Re: focus! (was Re: Focusing on innovation re: mono, python et al)

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Rich Burridge wrote:
> I've seen GNOME steadily improve over the last few years, but it still
> doesn't have a cohesive wholeness to it. One of the problems in this
> respect is that different distros customize GNOME as they see fit.

That's totally backwards. GNOME doesn't have a cohesive wholeness
because *it's not a cohesive whole*. It's a part. The distros *need* to
make changes to integrate GNOME with the rest of the distro and *make* a
cohesive whole.

Look, here are some quotes from the first 4 (non-duplicate) hits for
"Novell SLED review"[1] on google:

    "The desktop environment itself is clean, attractive, and free of
    clutter. Novell claims to have done extensive user testing to refine
    SLED’s UI, and it shows. This is not your average, stock Gnome
    system." (InfoWorld)

    "this desktop is probably the cleanest and most logical desktop of
    ANY operating system I've come across. All in all it's hard to
    imagine a better organized workspace and set of capabilities."
    (dcperspective)

    "The most impressive feature is its complete lack of, what I call,
    'ducktape' feeling. Virtually all distributions I have tried gave me
    the direct feeling I was using a product stitched together by
    ducktape; group A did something, group B as well, and group C
    stitched those two together with ducktape. SLED, however, feels as
    if the parts are surgically sewn together, after which a plastic
    surgeon hid the stitches. A huge step forward for desktop Linux."
    (OSNews)

    "For one thing, they’ve completely redesigned the GNOME interface
    (more on that in a moment), and integrated Beagle desktop search
    into the distro so completely that you wonder how you lived without
    it before." "I fought [the new main menu] at first, but trust me
    when I tell you that once you get used to it, you won’t know how you
    got this far without it." (madpenguin)

(Ahem. Sorry for the advertising.)

The reviewers have spoken, and they think that SLED is a cohesive whole,
and that upstream GNOME and the distros that ship vanilla upstream GNOME
aren't. So what can we (GNOME) do? There seem to be two broad directions:

    1. Agree that (for now at least) GNOME is a part, not a whole, and
       that we can best help users by helping distros to build good
       wholes.

    2. Figure out what sort of whole GNOME wants to be, and become it.
       Eg, if we want to be the sort of whole that SLED is, we'd
       become it by integrating Beagle and Tomboy. If we want to become
       the sort of whole that OS X is, we'd integrate Rhythmbox or
       Banshee and F-Spot. But regardless, if we want to be cohesive,
       we have to *integrate*, not keep a wall between the applications
       and the rest of the system.

-- Dan

[1] at first I tried just "SLED review", but that actually turned up
reviews of sleds. :-)