Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 22 November 2013, Rahul Sundaram sent:
What I was trying to convey is that If I am as an user unaware of other desktop environments, the defaults impact my experience a lot more than if I already know of the choices and have picked something that matches my preferences. The moment I pick something else, I have satisfied my need and the argument about defaults should really be considered in a more objective way than just as an expression of my preferences
I'm of the opinion that the computer should work, as much as possible, out of the box. It shouldn't require high end graphics cards, and special drivers that we don't have (whether because you need to get them from an external repo, or that they just don't exist). The simpler windowing systems ought to be the defaults, and the more convoluted ones a deliberate choice for those who want to tart things up, and are prepared to go through the nightmares of trying to get 3D graphics acceleration to work.
This is a VERY good point which I had overlooked, the hardware requirements of GNOME are much higher that XFCE (and I believe MATE) and represent choice which is very likely to frustrate potential converts.
Let me make another point. MATE or XFCE are close enough to Windows < 8 that almost anyone can use them. And from what I've seen, a lot of Win8 users are running in a similar UI, indicating others don't like Win8. The point is that no matter what other computer you have used, GNOME3 is not like that. There is a big learning curve before you know to hover here, and use ALT there, and do all the other stuff which just has to be learned. That makes a good case in my mind for choosing a default which is likely to work and be somewhat familiar.
And speaking of fancying things up beyond practicality. Can we have a better bootloader than GRUB2? GRUB 1 was always a small bit of a pain to configure, but far less worse than LILO. GRUB 2 requires programming to customise, not just a slight tweak of one config file. My current bugbear is that it always loads some old kernel, rather than the latest, because it sorts them in a peculiar order. Top of the list isn't the latest, and picking number whatever as default isn't going to work after the next kernel update. I'm going to have to hand re-organise the grub2.cfg file after each time a kernel is updated, to get it to work sensibly.
Why in hell is there no "default" line saying what you want, or is there somewhere and I haven't stumbled on it because a kernel update doesn't set that?