Re: Proposal for Outreachy (May-August 2020)

["Raghav Gururajan" <raghavgururajan@disroot.org>]

Hello Jan!

> In my opinion we should stay away from GNOME, because it is a Red Hat
> project, rather than GNU now. More than this, GNOME makes some bad for
> user freedom decisions, for example they promote nonfree software in
> their "Software" application. They also promote nonfree services such as
> Facebook, Google mail, etc. in their "Online accounts" application.
> They also make some poor design decisions such as adding support for
> flatpak, which is going to have support for "paid", which most
> probably means nonfree applications and they add more and more
> systemd-only features (systemd's problem is feature creep, software
> bloat, uncooperative developers and merging projects into systemd,
> without any reason).

Yeah, I am too disappointed by some or half of the things they incorporated into the project. The thing is, I want to bring more newcomers of GNU+Linux System into Guix. I would like to see Guix being deployed as mainstream system for domestic and commercial purposes. For domestic users, there is a high requirement for graphical interfaces. Unfortunately, currently we have only GNOME and KDE as full-blown desktop environments. They both have similar issues regarding software freedom and software creep.  GNOME Software, QtWebKIT etc. Also. they both are tightly integrated redhat creeps such as network-manager, pulseaudio, dbus and systemd. The only reasons for me to lean towards GNOME over KDE, is that 1) Being GNU Project (hope it stays) 2) Being GTK based (shared dependency with most other free softwares).

I also see another light. Enlightenment. The EFL library is independent of gnome, kde and redhat related stuffs. It has systemd only as optional dependency. Also uses connman over network-manager. May there is some hope here. Once Enlightenment grows into drop-in replacement of GNOME or KDE. I will definitely be shifting my focus from GNOME to Enlightenment.

> That's why I would like to see XFCE being improved rather than
> GNOME.

I love the design principles of Xfce. Modularity and re-usability. The only downside I face with Xfce are 1) Depends on GNOME stuff, dbus etc. 2) Not as feature-rich as GNOME or KDE. Anyway, Xfce is good light-weight DE fpr new-comers. That's why Xfce is still on my hope list.

> Ideally both GNOME and XFCE should work well on Guix, but if we have to
> choose between those two, I vote for XFCE.
> 
> But that's my private opinion, it'd be better, if Guix maintainers told
> what they think about it.

Let's not constrain ourselves by stating something as just opinion. :-) The matters you mentioned are real issues and factually causing trouble in software freedom. :-)

Regards,
RG.