Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com>
> To: desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Monday, February 3, 2014 4:35:41 PM
> Subject: Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product
> 
> 
> On 02/03/2014 03:23 PM, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > I am generally negative to any such solutions as they tend to suck
> > resources away from
> > advancing something over to trying to keep multiple options sorta working
> > together.
> > Any solution one choose at any given point in time will have holes or
> > missing functionality.
> > I don't think the best solution is ever to start filling those gaps with
> > complete alternate solutions,
> > as they will just be bringing in their own set of holes and bugs and in the
> > end you are not
> > moving forward anymore, you are just jumping around trying to avoid
> > regressing and trying to
> > plug security issues.
> 
> Which would not be a problem if the workstation group defines an solid
> criteria that is required to be meet before becoming a workstation product.
> 
> You must realize by Alex statements ( as well as the fact the several
> alternatives of desktop environments exist in the first place ) that end
> user will chose what *he* thinks what works best for him and his
> workflow not what *we* think is best for him or what *we* think is
> workflow is which in turns shows in the end of the day it's better for
> us to provide a larger inventory of products since it will increase the
> odds that the end user will find something *he* likes and *can use* for
> *himself* with us.
> 

Well first of all I have not advocated for banning any desktops from Fedora,
this discussion is not about deleting packages from the Fedora repository.
And I realize that some users will make the choice to use something else 
than our default setup.

But that doesn't invalidate the value of having a default, focusing development
resources on the default and expecting any alternative solutions to be able to
productively co-exist with the default. Because a lot of end users couldn't care
less about the 10 different desktops available, they just want something that works
with their hardware and software. And if we know the top 10 feature requests we have a 
realistic chance of doing something about it as we don't have to consider trying to do it 10
places or work around 10 sets of different desktop quirks and bugs.

To me this is a cornerstone of what the products are meant to be about, trying to do active
development of an identified product as opposed to just passively packaging whatever a 
series of upstreams happens to provide.

Christian