GNOME as the default desktop (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Minutes - 2010-12-06)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Dienstag, den 07.12.2010, 08:50 -0500 schrieb Jared K. Smith: 
> 2010/12/6 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com>:
> > What does this mean for other *DE and various community within the project?
> 
> In short, nothing different than things have been for the past couple of years.

Some examples of what this means:

      * Desktop SIG defines the default GTK theme and hardcodes the
        theme as dependency.
      * Desktop SIG defines gnome-icon-theme as the default icon theme
        and hardcodes it too.
      * These two pull in other gnome packages. It is impossible to
        install a desktop without having fedora-gnome-theme or
        gnome-icon-theme 
      * Some more examples of painful dependency bloat:
        https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=depchain
      * Removal of hal-storage just a few days before beta freeze.
      * Removal of the legacy icon names shortly before beta freeze
        resulting in many missing icons.
      * Removal of the notification area which and the resulting API
        changes in libnotify 0.7.0 breaks all other desktop bug
        gnome-shell.
      * Change from Nodoka to Clearlooks. Many people objected, after
        FPL spoke up the GNOME SIG promised to revisit the decision and
        keep us informed. This did not happen.
      * Black notifications that looked like a Ubuntu ripp-of. Again
        many people objected, but again GNOME SIG did not care.

And now there is
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2010/12/second-class-citizens.html

This really makes me wonder if Fedora is a distribution to work on for
people who are not using the one and only true desktop that must not be
named but called "the Fedora desktop" [1].

Regards,
Christoph

[1] Board decision, you remember?