Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] Gentoo Desktop - Proposal

James William Dumay <i386@××××××××.org> said:

> On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 13:14 +0100, dams@×××.fr wrote:
>
> > James William Dumay <i386@××××××××.org> said:
> >
> > > Yeah, I sat down and thought about it some more. Heres what I have come
> > > up with. I welcome flames, comments and changes to the document.
> >
> > ok, below are my comments
> >
> > >
> > > Gentoo Desktop
> >
> > The name cannot be Gentoo Desktop, there is already an official gentoo desktop
> > project.
>
> We can call it what ever we want.

name is not a problem


[...]

> > >
> > > Target Audience
> > > ===
> > >  "Hobbyist" users coming from other distributions, such as RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
> > > Small to Medium Enterprise Desktop Roll outs
> > > Educational Institutions (Universities, Collages, Secondary and Grade
> > > Schools)
> >
> > the goals are missing : is it just coolness, or security? polishness?
> > professionalism? ease of use? etc. redhat is polished, professional, but not
> > the easiest to use, for instance.
> The goal is to make the modification so simple that my grandmother can use it and as well as it seeming proffessional and easy to use.

please don't talk about grand mothers. We need realistic goals.
you won't be able to target grandmother use. The only computer a grandmother
might be able to use is imho a  mac with macos. No other OS has enough ease of
use/integration to be able to compete.

So let's take as goal : I install gentoo, and I want a perfectly integrated
desktop in less than 30 min, with no configuration.

>
> > >
> > > Desktop Environments - Why GNOME?
> > > ===
> >
> > I'll cut the rest : for me gnome is NOT the dominant desktop environment. KDE is
> > a lot more widely used, more powerfull, more integrated, has more extensions.
> >
> > [...]
> Its also got most of the major companies backing it aswell as the best
> accessabile and inclusive applications around.

hmmm, well, nautilus integrates badly with mozilla and soffice. epiphany and
gnome office are not competitive with koffice and konqueror. metacity is even
not integrated as well as kwm.
But well this is troll for now. Let try to agree on the concept/goal/need first


> > >
> > > Gentoo Desktop - The First Step
> > > ===
> > >
> > > Milestone 1
> > >  - Report on the Applcation and Services needed on Desktop System
> > >  - System Services - Hardware Detection Services, File/Print Sharing, Printing, etc
> > >  - Applcations - Office Productivity Tools, Internet Tools, Gaming, etc
> > >  - Decide on the appropriate virtuals and USE flags needed for user customization of the desktop.
> > >  - Create gentoo-desktop-x86-2004.0 profile based on the decisions made.
> > >  - Build system with new profile and report on system usability from an end users perspective, noting specific issues to be discuss and delt with in Milestone 2.
> >
> > this is a good way to do it. Maybe we should decide before that,
> >
> > - do we need/want that
> Well, if this project was a sucess and went ahead, this could allow
> Gentoo to become a prefered and major platform for educational and
> enterprise computing.
>
> > - how should it be integreated/handled by gentoo
> For the project itself (initally), we keep it localised as a gdr-project
> untill we have ran some trials on the system structure.
> As for infransture, we keep the customised desktop componenet away from
> the main tree, in its own cvs rep.
>
> If/when the project comes more mainstream, we can offer a stage/livecd
> along with the rest of gentoos releases.
>
> We should also release as often as the mainline gentoo releases to keep
> version numbering in sync as well as the improvments in the mainline.
>
> Comments and suggestions?

How should we decide what is good for the user? What choice to do? All this
goes against the gentoo moto : "All of the sudden, Larry the Cow was in
control".

Finding all the point of configuration, and customization takes a lot of
time/ressource, and it can be done properly only when the release of the main
gentoo is out. S it's difficult to release on the same deadline, unless it's
buggy

I have a solution to this problems, but I need more thinking, and I'll write a
new mail


-- 
dams

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