On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 at 11:27:46 +0100, BALATON Zoltan wrote: > This could be as simple as having some dockapps packaged and installed > via Suggests and having a menu from where they can be started and if > the user likes them they can dock them. This allows customisation and > avoids the "one size fits all" problem.
There's no solution to "one size fits all". What I'm saying is that distros should spend a bit more time thinking about turning the default wmaker workspace more useful by default. They should choose a set of dockapps which get the job done the first time a user logs in. Just giving them a xterm is simply not inviting. The user might prefer another dockapp, but he/she will be able to change that later, once he/she is convinced that using wmaker is cool. But having preferences is a _completely_ different problem. > (This menu and the way to use the dock and clip could be hinted in an > info panel to make it easier for new users.) Having stuff in the info panel means C code inside src/, and I oppose to that. One possible solution that distros could find is to have a firefox icon in the dock that once clicked opens up a local "Welcome to Window Maker" screen with some interesting information. Or something along these lines. I've seen a startup screen in KDE the last time I installed it. It was not a firefox thing, but we are not going to write a program like they did to do this :-) What I'm saying is that for all these years distros simply put a Window Maker rpm in the repository and *run away*. Natural selection selected the few of us who are here on wmaker-dev today. Window Maker is not a desktop enviroment. But it also does not turn using a computer a less efficient task - quite the contrary. But if you don't have some key dockapps to do the simple stuff, using WMaker _will_ be a pain. Let's see. Does a default install of KDE offer you a lonely konsole in the desktop and say "hey, if you really want to connect to the internet or mount your usb stick just install this package by typing these commands. Then open your konsole and run those programs you installed". No, they don't do that. Why? Because 99,99% of people would do that anyway, so they do it for them. But a distro Window Maker does not have even the information screen! If the wmaker people inside distros even tried to address this issue, that would be progress. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to wmaker-dev-unsubscr...@lists.windowmaker.org.
