Abandon "Default Desktop"

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat May 2 17:30:03 UTC 2009


Alex Hudson wrote:
> I personally find it a bit surprising that the choice of desktop
> environment is thought of as being sufficiently important that there
> should be no single "default". As a user, there are apps that are vastly
> more important to me, and for which there is choice: e.g.,
> OpenOffice.org vs. KOffice, Thunderbird vs. Evolution (vs. Kwhatever),
> Firefox vs. Epiphany. I spend 90%+ of my time in my desktop using those
> apps, not the desktop itself - Tbird is much, much more important to me
> than the choice of DE.

The idea is that by selecting GNOME, you'd get GNOME apps as the default
apps (of course, there's still the question whether to use OO.o and Mozilla
apps or the official GNOME defaults, but that's already subject for debates
right now, and both the current DVD defaults of OO.o + Firefox + Evolution
and the current live CD defaults of Abiword + Firefox + Evolution are a mix
of that), by selecting KDE, you'd get KDE apps (KOffice, kdepim, Konqueror)
as the default.

You can still fine-tune them in the package selection screen, the idea is
just that you'd get a reasonable set preselected depending on your desktop
choice rather than getting all the GNOME stuff checked by default.

A related issue is the way the current comps is structured, where categories
like "Graphical Internet", "Sound and Video" etc. are basically all GNOME
or GTK+ apps, the equivalent KDE apps are all in "K Desktop Environment".
We'd need a better comps structure (more conditionals? Maybe specific
handling of conditionals based on the desktop selected in the radiobutton?
Or maybe different versions of comps depending on the selected desktop?) to
really treat the desktops in a fair way and make a desktop selection screen
work properly.

        Kevin Kofler




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