So what you are saying is we need toOK ... 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?
1) Waste time promoting something that really doesn' t need to be promoted? We already have the gentoo weekly news, the mailing lists are archived on the web, and every new release is always mentioned on many website such as slashdot and distrowatch.
2) Focus more energy on something that the X11/desktop folks already do a good job with, taking away from everything else? I'm not sure what more you want here. And don't say make some graphical X11 installer/configurator...
3) This is subjective...highly dependant on CFLAGS and the user (ie, do they leave a lot of stupid services running).
4) I'm not sure just adding package for the sake of having as many as another distro is even close to a good idea. As it is, we drop packages regularly that are not maintained anymore.
The point is, why should we become "desktop oriented" as you put it (with the sole purpose of increasing the distrowatch rank...*yawn*), when we are really about configuring your system the way you want? Depending on the user, gentoo can be just as desktop oriented as those you mentioned. It all depends on what packages you emerge.
-Steve
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