Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On 31 Oct 2001, Seth Nickell wrote:

> I'm not really referring to the technical implementation. No, We are not
> developing a GNOME kernel. And yes! We should share everything we can
> with other systems such as Swing, KDE, Mozilla, whatever so the desktop
> is cohesive. None of these things have bearing on what I am saying.
> 
> > What I mean by operating system is the whole deal, including GNOME.
> > However, to users, this "whole deal" is labeled Red Hat or Solaris or
> > whatever, most likely. Because that's what it says on the box when you
> > buy it.
> 
> Which is part of the problem, but not one I am able to solve. ;-)
> Seriously, I don't care about naming games much (lest this start to
> sound like Linux vs. GNU/Linux or something). I don't really care what
> users call the desktop environment, whether they call it RedHat or
> Solaris or GNOME. I don't care who the "credit" goes to or who users
> think is making the "product". The point is 
> 
> For a large class of users, the desktop environment is the most
> fundamental object they interact with, the desktop environment is what
> holds their operating system together. When the graphical environment
> fails to provide a good experience for the user, I think the final
> burden rests with the desktop (perhaps the distribution can share this
> as well, but as a desktop developer I choose to treat this as my
> responsibility as well). If there's something missing that's needed, or
> whatever, the desktop is the primary mediator of the user experience.
> That's all I'm saying.
> 

This is not true for the "traditional" unix desktop market. 

> > If you want to extend into trying to solve all the UI problems of the
> > whole operating system, instead of just creating a good desktop
> > component, then you're going to have to look at working with the whole
> > OS and various relevant open source projects, instead of just the
> > GNOME Project. We have got to think bigger-picture if we want to have
> > a bigger impact.
> 
> Right! We agree here, we need to be looking at the bigger picture of the
> UI problems users are encountering. One of them happens to be system
> configuration without relying on command-line tools, so I hope we do
> something to address our half of that issue (the interface part), and
> encourage the responsible parties (distributions, driver developers,
> whatever) to implement the other half (the backend that interfaces with
> a particular piece of hardware or distribution convention).
> 

Users configuring the system? who could think of something so gross? The
users have no call to be managing the system, at best they might be
allowed to set their mouse and keyboard and sounds settings... 8-)

> 
> -Seth
> 

	Sander

"I don't think there is intelligent life within our solar system"
	-- Brian Behlendorf