Abandon "Default Desktop"

Frank Schmitt ich at frank-schmitt.net
Tue Apr 28 21:33:16 UTC 2009


Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 16:48 +0100, Naheem Zaffar wrote:
>
>> Forcing a choice at install time to uninformed users is plain bad
>> usability. Allowing those that are informed to change the defaults is
>> the right way.
>
> Naheem nailed this one. The problem with forcing a choice is that, for a
> certain group of people, the choice is nonsense: they have no idea what
> they are being asked to choose, or what they should choose.

We could ask the Gnome project to describe in two sentences the
differences between Gnome and KDE 4 and also ask KDE to do so. The
result could be a hint for the user.

The following is just some random bullshit, please don't take it
seriously. I just want to demonstrate length and terminology of such a
hint for the user (but probably even talking about frameworks and
applets might be to high level): 

[screen-  Gnome: A desktop environment that tries hard to enforce
 shot     consistent, accessible and coherent user interfaces. By
 default  default the list of running applications and the main menu
 desktop] items are split into two panels.


[screen-  KDE: A desktop environment that gives its users more
 shot     possibilities to adapt the environment to specific needs. In
 default  KDE 4, panels and desktop are just different instances of a
 desktop] common framework, allowing to move applets between panels and
          the desktop.

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