Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 15.05.2009, 16:17 -0400 schrieb Chris Ball:
> We have some good news:  OLPC has decided to base its software release
> for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11.  Unlike previous releases, we
> plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
> users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead.

If you say "OLPC has decided" I wonder who exactly made this decision
and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the
relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever?

After Subbu threw his head into the ring for KDE I'd like to do the same
for Xfce.
      * First of all both Gnome and KDE are horribly slow on the XO,
        Xfce on the other hand is much more lightweight and therefore
        runs much better.
      * Xfce already runs on the XO and it's well documented in the OLPC
        wiki.
      * Xfce uses much less disk space. For example, with Fedora's
        base-x group installed the normal Xfce groupinstall will only
        take ~22 MB while Gnome is ~ 180MB.
      * Xfce has a kiosk mode to lock down certain desktop settings.
        This might become very useful.
      * Xfce has far less strings to translate than other desktop
        environments. Also they use transifex for translations, which
        enables many people participate in localization. Transifex also
        has a cli, so people in countries  with slow internet connection
        don't need to run the full blown web interface.
      * Xfce uses gtk2, so it fits well with Sugar and killer apps like
        Firefox, OOo or Gimp.
      * Xfce 4.6 has a nice release schedule. I have to admit they are
        not always on time, but it's predictable and won't cause us so
        much work so we can focus on other things
      * Xfce has a short dependency chain, so the sugar users don't need
        to carry a big stack of libs they don't use anyway.

Ok, I'll stop here. I'm sure I missed some arguments and I'm also aware
of the fact that Xfce may have downsides compared to Gnome or KDE, but I
think it's at least worth giving it a try. I'd like to invite all of you
to try Xfce 4.6.1 in Fedora 11.

Kind regards,
Christoph