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

[Peter Robinson]

>> 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?

I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is
being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. The
good thing about it being based on Fedora 11 it will be easy to
install XFCE/KDE or what ever each specific deployment wish to use
with a simple yum command. I suspect the reason for the choice of
gnome is due to the massive cross over of sub systems between gnome
and sugar. Many of the underlying systems used in sugar are also
components of gnome. Some of these include
empathy/gstreamer/evince/abiword/totem etc which will reduce the
duplication of duplicate packages required to support both UIs and
hence the amount of engineering required by smaller OLPC/sugar teams.

Peter