Proposed F19 Feature: Cinnamon as Default Desktop

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 02/05/2013 04:36 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-02-04 at 21:49 -0500, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>
>> Honestly, what kind of benefit to the community do you expect from a
>> user who gets confused just by looking at a couple nice screenshots
>> and reading some brief explanation? Have you ever met such a person
>> (incapable of understanding two sentences but useful to the
>> community)? Don't you think regarding your users this way a tad
>> disrespectful?
>
> It's an *initial* state, not a never-changing one. When I first decided
> I was going to try Linux, I wanted to try Linux. I wanted exactly what
> our download page gives you - a simple link to a thing called Linux I
> could download and fiddle with. I'm not sure I wanted my first encounter
> with the Linux world to be a boxout explaining to me what KDE and GNOME
> were and asking me to pick one or the other.

It would have been a one time beginners encounter, you'd have forgotten 
very soon. I'd classify it as an negligible and ignoreable detail, which 
is burried in the amount of issues newcomers will have to struggle with 
later on.

That said, I'd consider this issue to be way overrated and would expect 
Fedora to bee more attractive to users, if it offered a fair choice of DEs.

> These things are obviously
> things I came to learn about later, but they're not the most fascinating
> topic to deal with when you first decide you want to play around with
> this here Linux thing.

I think you are putting too much emphasize on "first-timers" and seem to 
be forgetting the "Linux distro switcher-users". For them, easily 
finding the DE they know from their so-far used distro and easily 
switching between alternative DEs would be an important feature.

Ralf