On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 08:46 +1000, Robert Collins wrote: > For me, the radness (hey, if rad is a word, radness must be too!) comes > from the ease of use focus.
For me, the radness comes from well-implemented, cutting edge Gnome! Because of the people involved in its development, I think of Ubuntu as a showcase of all those ideas coming from Gnome and Freedesktop.org about how to create easy to use desktop system. I think they are often kind of lost in translation on most distros, because Gnome tends to be implemented poorly, if at all. To digress slightly, I do a lot of distro-hopping and I've come to think just about the only people who can deliver a decent Gnome experience are the Dropline people for Slackware, and Fedora - but that is Fedorised (hey, let's make up more words today!). It seems to me Gnome must be a right bastard to build, because I see this practically everywhere. Take source based distros: almost every time, on every one, with every update - KDE builds flawlessly, but with Gnome something inevitably fails at some stage! Not only on Gentoo but even on otherwise solid distros like Lunar and Source Mage... even Arch Linux, which is usually solid as a rock, stuffed up the last Gnome update in a major way. This is such a clear pattern there must be some reason other than plain incompetence - after all these same distros put together nicely working KDE without any dramas... Anyhow, Ubuntu is created by people who know their Gnome, Freedesktop.org guidelines, and Debian. If anyone can be trusted to do it right, it would be them. I suppose they will bring KDE in at some stage - there will be certainly a lot of demand for that. But I almost wish they wouldn't, because there are already a number of good systems based on KDE, while Gnome lags behind. PS. I'm writing this in Evolution 2 on Ubuntu. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
