Excellent post, Vince! Regarding usage data, do you think Debian's popcon
numbers will yield any useful insights?

Jude
On Dec 29, 2014 11:26 AM, "Vince Mulhollon" <vince@???> wrote:

> 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.
>
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