Re: Getting GNOME page on gnome.org

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hey all,

My view is that this page should help newcomers get hold of GNOME 3,
either to try it or run it full time. This is the main place on the
web for people to get this information. It is a prominent
public-facing page. The focus should be on assisting non-experts,
therefore. We know there is a lot of demand for this, thanks to our
new super awesome web stats - the getting GNOME page receives a lot of
inbound traffic, and generates a lot of outbound traffic to the major
distros also.

If someone is interested in a less popular distro, I think we can
assume they already have some technical expertise, and that they have
the skills to find the information they require.

With this in mind, we used some rough criteria when selecting the
distros to include when this page the first time round. These went
roughly:

 * provide a complete (or almost complete) GNOME 3 experience, which
is reasonably close to upstream
 * make it easy for a novice to get GNOME 3
 * if they don't include GNOME 3 out of the box, have a single link we
can include to provide instructions or automatically install it
(preferably not requiring the use of a command line)

When GNOME 3.0 came out, that lead us to include Fedora and openSUSE,
if I recall correctly. Ubuntu was added once their GNOME 3 ppa was
ready.

I think it's important to recognise that this page isn't a popularity
contest or a statement about which distros GNOME likes and which it
doesn't. Its primary purpose is to help newcomers get started using
GNOME 3. It is also a nice place to illustrate the communities and
values associated with GNOME, of course, and this page can do a bit of
that, but this shouldn't detract from its primary focus. Having a less
prominent secondary list of distros which include GNOME 3, but maybe
aren't as easy to get started with, seems like a good compromise to
me. How we select that list of distros is a little tricky, of course.
(But I do think we should have some criteria for this.)

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 03:40:41PM +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> > So what about the others then? I forgot about the Amazing Distro X! :)
> > I felt that the instructions for Arch ("GNOME is available in the
> > _extra_ repository"), Mageia ("GNOME 3 is coming in the next
>
>
> I don't like this change.
>
> I help out at Mageia. And the standard Mageia doesn't provide the
> correct GNOME. Saying:
> "Check out their websites for more details."
>
> while GNOME 3 is only in the next version, by default you only get
> gnome-shell and not e.g. gnome-documents...
>
> The purpose of getting GNOME page is to explain how you can get GNOME.
> The text on the getting-gnome is totally inaccurate.
>
> If you don't want Mageia there, remove it.
>
> But if you want to say how to get GNOME, then explain how to get GNOME.

Does the current version of Mageia let you get a complete (or near
complete) GNOME 3? (Not just the shell - the apps, wallpaper, font,
visual theme, control center, etc etc). It seems strange distro to
have on the getting GNOME page if it doesn't have that.

Either way, I don't think it should be our responsibility to maintain
instructions for installing GNOME 3 on distros. If we did that for
every distro on that page, it would quickly become a mess and
maintenance burden.

Allan