Re: Make Debian better (Re: Two Debian 3.0 reviews at Slashdot)
On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 16:21, Colin Walters wrote:
> I have been thinking recently about starting a Debian Desktop
> subproject, which is pretty strongly related to what you're talking
> about. Its main motto would be "Software which Just Works".
Please do! I think this is greatly needed.
Debian is a completely stable system which gives complete freedom to
it's users. Debian users have a large variety of hardware and usually
want to tweak their systems exactly how they want - this is not
compatible with autodetection in all cases.
Other people - desktop users, windows converts, corporate ppl with low
budgets... are looking for something which just works and works well
(and includes the very latest and greatest). At one time, the Debian
motto was that this is a great idea and that commercial companies should
spend effort creating user friendly distros based on debian. Some have
tried, some have failed... all have contributed useful ideas and program
to the open source community which we are now in a position to adopt.
> Unfortunately though, there's lots of core stuff that we need to fix
> before even contemplating something like a desktop group.
> debian-installer being the big one of course, but other things like
> finishing the menu rewrite, finish integrating GNOME 2 and KDE 3...
If the group is started now, it's first steps could be to help out with
these projects, ensuring that debian-desktop related customisations can
be made easily. Also, there are far more issues which need to be
investigated, all of which takes time. The most important of these is
determining what desktop-users actually want (If you're reading this,
your almost certainly not a desktop user, at least not of the type a
desktop subproject should target). The recent articles have gained
desktop user attention - announcing a new subproject now would be
certain to bring in many useful comments.
I hope you decide to start the debian-desktop/debian-home subproject
--
.''`. Mark Howard
: :' :
`. `' http://www.tildemh.com
`- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
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