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

[Ivan Vučica]

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> wrote:

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.

Providing a "big distro" (although I would avoid providing an actual 'big' distro) is a way to provide a canonical experience to guide development of applications. It does not need to begin by targeting actual "average end users", whatever that is. It doesn't need to target Joe The Plumber's facebooking needs.

 

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.

Isn't providing Debian packages + remastering Debian or Ubuntu one of the ways to go about integrating? And note that this is the strategy that has not played well for GNUstep so far; GNUmail did not become popular simply by being in the big distro. And it won't, as long as we think about a window manager (often WindowMaker) as something separate from AppKit.

Neither GNUmail nor WindowMaker have a no natural habitat. Is there a single package that'll give me a login session (that is, a natural habitat) and a window manager/panel/dock/whatever with shortcuts that prioritize GNUstep packages? 

And isn't providing such a login session with most of the work involved in providing such a "big distro" (whatever that may be... and I sure hope you don't mean a bundle that grows up from LinuxFromScratch, provides its own packaging system and its own installer). :-)

 

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Ivan Vučica

ivan@vucica.net