Re: Desktop user: Etch or the next testing?
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Jochen Schulz wrote:
>> These are all projects that improve desktop users' experience (from what
>> I believe, at least). Is there anything that Debian itself does for this?
>
> This sounds like a troll. :)
>
> Bus as far as I can tell, there is only little concentrated effort to
> improve "users' experience" throughout the distribution, that's true. In
> Debian, (almost) no one can tell a package maintainer what to include in
> a package or which patches to accept. Since (almost...) all work is done
> voluntarily and unpaid, nobody can force anyone to do something.
>
[snip]
>
> It appears to me that you are underestimating the size, success and
> workforce of the Debian project. There are more than a thousand Debian
> developers, maintaining about 30.000 packages (wild guess based on
> tab-completion), most of them in more than one version.
>
> Debian *is* the flag.
Any software, or any other product, if does not care about end-user
experience, will start to lose users, regardless whether it is free,
whether it is community-based. Yes, no one forces people to use debian;
all developers are volunteers and do not get paid. But debian is not
developed for fun (or just for a small group of people use). It is to be
a "Universal Operating System".
If fact, I do think debian does care about user experience. The apt
series package management system is a very good example of being
end-user friendly and easy to use. I guess apt series is one important
reason why people choose debian.
I guess desktop configuration is at least the same important as the
server configuration (I am not saying that server is not important). One
reason is that there are (I guess) more installations for desktops than
servers. The second reason is that people do not need to touch servers
every day and the only thing needed for servers is to be stable. But for
desktops, we (directly) use it every day for several hours. It is
desktop that pull (most) people in or push them away from debian.
For the workload problem, in fact it could be simplified. For example we
may just need to group some existing commonly used desktop packages
(something like tasks, and for sure users can then install whatever they
want using aptitude); pre-configure them to be easy to use and easy to
install. We may even do not need alternatives, just provide only one
solution that just works. We can support less hardware architectures.
Those mentioned methods are only some examples. I do not know the detail
because I am not an expert. But I am sure there can be ways to improve
desktop with not very heavy workload.
Yes debian is the flag. There should be a sub-flag to attract people
(both end-users and developers).
- --
Cheers,
Wei Chen
http://www.acplex.com/people/wchen/
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