On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 8:50 AM, Mauro Cicio <mauro@???> wrote:

> we are not ready to give up the philosophical principles behind *nix ("do
> 1 thing and do it right") and the freedom that comes with the "free as in
> speech" part of the FSF GNU.
>

I like that, maybe as a project motto or marketing tagline.

the GNOME audience
>

In an "emperor has no clothes" moment, does that audience exist other than
devs and corporate support aka are there any voluntary users who wouldn't
be happy with something else? You can recognize the disease from afar by
devs writing "user speak" instead of "I speak". "Well, the users really
need automounting of iomega zip disks, because, users". "Sorry we had to
product tie to one inner platform anti-pattern init system, but we had to
do it distro wide, because, users" Unfortunately there are no users so it
doesn't really matter, and the actual users that do exist won't use that
junk and are already installing freebsd. It reminds me of the Windows
Mobile community which very passionately believes in itself, although
statistically no one in the real world actually voluntarily uses it.

I googled around and finding numbers about DE use is apparently
impossible. I don't think it farfetched that the number of Emacs users
exceeds Gnome and KDE combined by a large integer multiplier, for example.
If this data existed, it would help in prioritization.

There is a popular meme that the primary purpose of a distro should be a
bootloader for either KDE or Gnome. I'm convinced thats wrong.

There is a difference between "This distro is a qmail bootloader and all
that matters is how well it runs qmail so qmail release blocks absolutely
the entire project" vs "This distro is marching along with or without us
and if qmail can't keep up or has license issues or can not implement
Policy in time, well, guess the release will use exim tough cookies"

Another meme is engineering driven distros vs marketing driven distros. A
commercial marketing driven distro could ship a "non-desktop, server"
release without xorg because "servers". However my xmonad / urxvt / emacs
/ chromium desktop will run just fine on the "server" release if no one
intentionally screws it up, and if the "desktop" release ships with
mandatory Gnome, the first thing I'll be doing with all that work is dpkg
--purge ing it and installing xmonad / urxvt / emacs / chromium.

I mean, personally, I kinda like Stella and Simh but I'm not proposing a
distro bend over backwards for them and I think that is the proper place of
bloated DEs.

A summary might be DEs probably are not as popular or important or actually
used as much as very widely believed in the dev community, so intense focus
on them above all other software is counterproductive.