[Design-team] [OT] GIMP becoming too profi and thus will be excluded from Ubuntu distro

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Nicu,

On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 09:19 +0200, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> On 12/02/2009 07:02 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 09:21 +0200, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> >> I am worried about this tendency, from both Fedora and Ubuntu, of
> >> dumbing-down the desktop spins: if Windows does not offer any useful
> >> application out-of-the-box,our key to success is NOT to lower to the
> >> same level and also offer nothing useful as the OOTB experience.
> >>
> >
> > What if we offer the art studio spin for F13 though? Then there would be
> > an OOTB experience specifically tailored for folks interested in
> > graphics in particular...
> 
> If a Workstation or Design spin emerges an is at least half-decent, al 
> the news articles published by my local (Romanian) community will stop 
> linking to the Desktop spin and link to that instead. We will also stop 
> handling Desktop live media at local event and promote that instead.

What are the goals of your local community in promoting Linux? What kind
of users are you promoting to? Are they more artistically-inclined? Or
do they simply want more functionality than is available in a CD-based
spin?

I'm trying to understand the need - maybe the Desktop spin is not the
right one for your local community - but I'm trying to figure out what
would be. E.g., maybe the Desktop spin does not have the Gimp, but if
your argument is that there are folks who are not professional artists
who have use for the Gimp, maybe there could be something like, I don't
know, "Desktop Pro," "Desktop for Technical Professionals," or "Desktop
Plus" or "Desktop Extended" or "Desktop Showcase" spin that is much
larger and has a different goal, eg.

- the Desktop spin's goal is perhaps a clean & simple / finely-honed
collection of a basic desktop experience for basic desktop productivity
common across multiple domains without much domain-specific content;

- this new spin's goal is to show off the best-of-the-best free and open
source desktop applications across many domains. It would be more like a
hall-of-fame kind of spin.

What do you think?

~m