Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:17:42 -0800, you wrote:

>On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 00:09 -0800, Dan Mashal wrote:
>
>> Can you give me some concrete bullet points on how you think
>> Fedora.next will be any more attractive to third parties?
>
>https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/31/good-morning-bugfixing-and-thinking-about-fedora-next/

Third parties, and to a certain extent the large market of consumers,
don't want choice, and often don't want change.

Linux, in terms of Desktop, is everything those people don't want, and
has gotten worse with time with the fracturing of the GTK based
community (we have gone from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 / MATE / Cinnamon) in
addition to the other desktop environments.

I fail to see how this new workstation product is going to change
things given that Fedora.next.workstation will basically be the same
thing as Fedora is now.  How is it any different to say your product
works with Fedora.next.workstation vs saying it works with Fedora? You
perhaps get a little more clarity, in the sense that (if GNOME is
chosen) Fedora.workstation.next = Fedora GNOME, but how much different
is that to what we have today?

If you want 3rd parties to target Fedora (or users to move to Fedora),
you have to provide what they want.

3rd parties want a single target to aim for, with a large enough
number of users.

Users want a desktop environment that works for them, and most will
accept the default if it satisfies that.

Fedora's problem is that GNOME 3 doesn't work for the majority of
users.  The fact that you have to provide instruction on how to use
the product on first login tells you all you need to know.  GNOME
Classic was predictable, in that there was no way Red Hat would be
able to sell GNOME Shell to the corporate buyers.

The creation of MATE and Cinnamon, and the fact that they have
continued to exist despite the effort involved, is the GNOME
equivalent to Windows users continuing to buy Windows 7 instead of
moving to Windows 8.

If you want Fedora to attract those 3rd parties, you need to solve the
fragmentation issue  either by moving to the Qt world (and hence KDE),
or by finding a way to find a compromise that brings back the users to
one GTK based environment.