Abandon "Default Desktop"

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 17:57 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > 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:
>>
>> Do we have any reason to believe that this is a significant percentage
>> of the Fedora demographic? Or does it not matter if they only make up
>> 1%? If so, are we targeting and possible type of Fedora user?
>>
>> I personally think there would be less work to be done if Fedora
>> stopped partially targeting a class of newbie users who can't be
>> trusted to decide their own DE, but are willing to follow Fedora's
>> aggressive update/upgrade paths. I have seen little evidence that that
>> demographic even exists, yet everything seems to be done with their
>> best interest as the rationale.
>
> I notice you chopped out the bit of my post where I carefully addressed
> precisely this question.
>
> To summarize (as I see it): yes they exist, no we don't know how many
> there are (and I'd say that's not even important, what matters is
> whether we *want* there to be lots of them or not), and there's no real
> consensus on whether we should care a lot about them or not. This is the
> fundamental problem here.


Sorry about that, I over snipped and under read. The rest of your post
addresses my concerns, or are least highlights the.

I would like to see the project choose a realistic direction and stick
with it. My own intepreation of the general direction is as an
accelerator and enable of FOSS development.

Thank you.


-- 
Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin
( www.pembo13.com )