Re: My thoughts on fallback mode

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

> It would be like releasing a new car and then telling the buyer that the
> tires that are included aren't good enough but that's okay because they are
> free to go through the trouble of replacing them right after they take
> ownership. Modularity is not a feature; a good feature is a feature.

You wouldn't be a very good car salesman then would you ? In fact people
loathe and hate the lock-ins wired into cars. Plus of course the first
thing anyone does when they get into a car is umm

	Adjust the mirros
	Adjust the seats
	Adjust the music
	Adjust the airconditioning
	Adjust the satnav
	Fit random personal objects (modularity)
	...

"I'd like to use a random bluetooth hands free", "sorry our car is only
available with our official hands free option"

"radio", "ours only"

"satnav", "ours only"

"engine management", "ours only, DRM protected and we sued the other guys"

"I need snow tyres", "sorry we don't support snow tyres, you don't need
them."

"I added go faster stripes" "You've voided the warranty"

The car market is such a mind-numbingly bad example, in fact it's the very
market whose abuse led the european union to pass legislation to limit
the power of "no reverse engineering" clauses, that later proved such a
good situation for software !

> If a user has to do a bunch of customization after installing to get
> a tolerable desktop experience, we have failed at design.

If the user can't then customise it to get a nice desktop experience to
suit their needs after that you've also failed. That of course cuts both
ways - it can have so much stuff you can't configure it.

The distros gather hardware info with permission from plenty of users so
they ought to be able to answer "what percentage of our users can run
this stuff". Not sure if they have enough data to do "what portion of our
users desktops can be seamlessly migrated - ie all the equivalents for
each applet exist and the settings can be mapped"