Abandon "Default Desktop"

[Kevin Kofler]

King InuYasha wrote:
> The only time KDE was a first class citizen on Red Hat/Fedora Linux was
> RHL 8.0 to 9.

Well, those were the days where RH tried to "unify" the desktop and to ship
mixed GNOME and KDE applications, with the infamous Bluecurve theme. This
was highly controversial: some people loved it, some liked parts of it, but
many others hated it. I like the Bluecurve theme that came out of this
initiative because of the consistency it brings among apps, and in fact I
still use it, but many people hated it. But the drawback of that approach
was that the KDE which was shipped wasn't a pure KDE, it used some
GTK+/GNOME apps, nor was the GNOME which was shipped a pure GNOME (the idea
was to make "best of breed" apps the default in both desktops, no matter
what they used; of course, there was strong bias towards GNOME apps even
back then, only a few KDE apps made the cut, like K3b) and the default
look&feel was also a mix of both.

This strategy has been abandoned since, and I think most people don't miss
it. Also because both GNOME and KDE are more complete now, so shipping a
mix of both to get the best apps isn't really necessary anymore, and
integration between applications has improved, so you get more value out of
the second best app if it's integrated into your desktop than out of the
best app if it isn't. Now of course, specialized apps will often be
available only in one version and you'll use them no matter what toolkit
they use, but for the default apps, you really want apps written for your
desktop in most cases.

        Kevin Kofler