Re: the same page

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Regarding support for older machines:

While I'm sympathetic to this, and in fact use a P2 for some development
and a slow p3 for other stuff (not to mention a 5-year-old SPARC), I
think we should bear in mind two things; one, the Gnome2 we are
preparing now will take time to "hit the streets" as it were, so we
should be planning for the user population of mid-2002 and not the
population of this instant; some of those old p1s will doubtless get
replaced in the interim.  

Also, as this is a new "major rev" release, it's not unusual for the
system requirements to jump up discontinuously at 2.0.  Once 2.0 is out
we want to avoid forcing the 2.0 user base to keep upgrading, but I
think a major release is an acceptable time for a "step function"
increase in platform requirements.   I think the need not to degrade
performance (footprint, etc.) will become more important when moving
from 2.0 to 2.0.1, 2.2, etc. 

-Bill

Trevor Curtis wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 12:57:05AM -0800, Seth Nickell offered:
> > For example... I was recently talking with Telsa and Jeff Waugh, both of
> > whom felt it was really important for GNOME to run on older
> > pentium-class machines because that is a market that has been largely
> > abandoned by Microsoft and hence an opportunity. They also care about
> > various "people" in that class of users (such as non-profits). All else
> > being equal I would love for this to be true too, but given a choice
> > between a desktop that was a) more usable or b) had more useful features
> > and a system that ran on older machines I would choose the first two
> > over the third. Maybe the conflict isn't inherent, but its an example of
> > the subtle ways we are on "different pages".
> 
> It's odd how this has come up now. Just a few days ago this would have made
> sense to me, but then, for some reason, I started taking note of friends,
> family, stores, non-tech businesses and the like. I was totally blown away by
> the fact that slightly more than %50 of these users run "older" machines. In
> fact I'm typing this on a family member's low-end P2. I think just the sheer
> volume of these users speaks... err... well volumes. I really dig all the work
> that has been done for users of Seth's mentioned A and B, especially since
> I'm one of them. ;) But I really think there might be massive opertunities with
> the lower end group.
> 
> just a thought,
> tcurtis


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