On Dec 29, 2014 11:26 AM, "Vince Mulhollon" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 8:50 AM, Mauro Cicio <[email protected]> wrote: > >> we are not ready to give up the philosophical principles behind *nix ("do >> 1 thing and do it right") and the freedom that comes with the "free as in >> speech" part of the FSF GNU. >> > > I like that, maybe as a project motto or marketing tagline. > > the GNOME audience >> > > In an "emperor has no clothes" moment, does that audience exist other than > devs and corporate support aka are there any voluntary users who wouldn't > be happy with something else? You can recognize the disease from afar by > devs writing "user speak" instead of "I speak". "Well, the users really > need automounting of iomega zip disks, because, users". "Sorry we had to > product tie to one inner platform anti-pattern init system, but we had to > do it distro wide, because, users" Unfortunately there are no users so it > doesn't really matter, and the actual users that do exist won't use that > junk and are already installing freebsd. It reminds me of the Windows > Mobile community which very passionately believes in itself, although > statistically no one in the real world actually voluntarily uses it. > > I googled around and finding numbers about DE use is apparently > impossible. I don't think it farfetched that the number of Emacs users > exceeds Gnome and KDE combined by a large integer multiplier, for example. > If this data existed, it would help in prioritization. > > There is a popular meme that the primary purpose of a distro should be a > bootloader for either KDE or Gnome. I'm convinced thats wrong. > > There is a difference between "This distro is a qmail bootloader and all > that matters is how well it runs qmail so qmail release blocks absolutely > the entire project" vs "This distro is marching along with or without us > and if qmail can't keep up or has license issues or can not implement > Policy in time, well, guess the release will use exim tough cookies" > > Another meme is engineering driven distros vs marketing driven distros. A > commercial marketing driven distro could ship a "non-desktop, server" > release without xorg because "servers". However my xmonad / urxvt / emacs > / chromium desktop will run just fine on the "server" release if no one > intentionally screws it up, and if the "desktop" release ships with > mandatory Gnome, the first thing I'll be doing with all that work is dpkg > --purge ing it and installing xmonad / urxvt / emacs / chromium. > > I mean, personally, I kinda like Stella and Simh but I'm not proposing a > distro bend over backwards for them and I think that is the proper place of > bloated DEs. > > A summary might be DEs probably are not as popular or important or > actually used as much as very widely believed in the dev community, so > intense focus on them above all other software is counterproductive. > > _______________________________________________ > Dng mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng > >
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