This question is walking around in my head for some time now…
I’m the first thinking that the old traditional desktop is that, old. And we need something new.
I like things I see about GNOME Shell and so on, but I’m a geek!
I mean, I do use virtual desktops or spaces, but I like to mess with my system and I always have running my Guake terminal.
I remember when Compiz came up, everyone was so excited with the things it could do. It was so cool, so fancy and that was going to be the right tool to attract normal users to our desktop, because it was a lot of better than Vista…
That was cool, but I don’t really see much people using those effects nowadays… Ok, transparency and smoothness on windows stuff, is used, but no much more.
So now people who are thinking on the next release of their distros for non-very-tech-users (like Guadalinex), are a bit afraid to be forced to use a very new concept, which is cool when you are geek or somebody teach you about it.
To upgrade a few thousand of users to a very new desktop concept is a quite hard challenge… Even having a helpdesk services, online documentation and forums.
I just hope those new concepts be really easy to catch or somebody make any kind of “first use lesson” for them.
Actually, for regular end users I think I prefer something like Litl OS or Chrome OS. That is a change of concept, but into something they already know: the web. And also the mediacenter and web interfaces.
Well, it’s just a personal thought…
Anyways, we’ll see next year… I wish the best for my favourite desktop and their hackers, so let’s have a bit of faith 😉
