Re: [Usability]Definition of "desktop" - was a Usability topic.

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 14:19, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 05:22:10AM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> > 
> > > Just a .02, isn't it a weird technical detail of Unix that "the desktop"
> > > is a module separate from "the OS." Certainly Mac/Windows don't have this
> > > distinction.
> > 
> > But it's one that GNOME as a project will just have to live with. :-)
> >
> 
> GNOME is never shipped in isolation, it should be designed to drop in
> as a part of the complete user experience.

GNOME is, however, developed in isolation. It's one thing if 'ls' has no
branding, but if a project of several million lines of code does not
effectively convey to users 'here is who we are, here is why you should
help us' then we're going to be 100% dependent on vendors very, very
quickly. That would be an utter shame. [FWIW, I don't think the menu is
the right place to do this, necessarily, but it's something we have to
think about very hard going forward. If GNOME's identity is to be just
'something that gets packaged with a distro', we've got very little
long-term future as a community. And that would be an utter shame.]

Luis