Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Ankur Sinha]

Hi,

On Sun, 2014-02-02 at 14:38 -0500, Alex GS wrote:


> What would it take to get MATE up to current standards to be
> acceptable as a default for Fedora Workstation?
> 
> 
> + Have the Gnome project developers provide support resources to the
> MATE developers to accelerate their transition to GTK3 as well as act
> as consultants.
> 
> + Perhaps even offer to make MATE part of the Gnome foundation as a
> legacy Gnome 2 fork and provide additional support resources? 

Er. Whatever happened to GNOME being independent and the workstation WG
not dictating their goals?

> + Configure a MATE desktop that is Fedora branded that uses default
> Gnome applications currently used in Gnome Shell such as Files and
> make sure it integrates with MATE.
> 

"make sure it integrates with Mate", Erm, meaning that GNOME upstream
should stop working on GNOME3 and start porting MATE to GTK3 instead?

> 
> + Bundle MATE with a lightweight compositor such as Compton or
> integrate Mutter as a MATE compositing window manager.
> 
> 
> + Replace the default menu in MATE with 'mintmenu' a plugin that
> replicates the Windows 7 start menu functionality and add additional
> plugins where necessary.
> 

So, not vanilla MATE either? 

> 
> You see it's not that much work at all and well within the scope of
> something achievable by a distribution with sufficient resources like
> Fedora and/or provided by Red Hat.  It all depends on whether the WG
> is serious about consolidating the Linux desktop, expanding to
> Mac/Windows developers and achieving the goals set out in the PRD.
> 

Erm. It is quite a lot of work. Not sure why you think making MATE
(based on an unmaintained code base of GNOME2) work well with GNOME3 and
further cherry picking components like the mintmenu is "not that much
work", even with RH providing resources (which they probably won't). If
RH did want to continue with GNOME2, they wouldn't have invested in
GNOME3 in the first place. 

> 
> I'm beginning to take a cynical view of the whole Fedora Workstation
> WG process, I don't anything will change and Fedora Desktop will
> continue to decline in relevance, but please prove me wrong.

What you're really saying is that we need to provide a desktop that is
well, quite simply a Linux clone of Windows, because Windows users are
erm.. used to Windows. What I'm wondering is why someone will take the
trouble to shift to Linux at all, if all it tries to be is a Windows
clone in the first place?

Moving users from Windows/Mac has always been a challenge, more because
people that buy systems off the shelf get systems that run these
operating systems. When this happens, they accept these OSes as the only
choices. What non developer would want to remove a copy of Windows he
paid for and replace it with another, any other, OS?

The data in your mail was very helpful. Thank you for that. However,
rather than building a Windows 7 UI clone, which even Windows isn't
continuing with, by the way, it makes me think that we need to spend
more time and effort helping the marketing team show off our product,
and may be even think of making it more easily available, like making
systems running it available off the shelf, for example.
-- 
Thanks,
Warm regards,
Ankur (FranciscoD)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha

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