Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Alex GS]

Microsoft just announced it's new CEO Satya Nadella who has an extensive
background as the former rain-maker of their enterprise and server
business with Bill Gates is going to act as his technology advisor.

Just wanted to add that if your thinking about continuing to ignore
GNOME 2 and experiment with GNOME 3 and it's unproven philosophy now is
not the right time. The window of opportunity for Linux to get into the
desktop workstation market in a serious way is closing fast.

On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:46 -0500, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
> 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.
>