Hi Jaqui,
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 19:56 -0700, J. Greenlees wrote:
3) No picking one GUI as the default, ALL gui options needs to be
included by default..
[ so that any new application can be tested against use with all of them ]
3a) best is to just go with a minimalist gui as default, G.N.O.M.E. and
KDE both definitely not viable. they both have very different backends
providing needed services for a desktop, so a distro that goes with
either is stealing the choice of desktop for developers / end users.
I don't understand your line of thinking here, Jaqui. How many (non-web)
app developers use their app with every GUI toolkit available? How many
(non-web) app developers use their app with more than one GUI toolkit
available? I think 0 for the first one, and very, very few for the
second.
I think there is a difference between the desktop environment a
developer uses vs. the GUI toolkit(s) his applications target, and I
think you might be confusing the two a little bit. For example, if I'm a
developer for a mobile device (say for the Maemo platform), I'm not
necessarily going to use Maemo to do my development work (and I'm not
sure I could!)
All this aside, how about web application developers, who I'd argue are
really far more common than OS or even rich client developers these
days? They want a desktop that works and works well for their workflow.
I don't think they care to choose from the 21 flavors available.
A Development distro would, by design, have to foster the freedoms of
Free Software / Open Source Software and let the end user have ALL the
choices available for ALL application options.
Having a choice available doesn't mean we get to shirk the
responsibility of picking sane defaults. Overwhelming the user, even if
they are a developer, with the equivalent of a 500-item questionnaire is
not really very considerate :( There is no lack of choice in free/open
source software. Part of the challenge of making it usable is filtering
those choices to the sanest / most useful / most frequently-used / most
widely-used.
Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Slakware, Madriva, PCLinuxOS,
Gentoo .... all fail to meet this, they all pick a desktop as default.
Every existing distro does.
You have to.
~m