Lest anyone think we're alone...

[Dan Smith]

LOL.. Thought I was responding to a Fedora help group I often answer
questions on.


On 11/25/06, John Babich <jmbabich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/25/06, Dan Smith <draciron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Ubuntu does have Kubuntu, a separate distribution. Anyway, some good news
> for Fedora KDE users:


It's an unofficially supported distro.  Basically Ubuntu has said if you
don't use Gnome for your desktop then good luck.  KDE can of course be
installed afterwards but post install KDE or Gnome installations tend to be
messy and very time consuming. At least the last time I've done it which was
3 or 4 years ago.


There is a plan is to merge Fedora Core and Extras in FC7. This
> eliminates one barrier. There will be no second-class citizens, but
> there will still be default apps at installation time. I hope that a
> complete KDE can be installed from the start with the merger of the
> repositories. I use both KDE and GNOME. Getting a *complete* KDE
> installation on
> FC6 is a bit of a pain. What can be installed by default vs choice at
> install time is being actively discussed. Now's a good time to push
> for more KDE.


I hate the default install options of Fedora so much that I ALWAYS choose
custom install. Some really excellent software like K3b, Midnight Commander,
ncftp, KDE and any KDE apps and the list goes on of stuff left out of the
default Fedora install. I also have a preferred partitioning scheme and the
default install wants to wipe that out. One of the things I'm covering in
the Admin doc is potential partitioning schemes commonly used and the
positives and downsides of each.


- Other Fedora Project members are pushing to integrate KDE more
> cleanly into Fedora.   See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE.


Thank you. I plan to visit that frequently.


Fedora Core and Extras include GNOME, KDE and XFCE (Yes, I even use
> XFCE on low-end machines). You can add others. It so happens that GNOME
> is the default windows manager. This, of course, makes GNOME an easier
> install.


Aye, Fedora as long as you do a custom install will do a nice job of
installing KDE. Except for grabbing some extras like MP3 support which
Fedora doesn't have the luxory of supporting thanks to RIA, I'm very happy
with the KDE install. I click a few extra utils that i like using while I'm
adding KDE, then afterwards I hit gnome-yum, sourceforge and freshmeat and I
have all my favorite apps.

Though I have some feature requests. I tried to make one through bugzilla
but the walk through dialog spun Firefox into some sort of endless loop. I
went to bed, got up six hours later and it still hadn't finished populating
the package list.  I'd report it except LOL. I'll try in a few days to skip
the wizard and see if it'll give me the normal Bugzilla.  One of those
requests would be an easier way to save what packages are installed. I'd
love nothing more for Fedora to read what I had installed last time, present
me a custom install where I could go through and add or subtract software
rather than doing it every time by hand. The alternate is just as bad by
editing the install files manually and only worth it if you are doing large
numbers of installs.  For example I just went up to FC6 on this machine from
FC3. (Been running FC5 since it came out on one machine, almost that long on
my third) Spent a good part of a day with gnome-yum re-installing files,
then another few hours downloading tarballs of stuff that wasn't in any
repositories.

Clique behavior is always bad for FOSS. One of the goals of the Fedora Docs
> project is to lower the barrier of entry. We should have a "big tent".


Not with Fedora Docs. Folks here are very friendly. I'm talking about the
wider Linux community.  Think of it in these terms. VB has billions of lines
of code out there. One of the things that have literally kept many people
using windoze is VB. Believe it or not years after the last and final
release there are still thousands of coders hacking more VB code.  Gambas
and the Mono project offer two different alternitives to VB yet nobody knows
about them. Suggest a non-C like language to many Nix people and they get
this really sour look on their face.  LISP, Smalltalk and dozens of other
non-C like languages have excellent support on Linux. Nobody knows about it.
Think about this as a TCO proposal to a company. Move to Linux and they
save  the cost of the OS, buying the latest Microsoft visual studio/ More
code will port from VB to Gambas than from VB to .net so they save countless
man hours while porting to a more secure, stable OS that doesn't require the
frequent hardware upgrades that windoze requires.  Most windoze users think
of VI and Gnu C when they think of Linux. That's an image we want to change.

Fedora by default doesn't install Gambas or most of the non-C languages.
Hell the default doesn't even install most compilers period. Even if you
never write a line of code dozens of apps will complain if you don't have
Perl, Python and others. What do fresh windoze users do when they want to
use the equiv of Access for example? I've found a few, haven't had a chance
to check them out but out of three I figure one ought to be pretty good.

A new Linux user is going to want to know what to use in place of the apps
they are used to using.  That is not cut and dried in Linux. Many of the
lists that do such are poorly maintained or give only really basic options.
Might be a  good document for us to add. It also might be a really good idea
for many of those apps to be in the default install.

One obstacle is lousy or non-existent documentation. We can change that.
> We can also work more closely with other FOSS projects on a complete
> FOSS toolchain for FOSS documents.


Aye, hoping to do my part on that.


> A new point:
>
> What are the implications of a choice of either GNOME or KDE at install
> time,
> or shortly thereafter?


To be honest unless disk space is at a premium choosing to install only one
of those gives a user half a desktop. Grip, K3b, Gnome-yum and so on.
Neither desktop is complete in my opinion. A user can muddle along with apps
that are not as good but exist in the given desktop. For the complete Linux
experience, at least from a GUI standpoint both should be installed. Between
both desktops and the 1,500 +other apps/utils I install I'm still using less
than 5 gigs disk space on my / partition which includes every one of the
default partitions except /home.  I'm like a kid in a candy store every time
I visit freshmeat or pull up gnome-yum LOL. For most users 5 gigs is
nothing. At least a gig of that 5 on mine is stuff most people wouldn't
install. So your talking 3 to 4 gigs of stuff that give a Fedora user so
many good tools to work with. Allows users a great amount of choice. If
Konquerer isn't doing it for them then they can use MC or Nautalis for
example. While using KDE as the window manager. If they are using Gnome apps
like K3b are really nice things to have installed default.


We will need an equivalent Desktop User Guide for KDE like what now exists
> for GNOME. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/DesktopUserGuide.
> This should probably be a separate document for now.


I'd be happy to start on that soon as I finish the Admin docs.


I'm willing to get a KDE version started on the Wiki. I can't do it
> alone. Just be
> sure to leave the GNOME version intact. Depending on how the default
> window
> manager discussions go, this may eventually need to be merged with GNOME
> into one document.  Of  course, some default apps are really KDE apps. The
> user doesn't know it. There is already a degree of integration between
> GNOME
> and KDE. Initiatives exist to make the integration tighter.


I don't use Gnome very often. Mostly on machines where KDE isn't there or
helping a user who chose Gnome as a desktop manager. So I would use the
Gnome guide as an example for the KDE guide but would not modify it
directly. If I saw something I wanted to add or suggest I'd contact the
author directly.


We have to remember the target audience in any case. The current DUG is
> aimed at users without root access. We don't even discuss updates at this
> level. We don't mention GNOME or KDE.



Except for corporate users and untrusted family members most people running
Fedora I think will have local root.
Unless they are  non-technical  or not as technical as they think they are
:) I prefer to give local root to users. Things like configuring printers,
installing software and modifying the environment are pretty essential to
most users. They are also things that most users coming from the windoze
world are used to being able to do themselves. Found that I spent less time
fixing machines where people abused local root powers than doing mundane
tasks for people who didn't have local root. Machines got scanned for
rootkits and I laid eyeballs on the logs of machines pretty frequently so
things went fairly smoothly.

So in my opinion %70 or more of Fedora users are going to have local root.
Most users not on a machine they own will not have root access to the
servers they are connected too. So there is value in covering both
situations.



In any case, in light to recent events, I suspect interest in KDE on Fedora
> will grow.
>

KDE is a very popular desktop manager. Default desktop on many distros. So
for folks coming over from Mandriva , SUSE or who got to learn Linux from
playing with Knoppix as an example they are going to want to stay with KDE.
Many long time Linux users like myself swear by KDE. In a poll I saw on a
LUG the usage between KDE and Gnome was pretty evenly split and about %10
going with really lightweight desktops or the more exotic desktops. No idea
if this representive of the Linux community as a whole. I suspect it is.

Drac
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