On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 09:32 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 21:50 -0800, M. Edward Borasky wrote:
> > Well ... if you've seen one KDE or Enlightenment desktop, you've pretty
> > much seen them all, eh? :) I guess I would ask mostly for more
> > "branding" -- Gentoo themes, eye candy, etc. -- and some more nifty GUI
> > tools integrated with Portage and the Gentoo-specific configuration
> > options. A graphic "ufed", for example, would be nice.
>
> Oh Goddess... You just opened up a can of worms rivaling the ozone hole.
>
> Gentoo has some very firm camps on branding. On one side, we have the
> "Everything in Gentoo should be as close to upstream as possible!" and
> on the other side the "Gentoo brand everything!" guys. I wouldn't mind
> seeing a bit more branding, provided it didn't get to the point of being
> ridiculous (read Red Hat). I think the Gnome team has done a good job
> of finding a middle ground. Could we benefit from some sort of
> "branding" USE flag? I think so.
OK ... here's my thinking. I visit DistroWatch every day and look at the
"Top Ten":
1 Mandrakelinux 1346
2 MEPIS 1329
3 SUSE 1083
4 Fedora 1056
5 Ubuntu 1024
6 Debian 960
7 KNOPPIX 860
8 Gentoo 655
9 Slackware 565
10 Damn Small 549
What's wrong with this picture? Well ... I would expect Mandrake, SUSE
and Fedora, with huge marketing budgets behind them, to be the top
three, even though, from what I hear, Fedora is the least stable, more
like a branded "sid" than anything else. :)
And I expect Debian to be ahead of Gentoo. It's been around longer, it
has a bigger community, and more packages (although I think Gentoo is
growing a lot faster than Debian).
No, the big surprises here are Ubuntu and Mepis. Both are "free as in
freedom" and "free as in beer", IIRC, both are Debian-based and both are
"desktop oriented". If Gentoo is to make it into the top five, which to
my way of thinking should be Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Gentoo and Fedora,
we need
1. More marketing/branding
2. Desktop orientation
3. Stability and security (I think we're there already)
4. As many packages as "sarge".
So ...
Is there a "gentoo-marketing" mailing list? :)
How difficult would it be to integrate Debian source ("dsc") packages
and source RPMs into Portage?
> As for the GUI tools, well, here's my take on it, taken from the
> gentoo-catalyst mailing list when someone asked about a graphical
> spec-file creation tool for catalyst.
>
> "It really boils down to one thing. Would you rather us stop working on
> catalyst and focus on making a GUI for it which would be inflexible and
> only capable of limited functionality, or would you rather us spend our
> time improving catalyst with new features and better documentation?
I struggled with catalyst for a couple of weeks and gave up. I
personally have no need for a tool to make stages or package CDs or
"Gentoo Release Media". For that matter, I have no need for a graphical
installer.
My modus operandi in installing Gentoo is to do the appropriate stage3
install for the subarch, followed by loading the desktop from the
appropriate package CD, followed by "emerge --sync; emerge -uvD --newuse
world", followed by installing the add-on packages unique to my
applications, scientific computing and algorithmic composition and
synthesis of music. The whole process takes close to a full weekend on
my ~ 1GHz P3 and Athlon T-bird. I've got it down to four "bash" scripts
plus canned "/etc/fstab", etc. files, though, so I can sit and watch.
What I want from catalyst is the ability to make high-quality
Gentoo-based LiveCDs easily ... to be blunt, as easily as a re-master of
Knoppix can be made. The compromise I'm willing to make is that i686 or
better is required. The compromises I'm *not* willing to make are the
deletion of Fortran from the gcc set, since some of the software I use
requires Fortran, and any less than the most comprehensive "just works"
hardware detection available at any point in time on the resulting
LiveCD.
I don't know who's the best in the hardware detection area. Knoppix does
everything I need except picking up the right vsync and screen size for
my monitor. I have little experience with others; the last Red Hat
install I did was RH9, and it seemed to be slightly less than Knoppix.
I've never tried Mandrake or SuSE, and my recent Debian experience is
limited to installing an ancient Celeron laptop from "sarge" boot
floppies.
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