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Re: Common Desktop goals



Yo!

Below are some opinions from me, from a perspectivce of somebody who uses 
Linux on Desktops within a company. To make Debian attractive for home 
users, priorities are somewhat reversed.

On Tuesday 21 September 2004 00.25, Bluefuture wrote:

> - Introducing a graphical boot in Debian:
> - Working on an option like "rpm -h" for dpkg system:

These two are nice, if somebody really is bored.  The normal user should 
never see package installations, and rarely boots his machine.

> - Developing a gtk frontend for the new Debian installer:
> - Working on Debian Control Center:

Nice from the admin, but again, not necessarily urgent.

> - Improve Apt-watch:

A tool pure users won't use, again.

> - Improve initd and Kernel optimization for Desktop.

Yep. Haven't noticed any serious problems myself, though.


Tasks that would be very important for me, because it really saves work for 
the local sysadmin or makes Linux easier for users:
(Disclaimer: I haven't done a sarge test-installation in quite a while, so 
some of this may already work)
 - Laptop support: power management should Just Work(tm)
 - hardware detection, including multimedia buttons on keyboard and 4 button 
mice etc.
 - KDE / Gnome / ... integration: look & feel, things like drag and drop, 
settings, ... (most annyoing example: when I start some gnome applications 
on my KDE desktop, nautilus launches, changes the background image, and 
places its icons on the desktop. This MUST NOT happen!)
 - Fonts: there should at least be a metapackage so that I can install this 
and have the full unicode charset covered (as far as possible, of course) 
so that web pages in foreign scripts display reasonably. Also: devise a 
method so that fc-cache is not called 10 times when I install 10 font 
packages. Wtih many fonts installed, it takes ages...
 - Multimedia support: MIDI playback working out of the box, for instance.
 - (KDE specific) Replace the wallet system with something less annoying... 
I *did* log in with a password, why do I have to unlock my stored passwords 
with a password? Dunno, write a PAM module that will unlock the wallet with 
the login password, something?

Users can accept Linux being different than Windows, but some of the above 
are issues where users are shaking their heads and flee back to their 
familiar environment and give up on Linux alltogether.

greetings
-- vbi

-- 
featured product: vim - http://vim.org

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