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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Gnome2 is dead.

Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project.

Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes

- Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork)

- KDE

- (list of minorities)

For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.

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1) think the differences between those shells are much bigger than between Luna and classic in XP

2) that it's a different shell, not a fully different desktop environment isn't really that important, for a normal user it will already cause confusion (maybe even more as it requires additional explanation what's the difference between the two).

Don't get me wrong: the thing that you have a choice is one of the virtues of Linux, but at the same time what it causes is that:

a) Linux is doomed to fail on a mainstream desktop market

b) none of the available choices is and probably will never be as polished as commercial competitors (and fragmentation is one of the reasons of that)

1) ~Maybe~. In absolutes, I agree. I don't think it matters much though.

2) Sticking with Windows comparisons: Moving from 98 to XP was different in quite some ways, to Vista and beyond was another change in lots of things.

We agree that choice is good. We disagree about whether there's too much choice right now. I see only two technical choices, KDE or Gnome, with the Gnome-Shell/Unity variants for the latter. No idea if this fork will prevail and be part of the list in the future.

The average user, the "grandma" that often comes up during these discussions, doesn't care. My gut feeling says that she'll end up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu installed (Maybe Mint. Maybe Fedora) and use what is available.

And quite frankly, what _is_ available is ready for every casual/average home user, in my opinion.

Agreed. If "grandma" were to choose Ubuntu, she would have a good quality 140 page manual ready to download and dip into. See the Ubuntu-Manual project on launchpad for the Unity version (currently at alpha).

https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual/msg02859.html

Is there a comparable tome ready for Gnome Shell based workflows? I'd really like to find one.

http://library.gnome.org/, also included in GNOME 3.

Looks good, somewhere between

https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/ubuntu-help/index.html

and the paper manual. I especially like the keyboard hints embedded as they go along.

Users don't read manuals. If you expect the user to read the manual to use your product, you have failed.

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