M. Edward Borasky wrote:
I was a former employee of Canonical (the company that makes Ubuntu) and I also follow the fedora and debian (desktop) lists pretty closely and have contributed stuff to GNOME. One thing that frustrates me about our (Gentoo's) desktop is that we try to stay as close to upstream as possible, but upstream also expects distros to do certain packaging work. For instance, GDM/GNOME has had for a long time a patch that allows to choose Shutdown/Reboot/Log-off instead of just log-off. Upstream won't integrate it because it makes some policy decisions (and they don't want to force policy). However, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE and (I'm pretty sure) Slackware (dropline) all use that patch. We are the only distributer of GNOME in the top 10 that doesn't include that patch. We can say we are waiting for upstream, but upstream has no mind to include it any time soon. It is a major annoyance to have to log-off first, wait a few seconds, then choose shutdown from GDM. We have a build system that lets users determine what patches they want applied, yet we don't give them the choice in this instance. This seems to me like a bad use of portage.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".
Bottom line, if we want to have a good desktop component, we need to stray (via optional use flags) from upstream at some points. We already (kind of) do this a bit with packages like ximian-ooo, but we need more of it.
Another example is the udev delay. I know it happened for good reasons (I'm really honestly not complaining), but, aside from DSL and maybe Slackware (and technically debian woody, sarge and sid both have udev), we are the only distro in the top 10 to not have udev by default yet. Again not a complaint, but something that really needs to happen ASAP for computers that support it. I have to say in defense of the udev/kernel guys, our mixed udev/devfs solution was very smooth. Great job guys!
Portage is really flexable enough to support this stuff. We don't need to dumb anything down for anyone. Just give people options if they want them. ie. It'd be great to have a "shutdown" type use flag for gdm and gnome-session which would apply that patch (I think it also needs shutdown/restart setuid, but you can set shutdown and restart commands at compile time, so we could create small setuid wrappers that get installed only with GDM for instance. I'm just throwing out ideas, not really suggesting anything.).
Its true, we'll never become Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc. Nor do we want to. But there are many ways we can improve our desktop for our users (and possibly attract new ones). I'm not suggesting we should have better DW rankings (who cares). But we can certainly do better than we are now without a lot of work.
I'd be happy to help with the gdm/gnome-session shutdown/restart patch if i'm not stepping on anyone's toes (foser)?
Nathaniel
-- [email protected] mailing list
