Having recently installed gentoo, I can see hwo it could get confusing
with DE specific profiles. Especially as a number of users that are new to
linux might very well have no idea what DE they're going to use. And the
same can be said for users who decided to run ubuntu "to try linux" and
then decide to go further.
having to choose a profile, gives less time for the wavering user, if you
ask me. Particularly because a number might well believe that having a DE
specific profile would restrict them to use such profiles.
Instead I'd say it's a better idea to give a suggestion of useflags in the
handbook for the different choices of DE's.
And also I don't thin it's relevant to talk about gentoo in relation to an
out-of-box experience. To me it seems to be counterproductive, being that
by creating an out-of-box experience would, intially at least, make
choices on the users behalf, which is against gentoo's philosophy as I
understand it.
The way I understand Gentoo, is it is a distro to allow freedom of choice,
whether it being a choice of having a graphical interface or a choice of
which graphical interface. And to aim for an out-of-box experience, is
counteracting that freedom, or rather, only allowing a choice of removing
it after the decision has already been made for you.
I don't think the developer profile should be removed however. There could
very well be users installing gentoo, with the purpose of getting involved
with developing gentoo. So the profile should be there, and it is well
enough documented as being geared towards developing gentoo, and not
developing in general.
(New) users already find it confusing what the differences between
profiles are (the number of users I've seen using a "developer" profile
because they do some programming, for example*) and frankly I think
having these extra profiles will make some users think you can only have
one of kde or gnome.
Why are we talking about "out of the box" with a distro that doesn't
even come with a pre-compile kernel? Or X installed? Gentoo isn't an
"out of the box" distro. If disabling use flags is considered too
confusing for users, maybe the entire system needs to be revised.
* Why is the developer profile even shown on "eselect profile"? Wouldn't
it be better to keep "unsupported" profiles off this list. Surely Gentoo
devs can cope with setting their profile manually in favor of a little
sanity preservation for the rest of us?
