Re: ALS and an observation

[Christian Riege <criege riege de>]

On Wed, Oct 20, 1999 at 11:05:12PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> [...]
> Man, our marketing blows. All the GNOME hackers were at ALS, we had
> some good conversations and planning, but KDE is the one with the
> big press release and feature article on LinuxToday. I really wish
> we could just hack and not think about this crap, but we want people
> to use our code!

I'm sensing a disturbance in the force ... :).

It's probably correct that KDE's press coverage outshines GNOME's
currently. However, IMHO, this can be 'blamed' (note the quotes
please) on two things:

- a somewhat premature release of GNOME 1.0 (at least that was my
impression) and the resulting bug-fixing-marathon which scared away
some of the press (imagine someone installing 1.0, playing w/ it only
to have it crash more or less frequently).

- GNOME users/developers not being ferocious (sp?) advocates of
'their' desktop environment of choice. Personally, I kinda like that
quieter, somewhat more 'professional' attitude a lot ... I remember
back in the days of OS/2 the "Team OS/2" members - most of 'em were
added to my kill file after two posts to Usenet :).

Is there a solution? Probably yes. I *really* like GNotices, but I
don't think that it's very well known outside of the GNOME world.
Maybe a bit of promotion would help. Also I'm really impressed by
GNOME's technical features - i.e. the stuff that the regular user does
not see or notice - but I don't think that this has been outlined on
one of the major sites out there yet. There has been discussion of
Bonobo and stuff but nothing that would represent something that could
be understood by non-techies.

Just my $.02,
        Christian