Re: GNOME 3 Marketing - GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2010-03-30 at 21:37 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> El mar, 30-03-2010 a las 11:52 -0400, Owen Taylor escribió:
> > We can also point to various alternative desktops built on GNOME
> > technology - whether that's the continuing ability to run the GNOME 2
> > panel and window manager, or to XFCE and LXDE.
>
> Scratch that, we either point people to GNOME Shell or GNOME Panel +
> Metacity. Our message is totally broken if we point people to other
> products :-).
>
> Remember http://live.gnome.org/GNOME3Myths , we should keep people using
> GNOME and make it clear that we want you to use GNOME Shell but we are
> not forcing you if you prefer the old panel, it's there if you need it
> and it's not hard to use it.

I'm not really completely on board with this way of positioning things -
we need to have an unambiguous message:

 GNOME 3 is GNOME Shell

because we *aren't* designing things around running the GNOME 2 panel
with GNOME 3, we aren't making the guarantee that it fits together, and
we aren't trying to provide a unified visual experience across the GNOME
3 shell and the GNOME 2 panel. This last is important from a marketing
perspective - if articles come out about GNOME 3 with screenshots of
some components from GNOME 3 running with the GNOME 2 panel, then we're
making a very weak message.

There's always been the idea that the tent of GNOME is broader than the
GNOME desktop distribution and there is certainly room for other options
than GNOME Shell in there, but when we are selling the GNOME 3 desktop
we need to be selling a single thing.

> On this topic, Debian for example is offering a "gnome-3-session" meta
> package so it shouldn't be hard for distros to offer alternative
> sessions in GDM that use gnome-panel + metacity. We can work with the
> major ones to support this fallback for users.

Practically speaking yes, distributions are going to have to provide
this option at least for the next year or two. I don't generally think
that separate sessions and forcing the user to log out and log in are
the best way to do this - in Fedora we offer a GUI tool for switching on
the fly.

So how we message the choice - what are the terms that a distribution
should be using when talking about this choice. Should it simply be

 (*) GNOME 3 - enhanced experience
 ( ) GNOME 2 - reduced hardware requirements

?

- Owen