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

[Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 14:28, Luis Villa wrote:

> > 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.]

One of the things I like about GNOME is the lack of blitz branding that
seems to be prevalent with KDE.  I don't need or want advertisements in
my About menu, or every application to be named [BRAND] [APPLICATION].

I think its important to keep in mind the target audience for software. 
The largest is going to be end users, who are unlikely to be part of a
"community"; they just want software that works and works well.

Developers and enthusiasts, I would imagine, will seek out the projects
that interest them.

-- 
Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>