Re: Vision for new platform

[aep <aep@exys.org>]

On Mon, 21 May 2012 17:18:47 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> but when it comes down to it,
> in order for anything to work _right_, you need GNOME.

I'm afraid, that's the consistency i was talking about. Gnome or KDE 
are the only FDO choices available. I can fully understand the decision 
not to support my pile of hacks i call work environment,
because the only fully understood and properly researched (with actual 
real scientists, not bloggers) work environment is microsoft windows. 
There is nothing wrong with business decisions.
The only grudge i hold is that this entirely destroyed any fun in linux 
as a hobby for me.

> This placed an unnecessary
> burden on the desktop environment/file manager to get things right

The middleware bloatup here is just an artifact of the lack of policy 
in the lower stack, indeed.
It requires discipline that all of the free workforce out there just 
lacks, so you need guys like canonical to pour money in the pipe, and 
they typically fund the cheap high school kids with no experience in 
system design but lots of confidence. It also requires tons of manhours 
in testing, in order to get it working on all of the trillions of 
permutations of configurations. It's not something you just hack away in 
your lunch break.

> remember HAL?

It went away before i finished laughing.

> That's why I think, to be viable and relevant

Yes of course. I couldn't agree more.
All i'm trying to do is tell you, is that it's bloody hard. But talking 
to the guy who had the balls to rebuild a libc from scratch, it's 
possible you might just be able to pull it of.
Just put the bar a bit lower. Targeting existing desktop users isn't 
all that desirable. They're perfectly happy with the UI's that canonical 
provides for them. And it's a good thing these people like their 
universe and everything,
just like Drepper still has friends.


Arvid