On 23/09/14 02:36 PM, Joey Hess wrote: > One way might be to decide if a given DE is fundamentally different > than the others in some way, and if not, only include one of a set > that share common characteristics. So, maybe only gnome and not > cinnamon since it's a rather near cousin (AFIACS).
While that may be true from the point of view of ancestry, it's not as true when it comes to design philosophy. The GNOME 3 maintainers decided they needed to break from the "traditional" desktop and try something new, a move which many users embraced, but others rejected. The Mate maintainers went one way to address this problem, a step backwards to GNOME 2, whereas the Cinnamon maintainers went another way to address this, a step forwards based on GNOME 3. Both Mate and Cinnamon feature the traditional panel and menu design that GNOME 2 did, so share more in common in design than they do with gnome-shell, even though Cinnamon is, as you say, a "close cousin", of gnome-shell. What perplexes me is why Mate, which is a throwback desktop based on an aging codebase with none of the niceties introduced by GNOME 3 is now visible whereas the (imho) saner, forwards-looking Cinnamon, which takes advantage of those improvements gets relegated to the sidelines due to having too many "common characteristics" with GNOME 3. > Or only xfce and not lxde since both are fairly light desktops. > Another way could be to look at popcon trends, although cinnamon is > too recently packaged to be able to tell if it will have many users in > debian. Indeed, and seems doomed to remain less popular if users don't even know that it's an option because they can't see it when they install. Perplexed, Ben
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