[pkg-cinnamon] Bug#762342: task-cinnamon-desktop: Please turn on display of Cinnamon desktop task

[Ben Armstrong]

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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