zerozero wrote:LMDE Xfce represented only 4% of the Linux Mint audience.
(This) one wonders what percentage of the
LMDE audience LMDE Xfce represented, since - IMHO - it's unfair to compare them to the overall Mint user base. (BtW, what percentage of the entire amount of Mint users use any LMDE as their exclusive Mint distro?)
And I wonder if the developers have considered that, while those who favor MATE or Cinnamon could conceivably (I suppose?) be using one of those DEs because they actually like it better than Xfce... That the people who use Xfce are comprised of not only people who do so because they like it, but also people who do so because they simply cannot afford to purchase a computer that is new (or less than five years old - my newest is, I believe, eight years old and I think it might be nine) or even new components. For those of use who are in that particular boat, "liking" a DE has much less bearing on our choice than the fact that a given one is actually usable on our systems (although we may well also like Xfce better than the GNOMEish ones).
This is also consistent with our strategy to focus on what we do best, to do less and do it better and to invest less time in maintaining editions and more time in developing the core technology that they use.
I completely understand not wishing to spread yourselves too thin. That scenario, if taken to its logical extreme, hurts everyone.
It was a tough call at the time when Linux Mint lost its Fluxbox and LXDE editions.
I would think that it would have been an easy call to make - and that the obvious decision would have been
not to drop Xfce, for the reason that I discussed above.
They were great but they only appealed to a minority of our users
Again, while the "majority" of users that {some other DE} appealed to undoubtedly had the freedom to choose the DE that did appeal to them, there are some (and I suspect that the actual number is more than "some") of the "minority" of users that Xfce appealed to that did not have the ability to make a choice of DEs.
For many people - at least in my country (USA) - it's a choice between eating once a day or, say, paying our water bill on time (and when we get sick, well...). In my own case, I would like to say that if I had dedicated my entire "entertainment/luxury" budget last year towards purchasing a different computer, that I could have done so. But I bought a meal at a restaurant once (it was Taco Bell and cost around $5) and bought one paperback book (for a dollar at a yard sale). Other than that, I guess you could call the meat that I was able to purchase (sporadically, rarely, during the Summer, when I actually had work) a luxury; I gave up my vehicle years ago, along with cable television (and, in fact, haven't even turned my television on in about a year because it's too difficult to pay my electric bill now).
I know that many are in better shape, financially, than I am - but then, too, I see people almost every day who are in worse shape.
You mentioned that Fluxbox and LXDE had already been dropped... and then Xfce was dropped, too. In order to keep two GNOMElike DEs? I do not really understand the logic in that.
Respectfully, I tried both Cinnamon and MATE when I had my friend's new laptop here, and they both looked like "almost, but not quite, copies of GNOME." Which is fine, I understand that GNOME 2.x has been dropped. So you decided to create...
two of them, lol? But you do not wish to spread yourselves thin? So you dropped Xfce, which isn't a copy/clone/imitation/"almost" anything but, rather, its own DE? Which provides a wonderful balance of capability and low resource requirements? <SCRATCHES HEAD> Err...
What?
Are you drawing a line, saying, "Those of you who make
this much money are welcome to use our OS, but those of you who manage to earn less, be off with you?" Or is that just the impression that you give by dropping the DE that actually performs well (or at all) on the systems that poor people are likely to be able to afford (or, regrettably, to find whilst looking in dumpsters)?
and we can see the benefits of this decision now, we can release all our editions and switch to focusing entirely on the development of the next iteration much faster in our release cycle. Whether it’s Cinnamon, MDM, the Software Manager, the Mint tools, the LMDE live-installer or even new projects such as a Driver Manager or R&D plans related to the installation and/or base underneath Linux Mint, development is extremely important to us.
Faster is good. I guess. Do you have a fear that if you had continued at your (then) current speed, that you would have lost a significant number of users? Because I think I read somewhere that you were nearly the most popular linux OS (if not THE most popular) already. At your (then) current development speed. <SCRATCHES HEAD AGAIN>
I feel that I should point out that the decision to drop Xfce from your Debian edition (or is that Debian-
based edition? I'm not really clear on the terminology) does not, at this time, affect me directly. But it is distressing for two reasons: First, because my own much-used old computer is about shot (Mint 14
Xfce breathed new life into it, but its fan is gone and I cannot see well enough to be sure that I could disassemble it and reassemble it again into a working laptop, even if I could afford the $39 for a new fan/heatsink assembly), my - even older desktop runs but I cannot figure out how to get the nVidia FX5200 graphics to work right and was in the process of trying to find an old LMDE edition version with Xfce to try on it because I've read that Debian tends to be "older" yet it's a "rolling" OS - so I thought maybe I could find one that worked on my hardware yet would still receive updates - and the even older laptop I was loaned to use has an ATI IGP340M/RS200 graphics setup that ATI doesn't seem to support at all in any form <SIGH> and, again, I was wondering if I installed an old version of LMDE Xfce, would it both support the hardware and be updatable. But, secondly, it distresses me because
I cannot help but wonder, is Mint Xfce to be the next victim on the chopping block, since you have already dropped the LMDE version of Xfce?
I am not mad, but I am sad - and more than a little worried.
zerozero wrote:will the old 201204 work and if properly updated be the same as any of the recently released isos?
- in a way, yes, the isos are not broken at the moment, meaning that the upgrade path is sane
(the same can't be said about older isos)
- anyway you are going to install a iso with around 1GiB and right after do more than that in updates.
MtnDewManiac wrote:Isn't that the whole point of LMDE being a rolling distro? If it isn't, then I'm really confused.
yes it is if you have the system installed, you can keep rolling on for as long as you want;
you can't expect to install the original sept/2010 iso and make it work now