Hi,
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Well, it's less Fedora-y in that we used to have this kind of conception where there were desktop environments, controlled by the desktop team.
Fedora desktop team has only ever controlled the desktop spin, which uses GNOME. Other SIGs have controlled other desktops since there have been spins.
Then the login manager, system config tools, and probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of were controlled more or less by the distribution.
what do you mean by "the distribution" ? We all work on the distribution right?
GDM did stuff like setting language and keyboard layout, and wasn't really considered a part of the GNOME stuff (I don't think).
GDM has always been a part of the gnome ecosystem. that's what the G in GDM stands for.
It was expected that you could just swap out DMs (like skvidal thinks is still the case) and everything else should just deal with it.
So now, gnome-shell does sort of require GDM to have full functionality, and GDM does require gnome-shell to have full functionality. That's definitely an example of integration that didn't used to exist that does now. I don't see why that integration makes Fedora less Fedora-y though.
The system-config-* tools were part of Fedora and used across all desktops - it didn't matter what desktop you ran, you used system-config-keyboard and system-config-display and so on.
It's true, we've tried to get rid of the need for the system-config-tools. In some cases we've made them completely unnecessary (thanks ajax, thanks dcbw, etc). I think make things like those more integrated doesn't make Fedora less Fedora-y though. I think it just makes Fedora more cohesive.
I think other desktops still think of things somewhat in those terms, but GNOME definitely doesn't: GNOME wants its own stack, almost top to bottom.
Not sure about GNOME, but I can speak for myself as a gnomie and long time fedora desktop member. I want users to have a top-to-bottom integrated experience. But I think if you asked anyone working on fedora if in general they want the user to have the opposite of a smooth integrated experience, they would say of course not. So it's really a matter of the specifics of how to get there, I guess.
--Ray