Abandon "Default Desktop"

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Mon May 4 19:56:06 UTC 2009


Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Mon, 2009-05-04 at 09:04 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> (except that you get Firefox as your browser if you choose GNOME, whereas
>> the official default browser of GNOME is Epiphany).
> 
> This is one of the reasons why it's not the Gnome spin, it's the Fedora
> Desktop spin.

I don't see this as a good reason not to call it the GNOME spin. It's still
GNOME, even if you replaced one application. Many distributions install
Firefox by default if you select GNOME.

That said, one wild suggestion: why don't we kick out Firefox entirely?
Their outrageous trademark policies (every single patch needs to be
approved by upstream) make the Firefox stack the *only* packages not
qualifying for provenpackager access, which is an impediment to Fedora's
development. Additionally, their artwork has a non-Free copyright license
according to the Debian folks who audited it. (And upstream's claim that
this is a requirement for a trademarked logo is just plain wrong, e.g. all
the official renditions of KDE's gear trademark are under the LGPL.) My
suggestion: ship Epiphany on the GNOME spin, and then either have a
rebranded Firefox (Iceweasel or whatever) in the repo or no Firefox at all.

> If somebody wanted to make a GNOME spin that highlighted the best of the
> GNOME world and GNOME only, they could.

Realistically speaking, nobody is going to produce a spin just to replace 1
application (or maybe 2 if you suggest replacing Pidgin with Empathy too,
but that's where the "Desktop" spin is headed towards anyway). This is a
bogus argument.

        Kevin Kofler




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