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

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 12:05 +0100 schrieb 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. 

I have to admit that face to face conversations are often more
productive than mailing lists, but the downside is that decisions are
harder to comprehend.

> 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'm afraid with Gnome installed by default there won't be much space
left to install anything else.

> 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.

Same goes for Xfce. gstreamer for example is not a Gnome thing. It
started that way but the gstreamer devs always point out that it's a
generic framework. Abiword or gnumeric are not really Gnome ether, they
only use some Gnome libs but don't need a Gnome desktop. So if this
really was the line of thought, IMHO it's a little weak.

> Peter

Regards,
Christoph