Desktop issues discussion proposal

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Fri Apr 23 20:00:22 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 15:37, Mariano Draghi wrote:
> Havoc Pennington escribió:
> 
> > 
> > This is a home user though as you say, not really a current focus at Red
> > Hat. Though we're happy to see people improving Fedora in this respect
> > and aren't going to reject enhancements for home users.
> > 
> > Havoc
> > 
> 
> Sorry, but http://fedora.redhat.com/ states:
> """
> The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to 
> build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free 
> software.
> """
> 
> I really don't see where the "home users" are excluded in that definition.
> I've been thinking that the "corporate" user was a target of RHEL, _not_ 
> Fedora.

That's why I said "not really a current focus at Red Hat." Other
contributors to Fedora could choose to focus on home users (and I'd
encourage it).

> Besides, many of the latests discussions in this list (rythmbox vs xmms 
> being a very good example) are clearly focused in usability of things 
> that have nothing to do with the corporate desktop client assisted by a 
> IT department.

Lots of corporate environments do allow people to listen to music, and
have webcasts and conf call recordings and things of that nature.

> Really, I don't get the point.

My point is primarily that we need to be clear what the context is for
every proposed enhancement. Ultimately there are multiple target users
and multiple possible deployment scenarios, and you have to design
different features and modes of the software to accomodate each of them.

In my opinion we can go ahead and assume that home installs won't work
the same as corporate installs in many respects.

Though personally I would love an easy out-of-the-box way to set up my
home network such that I got automatic backups, etc. ... I'm also pretty
tech savvy.

> Besides, if RedHat is going to focus only in the things they care (i.e., 
> enterprise), and want others (the community) to do the rest of the work, 
> then Red Hat should set up ASAP the infrastructure so the community can 
> get more involved.

I certainly agree with that, and Christian and his team are working on
it.

> Right now (FC1), Fedora is a very "usable" and general purpose OS. Has 
> this goal changed? When? Why? By whom?

The goal has not changed. What we're discussing here is adding new
capabilities and focused improvements for particular audiences and
scenarios.

UI design can't be done "generically," you have to know what your focus
is. This is the reason I'm emphasizing our focus, because that is where
our design proposals come from.

Red Hat does expect home users to be a focus down the line, and we don't
want to see the OS go in directions that will preclude that.

Both Fedora and RHEL are intended to be general-purpose operating
systems; home vs. corporate is not the difference between them (and
server vs. desktop *certainly* is not the difference).

Anyway, to think about desktop UI and design crisply, we *must*
distinguish different kinds of user and deployment scenario. In a whole
lot of cases, we'll need multiple UIs. A router and a home desktop for
example can't sanely use the same network config dialog.

Havoc







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