shiny desktop, anyone?

[Trond Danielsen]

2007/5/28, Valent Turkovic <valent.turkovic at gmail.com>:
> On 5/23/07, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 16:39 +0800, Ken YANG wrote:
> > > as we see, suse 10.2 has the animation grub, it looks good.
> > >
> > > can fedora has this kind of grub?
> > >
> >
> > We (the desktop team) hope to get rid of the grub menu in the default
> > boot sequence instead of making it nicer. See
> >
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup
> >
>
> Great! Go desktop team, go! :)
>
> I really believe that presentation of linux is one of the most
> important things... it must be shiny and preeeeety :) Nice kernel
> hacks and speedups are nice... but those are things that most desktop
> users don't care and don't know even exist... but they know good
> interface and nice boot grub screen when they see one.

I do believe that most users actually care more about kernel hacks and
speedups than bling-bling on the desktop, they just do not know it.
Most of the people I know run Windows on their computers, and they can
roughly be divided into two groups: The non-technical users that do
not change anything, and the technical users that instantly switches
to the Windows classic interface once they get the chance. I think
they would be very upset if the support for their iPod was replaced by
drop shadows on windows :)

The biggest complains agains free software desktops is not the lack of
glossy themes, it is the lack of hardware and multimedia support,
speed and general stability. These are issues that are not solved by
being able to put virtual workspaces on a spinning cube, but rather by
adding support for new hardware to the kernel. The time that it takes
to boot a modern linux desktop and the time it takes to start up a
popular application like Openoffice, are also much more important to
gain attention from regular users.

-- 
Trond Danielsen