David L. Gehrt wrote:
I am a long time user of... RedHat, Fedora
me2
I am of the opinion that Linux may be at or close
to a crossroad moving from a computing genre in which the users
and
developers make cooperative decisions on alternative development paths
to
one in which changes are imposed by developers.
did consumers ever have a say in
development? Wasn't it always just providing
what apple and windows had, or racing to keep up with hardware developments?
people seemed to be satisfied with this.
For me it is not just that the Gnome2 environment is being replaced
with
a
new version, it is that this new version, Gnome3, was seemingly
developed without much consideration of how the former version, Gnome2,
was being used and then imposed on users.
Does a desktop environment have to remain
static? Cannot it evolve with time
and with the developments in the greater world of computing? There are those
who think that the pinnacles were reached with kde3 and gnome2. I am not among
them.
What this seems to imply is that in the future the mainline Linux UI
will
be
characterized features imposed, and by lack of flexibility.
There are also
countless other window managers/desktop environments in the
fedora repos, the most evolved being xfde and lxde.
This lack
of flexibility means that users are presented with a computing environment
with
features thought desirable by developers and which provide little or no
way
for users to modify their computing environment in ways that meet
their needs and preferences.
You want to modify? I guess you haven't tried kde!
I love it.
I suspect without knowing that this is someones idea of how to turn
a
profit
by moving Linux to more profitable place on corporate desktops.
Unlikely. Most
corporations use windows and even more rarely update their
software. My last employer was still using windows 2000 and a subsequent one
windowsXP, without any of the service pack updates, for fear of a need for an
expanded IT department.
The bottom line is that in he
absence
of consultation with users s/w developers are not very good at meeting
the needs of users
Such consultation is certainly welcome, but I as a user am
sometimes stumped
when asked what I would like to see, as I don't know what is possible and I
have no way to imagine the not yet realized.
As a country is the US becoming incompetent?
no comment