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Re: Proposal: switch default desktop to xfce



Op 25-10-13 12:10, Thomas Goirand schreef:
> On 10/25/2013 07:52 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>>
>>> Debian is the "Universal OS", isn't it?
>>
>> Part of being a 'Universal OS' is being useful to as many people as
>> possible, including people who don't know what a "desktop" is and
>> people who don't have the ability to choose a desktop. Artificially
>> limiting the range of people exposed to, using or working on Debian
>> isn't a good idea.
> 
> It's not as if those users would just stay, stuck on the screen forever,
> then give-up installing Debian because they don't know what to answer.
> They will eventually choose an option, and move on to the next screen,
> even if they don't understand what they are doing.

There's a limited number of times people are prepared to do that ("move
on without understanding what they're doing") before they will give up
and move on -- either to another distribution, or away from Linux
entirely. That can't be the goal.

We do need a default desktop, and I happen to think that having several
"variants" of Debian ("Debian Gnome", "Debian KDE", "Debian XFCE", etc,
rather than "KDE alternate CD 1", which is somewhat more involved and
therefore less clear for non-native speakers) that only differ in their
default choice of desktop would be a feature, not a bug. We can then
make the "choice of default desktop" be something as simple as a symlink
(or equivalent) on our download pages.

I do agree with Russ that several people do not seem to understand that
the difference between "kubuntu" and "xubuntu" is no more than the
default set of packages -- in fact, I've had to explain that fact
several times to different customers.

-- 
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.

If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.

  -- http://xkcd.com/1133/


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