Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Markus Hitter wrote:
> Am 20.12.2013 21:04, schrieb James Carthew:
> > I see a gnustep desktop as having at first boot the user choose
> > apple, next, or windows GUI style giving the best of all worlds and the
> > user total control.
> While you have a few very good ideas, I simply can't wrap my head around
> why everybody thinks in terms of whole distributions. With a complete
> distro you have ten times more non-GNUstep work than this small group
> can afford and, worse, you compete directly with the big distros. The
> chance to become more popular than Ubuntu is probably 0.00001%, no
> matter how excellent this GNUstep distro works.
I do agree, although once you have working and clean packages, making 
your own distro is easier. If I'd were to make a distro I'd spin off an 
existing one, not starting one afrom scratch.
For me it is absolutely not interesting though.

My mid-term goal would be to have X packages that make up a working and 
usable environment and being able to install them. Like you can choose 
to use XFCE, LDE or GNOME. You will have one or two flavours of GNUstep 
stuff (I am thinking here of something more GAP and more Etoile 
oriented). Most probably they will have a lot in common too.
> And no, average people don't install distros just for fun. Typical end
> users run the OS their PC came with and retire the PC when this OS is no
> longer usable. Even the big distros struggle a lot to overcome this
> laziness. Accordingly, trying to do a whole distro is a sure recipe for
> staying small and invisible.
>
> If you integrate GNUstep into existing distros, including Windows and
> Mac OS X, you compete just on the application level. And the chance for
> e.g. GNUmail to become as popular as Thunderbird are many orders of
> magnitude higher.
True. Besides, we even have it already packaged, but the packages do 
suck and the surrounding environment is often spotty.

I am not working on a dozen applications to compete on the application 
level, but on the application-inside-my-favourite-environment level.

Thunderbird and Firefox are fine, they just have sucky menus, ugly tabs, 
scrollers on the wrong side.
I'm using seamonkey to send this mail and it is this way since years, 
since GNUmail broke :(

Riccardo