On Wed, 2013-03-20 at 17:19 -0400, Ray Strode wrote:
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?
Well sure, but we kinda felt a project wide responsibility that those tools should work, because they were Our Tools For Making Stuff Work.
Now no-one really works on a lot of the s-c* tools, partly because 'GNOME replaced them'. RH isn't paying anyone to write system config tools for KDE or LXDE, and Fedora isn't making any kind of effort to say 'hey, let's make sure system configuration works outside of GNOME'. So it kinda falls into a black hole. Like I said, I think there are areas where we need to look at things from a Fedora-as-a-whole perspective and say, well, look, is the distro covered here? Not just 'does it work on our default desktop' but does it work on a distro-wide level?
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.
Well, they probably wouldn't all agree on which top-to-bottom integrated experience they want to have ;) And actually I think there are people who _don't_ want that. The guys who run nine terminals in a 3x3 square on fluxbox or whatever probably don't want a top-to-bottom-integrated experience, but they might want to configure their keyboard once in a while. But in F18 we shipped a completely busted system-config-keyboard, because hey, the GNOME keyboard config tool works, and no-one's really paid to care about s-c-keyboard any more, like maybe they were 5 years ago. And no-one apparently feels responsible to care about s-c-keyboard from a Fedora angle. So it just sits there getting progressively more broken. Ditto with various other s-c-* tools.
I think the top-to-bottom integrated GNOME experience will be great for a lot of Fedora users (I'm sure looking forward to it!), but not the _only_ thing that _all_ Fedora users want, and Fedora as a whole might want to take a look at what is not being taken care of, which in the past got taken care of as kind of a by-product of making sure our default desktop worked. In the past, we had to make sure a lot of distro-wide bits - old-GDM, s-c-* - worked in order for our default desktop to work. Now, we don't: so we can get into this situation where the default desktop stack is doing pretty well, but when you step outside of it, things look worse.