Desktop Linux

[Rahul Sundaram]

Sankarshan Mukhopadhay wrote:

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>Rahul Sundaram wrote:
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>>Aza dotzler presentation on requirements for Desktop Linux is a relevant
>>article for what is appealing to the target audience
>>
>>http://piercedotzler.com/asa/linux%20%96%20in%20search%20of%20the%20desktop.pdf
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>Rahul, thanks for the link.
>
>Unfortunately, we seem to be moving in the same loop of *Why can't my
>desktop be like Windows ?* Very wrong and not the right way to a good
>and proper Linux Desktop.
>
>Both in this presentation and the blog, the issues mentioned relate
>mostly to Usability on the Linux Desktop Environments vis-a-vis the
>Windows UI. The assumption for this hypothesis is that the Windows UI is
>picture perfect - not true at all. Assuming that there is no real need
>to clone a Windows UI to make a usable Linux desktop, the real challenge
>is to enhance learnability.
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We have to make it easy for people to migrate from the Windows UI 
regardless of its flaws. We dont need to create a perfect clone. That 
would be monumentally stupid but we can try and understand what makes 
the current UI a higher learning curve. My opinion is that data 
migration is of a even higher priority than UI similarity. GNOME and KDE 
is comfortably close now.  There are other points like installing legacy 
group by default which is trivially easy. Lets say you try to install 
Real player (ignore for the moment that its a proprietary player, a open 
source off repository player will do the same thing) on Fedora Core 4, 
you will get a obscure error about some .so file missing which you will 
have to rectify by using installing a compat libstdc++ library.

>on the other hand, anything above Windows98 (and by that one
>includes a majority of the Government offices in India) causes usability
>issues in terms of terminal usage/command-line interface, print-tool
>usage, browser usage (inexperience with tabs) and mail client feature
>requests.
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Precisely.  So lets look at the action items here

* Install the legacy group in Anaconda by default for better backward 
compatibility. The Fedora Extras repository is not going to cover every 
software out there.
* Mount FAT filesystems by default in first boot.  (NTFS is off limits)
* Investigate a tool like openmover.sf.net for data migration after 
confirmation with user on first boot
* Trim down core to defaults as much as possible

regards
Rahul