Underlying DE for the Workstation product

Sun Feb 2 21:25:01 UTC 2014

I think what he was saying is that the traditional desktop has already been
defined, and accepting by the mass audience.  It's just that Windows was
the pioneer that happened to be prevelant when the desktop was being
defined.  The statistics he provided shows us that even though Microsoft is
trying to shift to a more mobile and touch centric inteface with Windows 8
and 8.1, their audience is refusing to make the jump, because they favor
that traditional interf?ace. Heck Microsoft is even changing things back to
more traditional interface because their customers are not liking this new
"way of doing things", hence some of the changes from Win8 to Win8.1 and
there are rumors of even more traditional approaches coming up in the next
iteration of whatever Win8* will be.

We have been trying to push this same transition onto our Linux users for
quite sometime now, and its just not being accepted well by the majority of
the market, otherwise Gnome would not have become so fragmented with
off-shoots like MATE, Cinnamon, and the others.

I am one of those long time Linux users whom prefer the traditonal ways of
interacting with my machine that Gnome 2 provided.  So, I would say we
shouldn't focus on making our product more "Windows  like" but rather more
"Gnome 2 like".  Now, I know I will get barraged (as people like me whom
speak against Gnome 3 always do) with the "You need to move forward and
stop being stuck in the past" comments.  But thats how I actually feel.  I
admin a decent sized RHEL environment at work, and I do it by using Fedora,
because I apprecaite the similarities between the two (yum,
system-config-*, etc), but I aboslutely hate trying to use Gnome 3 because
it so ineffecient for someone like me whom prefers the traditional
interface. Every time I stare at the big bar at the top of the screen I
cant help but feel like all that useful real-estate being wasted for a
clock (in the middle) and only showing me one application of the many I
have running (and its the one I am presently working in.... I already know
which one I am in....useless).

That's why I awlays install Cinnamon and use it as my primary workspace.
So, instead of trying to shoehorn MATE into GTK3 standards, why not use
Cinnamon which already uses GTK3 and still gives the traditional desktop
experience for its users?  If Fedora and Red Hat were to start spending
resources on Cinnamon, I honestly think it would be the desktop that
unified the Linux DE market.  Not only that, I think it would be an
attractive desktop for people that don't want to switch to Windows 8 from
Windows 7 (My mother is the perfectly example, she loves Cinnmon because
her new laptop shipped with Windows 8).  When I setup Fedora 19 for my
mother using default Gnome DE, she hated it and WANTED Windows 8 back.
 Once I installed Cinnamon, and let her try it, she instantly was able to
use it with no re-learning.  If my 58 year old mother can learn how to
navigate Cinnamon within 5 minutes of using, that speaks volumes to its
marketability.

Again, I am not very technical when it comes to the development involved in
building Gnome3, Cinnamon, and MATE, but I can tell you from honest to
goodness experience, that literally everyone I introduce to Cinnamon,
aboslutely loves it.  Those same folks when introduced to Gnome will often
say "why?"  and "how do I do X?".  I teach a few introductory Linux courses
at a local college, and when we disuss DE's I always have my students
install several (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, MATE, etc) and write reports over
which they prefer, and my top two results are usually KDE or Cinnamon.
These are students whom have little to no experience with Linux mind you.
This is empirical evidence that I have gathered on my own.

On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 4:03 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> Join Fedora! Come talk to us!
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Join_SIG
>
>
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