On Sun, 28 Dec 2014, Klaus Hartnegg wrote:

> Am 28.12.2014 21:47, schrieb Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI:
> >OTOH desktop users that will be attracted to Devuan will also be in
> >majority the same who also already renounced Gnome and Kde.
>
> Very likely yes. But still the largest number of all is probably
> server admins.

Yes. Easy to evince from all responses we received on VUA email address.

Sysadmins are definitely our usecase and we plan to provide professional
users of Debian in this sense. Yet we don't exclude the needs of
desktop environment - and in general we will be investing in R&D also to
set a mark for other distros who are not sharing revenues with upstream.

Let me remind you that DE does not mean just casual consumer grade use
of a desktop, but also professional use, as in case of multimedia
production. There are many issues that Devuan can also fix there,
starting from the FFMpeg removal from Debian...

> Linux is mostly a server OS anyway, and desktop users probably care
> less about the init system than server admins do.
>
> Am 28.12.2014 22:02, schrieb Dima Krasner:
> >IMHO, if we're *technically* able to deliever GNOME, we definitely
> >should do that
>
> YES!
>
> The suggestion of the OP was not to drop Gnome, but to avoid a delay
> by "get Devuan up and running with DEs/WMs that are not so entangled
> with systemd, then tackle Gnome once the basic structure is in place".

What is quoted above is defintely aligned with the current focus for
Devuan developers.

> Does anybody have an idea how many server admins, and how many desktop
> users are interested in Devuan?

a good start is this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

then again, from what I could read in the huge amount of feedback we
had: the vast majority of people caring about this project, including
the core developers who are themselves running server farms: we are
mostly server admins users, often relying on Debian in our professional
life.

I still recommend using GNU/Linux on desktops, especially for people
that have a mission-critical reliance on their desktop use like
journalists or activists. But we must also acknowledge there are plenty
of Debian developers that themselves are using Apple/OSX as their own
desktop. So to say, DE is not exactly a situation we want to compete
for, since we have even lost many people among our own tribes, if you
get my point straight.

Look, I've been in the DE and liveCD DE shuffle of GNU/Linux in the past
15 years myself - as much as many readers here - and obviously today I'm
quite opinionated about it. Let me just say that, with all the work done
in between - including the Ubuntu fork - we are still a minority of
users of GNU/Linux on desktop. There is no point on working hard to
improve that situation now with Devuan, since our priorities and worries
are different and mostly related to the systemd avalanche, which is a
deeper issue affecting many different interests.

Being pragmatic, as of today I'd be most interested in knowing what the
developer community of kFreeBSD or Hurd is planning to do: if they see
Devuan as a reliable new base to continue their efforts, or if not then
what we can improve in our plans so that they can perceive us as an
opportunity to survive.

ciao

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