Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 15:47 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Since everyone else seems to be shy about kicking off some of the
>> threads for the next steps, I'll get this one going and get it out of
>> the way.
>>
>> We need to settle on an underlying DE for the Workstation product.
>> The two major DEs in the Linux space are GNOME and KDE.  Fedora has
>> spins for MATE, XFCE, and one other (I think).  I've gathered that
>> there's a lot of assumption, both in the broader community and within
>> the WG, that Workstation will continue the Fedora trend and be based
>> on GNOME.  I would even venture to say that is a fairly sane
>> assumption to make.
>>
>> With that in mind, would the WG like to officially settle on using
>> GNOME as the underlying DE for Workstation?
>>
>> I will be perfectly honest and say I have no overwhelming preference
>> here personally.  My expertise extends to helping navigate through
>> Fedora process thus far, so I'm not sure I'd make a huge impact from
>> the technical side of things on whatever DE is picked.
>
> Given the tension between the definition of a "Workstation Product" and
> the multiple desktop spins that I've identified on devel@ - i.e. that a
> "Workstation product" built around a single desktop occupies the
> 'desktop space', without accounting for alternative desktops - do you
> definitely want to go ahead with the model where the WS product is
> specifically associated with a single desktop and makes no attempt to
> somehow 'include' alternative desktops, or is it worth considering
> possible approaches that somehow account for alternatives? I realize it
> might be quite late to do that, but it seemed worth asking the question.

The PRD already has a section that speaks to working with various
toolkits to make them inter-operate with each other.  The idea behind
that is so that applications from various toolkits have the same
look-and-feel on the Workstation regardless of their primary
DE/toolkit.  While I realize that isn't specifically answering your
question, it does at least speak to the fact that there isn't ONE
TOOLKIT TO RULE THEM ALL.

As to whether we want Workstation to be a "pick your own DE" product,
I personally don't feel that's a great way to start.  Seems somewhat
confusing.  There's a lot of work to be done, and having a single
underlying toolkit/platform to work from at least helps to focus on
where the initial work goes.  I also don't think it excludes the
possibility of different Workstation DEs in the future.  If we'd like
to rephrase as "initial Workstation DE" to allow for that possibility,
I'm OK with that.

josh