Unity For Fedora (As in OpenSUSE or Arch)

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Feb 1 18:04:16 UTC 2012


Matthias Clasen wrote:
> After the fruitless discussion on xdg-list, we decided that the spec was
> not going to help us in implementing the desired user experience.

That's not up to you to decide. The spec is a cross-desktop spec already 
implemented by KDE Plasma and Unity. Sometimes you have to interoperate even 
with a protocol you don't like! Do you think SMB/CIFS is a great protocol? 
Yet we have Samba, and for a good reason! Interoperability doesn't always 
mean YOUR spec will be the one getting adopted by everyone. (That's exactly 
the frustrating thing about GNOME's current approach to interoperability: 
They always want to force THEIR standards onto everyone. And that's when 
they even remember other desktop environments exist in the first place.)

I have also explained in my reply to Florian why the "discussion" on the XDG 
list was fruitless and why that spec would actually HELP implement the 
desired user experience in gnome-shell, if you were open to cross-desktop 
protocols instead of forcing the "native GJS extensions only" dogma.

And independently of what gnome-shell supports, your applications will also 
run on plenty of non-GNOME workspaces (KDE Plasma, Unity, Xfce, LXDE, 
proprietary operating systems; and yes, users WILL run them on all those 
platforms), so supporting only what gnome-shell supports does a disservice 
to your users. At least Plasma and Unity users would benefit from you 
adopting libappindicator in your applications; for the other platforms, it 
will either also help or just not make a difference.

        Kevin Kofler



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