Re: the same page

[Cody Russell <bratsche gnome org>]

On Wed, 2001-12-19 at 22:27, Seth Nickell wrote:

> My personal feeling is that this will result in the same thing happening
> as happened to Cyrix. Targeting less visible/flashy markets and moving
> to more visible markets hasn't seemed to be a common phenomenuum in the
> computer industry. That's why, for example, while I think its great that
> ...
> I also don't think its unreasonable to say "Use an older machine, use
> older software". If you're using a Pentium-200 you should probably
> consider using GNOME 1.4 or Windows98 instead of GNOME 2.0 or WindowsXP.
> Its true that you won't have the same features...but if you can always
> get the same features without any hardware upgrades why would anyone
> ever upgrade? Why aren't we still using Commodore64s or whatever?

One of Gnome's major purposes is to provide a free alternative to
commercial desktop environments such as Windows or Mac.  By limiting
Gnome's features to a set of features fit for a Pentium 2, Gnome would
not really be working very hard towards that purpose.  Targetting older
machines that have been abandoned by Microsoft doesn't really accomplish
anything for anyone, I think.  Most people on older machines are either
using Win95 and won't change because they've been using it all this
time, or they're using fvwm or an old KDE or Gnome 1.0 release.  Writing
future Gnome releases that don't provide additional cool features for
those users due to hardware restraints obviously doesn't gain those
users anything so they're not likely to upgrade, and it doesn't provide
the alternative to modern desktops or operating systems so higher-end
users won't use it either.  Ultimately Gnome gains a few low-end
computer users but loses out on potentially many higher-end users.

It's also much less fun for the developers. =)

Cody


-- 
Cody Russell, bratsche gnome org
http://www.gnome.org/~bratsche/