Proposed F19 Feature: Cinnamon as Default Desktop

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 04 février 2013 à 20:35 -0500, Jon VanAlten a écrit :

> I don't have a horse in the default desktop race, being one of
> those weirdo tiling window manager users, which is possibly the
> exact reason why the idea of not having a default appeals to me.
> Maybe, if your objection is that the choice is too hard, you are
> making it too hard artificially?  For those who really are brand
> new and won't really have any idea what's going to be under the
> hood of any one DE, wouldn't a simple screen shot highlighting
> some of the primary interfaces of the home screen be enough for
> that person to say, "Hey that one looks pretty (or maybe similar
> to my current desktop, or some other property that motivates my
> software choices).  Now I shall click the download button below
> the picture, and presumably I will get something that will look
> like the picture"?  I think this is a "test" that most people
> can handle (and if they can't, I frankly don't want to be the
> one to support them!).  And beside the download button for each
> DE can be a "more info" link, for those (possibly majority?) of
> users who are more interested in learning about the image they
> are about to download.  I haven't yet met a linux user who was
> not driven in part by curiosity.  Maybe I don't get out enough.

I find that a screenshot is by no way sufficient information to choose
anything. If you look at Sugar, does the screenshot tell you anything
like "this is aimed at kids" ? Does a screenshot of a tilling wm tell
you anything about it being a tilling vm ? Can 1 screenshot express the
versatility of KDE ?

To me, the answer is no.

So then you do something else slightly more complex, like 2 minutes
movies, or you do more than 1 screenshot, this is becoming slightly more
onerous. This would for sure be good for the website, and I have yet to
see a volunteer for this, but let's assume that someone in this thread
just do it.

Either there is not enough difference between what we offer, and then,
more information will not change anything and the default is enough for
most people ( since there is no real difference ).

Or there is enough differences to warrant more explanations, and then
the download page is not really the place to ask to people to understand
the long list of difference.  

Now, if people motivated by the "no default" idea would start first by
showing a concrete proposal like a patch for the website that could be
deployed on a staging host and that could be tested rather than just
asking others to do stuff, maybe we would spend less time on the
question. In the end, if no one is motivated to do anything, nothing
will happen ( and no "I will do it only if people say this is accepted"
is not a acceptable answer. If people can invest time into arguing and
not into making, they have a wrong set of priority )

-- 
Michael Scherer