Abandon "Default Desktop"

[Kevin Kofler]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> The board would likely never say that.  However there are a large number
> of Fedora resources that are focused on new technology and advancements
> in the user experience.  Most of this effort is focused on the Gnome
> desktop.  This is due to the number of package maintainers in Fedora
> that are also the upstream developers.  So we do tend to see the new
> things in Gnome first, and then KDE later (see NetworkManager,
> PackageManager, pulseaudio, DeviceKit, power management, so on, so
> forth).

Well, a few things there:
* sweeping KDE under the carpet is not the way to attract more effort
towards KDE. We need more manpower to be more active in upstream KDE
development, not just packaging, but we aren't going to get that manpower
if we place ourselves as a distribution hostile to KDE. We KDE SIG people
have been fairly successful at fighting the historically-motivated
suspicions of KDE people about Fedora, but GNOME bias in things like the
download page or the way the desktop environment gets selected on the DVD
can quickly lead to new bad blood flowing.
* PulseAudio has actually been the default in Fedora's KDE ever since it was
the default in GNOME (Fedora 8).
* KPackageKit has been available since Fedora 10 (only 1 release late) and
also as an update for Fedora 9 (where PackageKit was first introduced).
* power management just works with KDE apps. Up to Fedora 9, we had the KDE
3 KPowerSave. In Fedora 10, we shipped guidance-power-manager, a PyKDE4
app. And now, power management is part of KDE 4.2 itself (PowerDevil) and
that's what will be the default from Fedora 11 onwards. We never relied on
GNOME/GTK+ apps for power management. And I actually asked about desktop
dependencies of https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PowerManagement
feature and was told it's work at the lower levels and should benefit both
GNOME and KDE alike.

Now it's true that the KDE frontends for NetworkManager are still
experimental (and so we're still defaulting to the GNOME one even in the
KDE image), but the KDE spin has fully working networking with NM-gnome,
which is exactly what the GNOME spin is using too, so it's not like this is
going to make the KDE spin look broken. (That said, hopefully we'll be able
to default to the native NM plasmoid in Fedora 12.)

As for DeviceKit: what exactly does this bring to the user? I see only a
limited set of new features. The main point is really that it is new code
and HAL is old, and yes, a DeviceKit backend for Solid is needed. But I
can't see how not having it available now is going to make KDE look bad.

        Kevin Kofler