Submitted by GNOME/GTK+ hacker Federico Mena Quintero blogs about the responses to the Questions for GNOME Deployments. “It’s an informal study of the requirements that those deployments have, based on feedback which they provided about their particular needs. By fixing the most common problems which the deployments are experiencing, we will make GNOME more attractive for future deployments, and we’ll get more users faster.”
Having this as the primary ambition explains a lot!
KDE just has the ambition of the being the best desktop.
Here’s a direct link to the report itself:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/docs/gnome-deployments-2006/in…
I think it’s an excellent approach, give the users what they need and help the biggest adopters where they need it the most for maximum exposure, keep on rolling.
Is Gnome planning to get more users from the free software community (KDE…) or from closed one (Windows, MacOS…)? It would be better for free desktop environments to have the same advocacy policy, otherwise they would be battling with themselves.
I find all of these ‘10% by such and such a time’ rather silly, and I’m tired of it. It’s funny it always seems to come from some Gnome people, and we get these silly little slogans like ’10×10′. Its seems as though he has never read Joel Spolsky’s ‘barriers to entry’ article that he’s quoted, and thought about what it all means.
As far as the problems from various people in there go, they seem to be more reflective of problems with Gnome more than any attempt to get ‘10% market share’.
Performance is always one that comes up, and I think Gnome on a thin client is a complete non-starter. The many printer problems were one of the things Linus Torvalds brought up in his infamous posting:
“Printing is routinely broken, specifically gnome-cups-icon, it leaks, and takes up too much CPU, so I remove the package. Users can still print, they just get no notification or any kind of management of their jobs.” (Jorge Castro, Oakland University, United States, 2500 users)
This is actually a ‘What is Completely Broken in Gnome’ document disguised as a ‘World Documentation’ document.
‘World Documentation’ document
Pardon? That should read ‘World Domination’ document.