> 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" _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list