Brief diary of an F-7 installation

[Jim Cornette]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Andras Simon wrote:
> 
>>> 2. There should be an honest choice given between Gnome and KDE.
>>> There is something sneaky about the way Fedora tries to get Gnome in.
>> I remember being offered the option to install Gnome, KDE or a third
>> DTE (Xfce?). I chose none, and got it :-) Which, btw is a definite
>> improvement over older RH/Fedora installs. So I don't see any Gnome
>> conspiracy here.
> 
> Where were you given that choice?
> As far as I can see, you get no choice at all
> unless you opt for a Custom Choice of packages
> (which itself is non-default);
> and then you have to choose the Desktop bundle,
> uncheck Gnome and check KDE.
> It's easy to overlook the fact that Gnome is checked in by default.
> 
> Why not give users a simple choice with radio buttons?
> 
> I'm pretty sure the Anaconda/Fedora developers
> have a political preference for Gnome over KDE,
> and so make it more difficult to choose KDE.
> I think people should have a free choice.
> 
> 

Check out issues from the past that related to qt licensing problems in 
the late 1990's and the history of the GNOME project. It is great to 
have alternatives. There has to be defaults and that means one choice 
from many possibilities.

I use GNOME and prefer it over KDE. I was tempted and installed KDE when 
Mandrake was basically an RHL 5.x build with the addition of KDE. I lost 
interest in Mandrake shortly after RHL included KDE along with other 
alternative desktops at install and was available in an iso that you 
could burn to CDROMs also.

If there are any preferences, it is probably because of being almost 
burned by qt and the financial investment in making an alternative to 
what would have resulted if qt went unchallenged.

It is what it is, biased or not. KDE is available, xfce and gnome. Not 
all prefer any of them and sources for alternatives to these are out 
there also.

Jim