Abandon "Default Desktop"

[Nikolay Vladimirov]

2009/4/30 Trever Fischer <wm161 at wm161.net>:

> This is obviously subject to personal opinion. The only unstability I
> currently get are due to the fact I use kdesvn-build to have the latest SVN. A
> friend of mine uses Fedora KDE on his netbook and is quite happy with it.
> Another uses 4.2 on gentoo and is also happy as a clam. KDE is just as stable
> as GNOME. The only problems one might find in fedora is that it doesn't get the
> same amount of love that your average fedora dev gives GNOME. Putting KDE up
> there with the same rank as GNOME should work to fix that.

You're right it's just the experience I have which may be cause by a
lot of other components like intel video drivers and so on.
On average I get 0.5 total KDE crashes a day and about 1 kde
application crashes per day. While in gnome those are per week.
It's just my observation on several machines that Gnome is more
stable. I have  feedback from only 4 KDE machines which is not enough
to state that "KDE is unstable crap". I admit that.

I don't think that just promoting KDE as first rank DE for Fedora will
get devs to work on it more that they do now.

> No nice AV player? You mean like Dragon Player? And if Amarok is so awful, I'm
> sure the developers would be glad to hear why. They're constantly taking
> feedback and using it to stop everyone's complaining.

I don't like dragon player this may be somewhat personal. At the
moment I use mplayer without GUI or totem, both are great.
In my opinion the videoplayback trough plasma is somewhat slow (both
xine and gstreamer) and buggy.
The amarok developers get a lot of feedback and all the things I don't
like are known to them and they will be fixed eventually. Amarok  2.1
will bring the first bulk of goodness but it's just some work that
needs to be done and it takes time.
At the moment amarok is usable but nowhere near banshee or rhythmbox
or amarok 1.4 was.

>> One thing that really must be addressed is that if I want to install
>> KDE I have to go trough all the trouble to remove all the gnome stuff
>> which is a lot of clicking. A different set of applications is needed
>> for every DE. And it will be good if there is some meta grouping of
>> the applications.
>>
>> On the installation methods I always use netinstall since I have 6-8
>> MB/s bandwidth to my local fedora mirror. So I get all the stuff in
>> the anaconda package selection. It should be fairly easy to say: I
>> want "Minimal Install" or "I want [Gnome|XFCE|LXDE|SUGAR|KDE]" And all
>> the packages selected by that choice should intended for this DE. I
>> don't want rhythmbox in KDE or evolution.
>
> So, I'm kinda confused here. Are you /for/ or /against/ promoting KDE to be on
> the same level as GNOME? Just wondering.

Gnome should be the default but it must be very easy to click "KDE"
and have that without any fuzz.

My point is that it will be good if I can select for example KDE in
anaconda and the selected packages to be ones in the KDE LiveCD Spin
for ex. Same stands for XFCE and others. And by selecting a DE you get
only the applications that are specific to your DE without the Default
selected packages that are good for GNOME.

On a side note this may be a little harsh but can we be realistic and
say that an unexperienced user will only go to Fedora by mistake and
actually all newbies use ubuntu. So no need to really care that much
about users who don't know what Desktop environment is and explain to
them about different ones in the installer. This is pointless.

For ex this guy I work with uses ubuntu. And yesterday he saw me
playing around with some plasmoids and he said:
- Cool. What's that?
- KDE
- Uh?
- Like you use Gnome as DE and this is different and it's called KDE.
- Uh? I use ubuntu.
- Um....... actually this is Kubuntu.
- Oh, Ok.


-- 
NV