Project Timelord -- Initial consideration

[Tom M. Shaw]

On Wednesday 21 October 2009 08:46:41 Alessandro Ghersi wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 October 2009 05:12:41 pm Harald Sitter wrote:
> > Anyway, I think that knm is a better suited example of why the policy
> > makes no  sense:
> > a) I cannot connect to my wifi at home
> > b) I cannot connect to the wifi at university
> > c) I cannot connect to universities's VPN
> > d) All of the above works perfectly fine with nm-applet
> > e) Upstream suggested various times that we should use nm-applet at least
> >  for  the time being
> >
> > So, honest to god, if we had to kick speedcrunch (which is, btw,
> >  considerable  bigger than kcalc) and the german translations (incomplete
> >  as they are for Kubuntu apps) why did we not look into this more
> >  seriously?
> > Working network is important one would suppose.
> 
> It seems that we never asked what users do after installation...
> The first thing that comes to their mind.
> Obviously, they want connect to their network (wifi, vpn and something
>  like) and they can't do sometimes.
> Result?
> 1) They blog about how much kubuntu sucks although it is a good
>  distribution because....blah blah blah....
> 2) Kubuntu dev lose their face
> 3) We do a bad publicity to kde

I think some of the problem is that the corner cases are steering the 
direction of how to manage the network. Most people don't use a VPN, bluetooth 
modem or the latest 3G usb dongle yet those seem to always come up as "must 
have". What most people have is a rj45 on the end of a cable or or wifi with a 
key or a password yet those are the items that are broke most often. Make the 
people with the not so common connections put a little more effort into it if 
necessary while ensuring that the basics work. If this means having something 
besides networkmanager so be it, let the network work and let the person 
download something more advanced for a more advanced connection.

Every new install I always give the default networking a go but so far it's 
almost always failed at the lowest possible point with wireless and that's a 
WEP password. When this happens I plug a cable in or a flash drive and install 
wicd and it always works and gives me what is most important, the reliable 
connection that isn't dependent on the desktop environment. Out of a random 50 
people I know wicd would cover 95%+ of their network connections. More 
widespread use would also probably motivate people on a KDE interface for it 
too and to address some of the gripes people may have with it. Obviously 
there's not much interest worldwide for a working KDE interface to nm even 
though it is very widespread in it's use.

If Kubuntu is to gain greater success it can't always be chasing what Ubuntu 
is doing because in some cases it will never catch up and perhaps that is big 
part of the overall issues facing it and trying to be addresses here.

Tom

> 
> Alessandro Ghersi
>