Abandon "Default Desktop"

[Adam Williamson]

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.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net