Christoph Anton Mitterer <cales...@scientia.net> writes: > But do we really need a default desktop environment?
There are different ways of presenting the choice that make the choice more or less obvious, but it's hard to avoid a default choice in an installer. Even if you force the user to pick one of a list of options, users will tend to pick the first on the list. If you need to eliminate the concept of default entirely, the best you can probably do is either not install a desktop environment at all by default, or randomize the list each time it's presented, so each user sees a different "default." Neither of those seem particularly appealing. There is a lot of practical benefit to aligning our default choice with the defaults chosen by other versions of Linux, since it means that the user who is vaguely familiar with Linux at just a user level will see a consistent and expected user interface when installing Debian. I suspect the concept of the default desktop environment is less important (although not unimportant) for Debian than for a lot of other Linux distributions since Debian by nature tends to attract more sophisticated users who are more comfortable with the idea of switching such things themselves. It might be worth noting here that, anecdotally, I talk to a lot of more casual Linux users who view the various desktop-variant Ubuntu install choices (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.) as separate Linux distributions from Ubuntu itself, although my understanding is that the differences apart from the choice of default desktop environment are minimal and you can achieve effectively the same results by just installing Ubuntu and then the desktop environment of your choice. The idea of the desktop environment just being an option in the distribution like your choice of editor or web browser seems somewhat foreign to a lot of less-sophisticated users. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87k3h2e072....@windlord.stanford.edu