Fwd: Re: Application duplication (was: Re: cdbakeoven)

[Scott Wheeler]

On Saturday 20 April 2002 05:34 am, Raffaele Sandrini wrote:

> I hate comparing with M$ Windows but in that case....
> I think we schould try to get KDE at the same point. So that KDE is a
> WindowManager with some add ons. There are some basic tools in it and - of
> course all System Tools. Everything outside should be outsourced.

I think the fundamental problem with this is that compared to Windows, 
installing new software on *nix is hard [for Rolf's mom].  Things are moving 
in the right direction, but the users that we're trying to optimize things 
for seem to be those that don't understand things like:

Where do I find an app to do ... ?
What's an srpm, an rpm, or a tarball and which one do I need?
Where do I find lib... that is needed by ...?
Why can't I use this rpm?  (wrong distro, architecture)
It says that I don't have ...; what do I do?

Those of us that have answered these questions to our non-geek friends that 
we've convinced to switch over to Linux know that these are really common.

And there's no easy answer at this point.  KPackage is great, but I know 
people that are KDE users that still have problems installing things.  

So, what does this mean for KDE?  I think it means distributing more stuff 
than Windows does.  KDE is used on a wide variety of platforms that won't 
have easy to find or install packages if the apps don't come with KDE.  What 
I think this would mean to end users is less usable apps, thus less 
functionality.

===
It seems to me that there is an easy solution to this.  The K Menu Editor 
already has hide functionality.  Why not hide applications that are deemed 
superfluous by default?  Add an "Un-Hide All" button and users can quickly 
get back to the way that things are now.  This would seem to minimize 
confusion while retaining the functionality of the current application 
scheme.

Thoughts?

-Scott