Re: Proposal for Outreachy (May-August 2020)

[Efraim Flashner]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 07:06:58PM +0100, Jan wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On Tue, 07 Jan 2020 11:32:10 +0000
> "Raghav Gururajan" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Guix Folks!
> > 
> > 1) Improve GNOME Software Stack and GNOME Desktop Environment's
> > user-experience in Guix.
> > 
> 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).
> That's why I would like to see XFCE being improved rather than
> GNOME.
> 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.
> 

For better or worse Gnome is the dominant desktop in the GNU/Linux
market space and we do have it packaged and offer it as part of our
default desktop example. Furthermore Raghav has already been working on
making Gnome better in Guix.

As far as the privacy concerns, those can be addressed on a
package-by-package basis but shouldn't be cause to skip it entirely.

-- 
Efraim Flashner   <address@hidden>   אפרים פלשנר
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