Wait a sec...what about derivative users?

[Cory Sadowski]

Everything I've seen so far is really awesome. I don't want to
downplay that in any way. However, not all users, especially power
users, will necessarily want to use GNOME or Unity. Is there some way
we can include users like this? I mean obviously nothing is stopping
them from contributing or using certain GNOME programs like Nautilus,
but at the same time it's often said that Kubuntu, for example, is
perceived as a "blue-headed step-child"; presumably it is a similar
case with Xubuntu. I'm not sure if Lubuntu is even 100% official yet,
but you get the idea; the focus is always on the main GNOME releases.
That's understandable, but it'd be nice to have some real quality
sections and advice for the others as well, to make it obvious that
they do exist and people might want to try them as viable and
well-integrated alternatives, especially given KDE's reputation as
being more for power users in the first place.

The Kitchen Sink initiative would work great for GNOME and Unity, no
doubt about it. Such a thing might be rather redundant on KDE though,
to be fair; all the options are right in front of you in System
Settings, however oddly they might be grouped at times. I mean, none
of it is really hidden or difficult to change, like could be argued of
GNOME or Unity (gconf/dconf); it's just Right There as soon as you
open the program. That doesn't mean there's stuff we wouldn't like to
see more easily tweakable though; before Natty, unless I'm mistaken,
one had to manually install and uninstall Colibri from source if they
didn't like the default notifications, but even with its inclusion in
the repository, newer users or migrators from other distros probably
wouldn't know about it; things like that would make for some
interesting reading or be worthy of a small tool or subset of a tool
in its own right, especially given that my example program there
required extra steps after being uninstalled to ensure that the normal
notifications came back and not the ugly yellow old-timey fallback.

I haven't used XFCE or LXDE very extensively, but from what I've seen
it's kind of a similar situation there, with most settings being
pretty obvious, but there's doubtless interesting things that could be
done or explored that might not be inherently obvious, and since last
I checked XFCE shared some aspects or settings with GNOME it might
benefit from some parts of the kitchen-sink idea as-is; I'd have to
look into it more closely to be sure, but I'm just tossing ideas
around anyway.

Most of all though, personally, I would absolutely love to see
sections dealing with the CLI and classic programs like irssi, mutt,
screen, mplayer, the framebuffer, SDL, things like that. How does one
configure the TTY? Vcstime doesn't work anymore as-is, so how can one make a
stop-gap or fix it permanently? How can we make SDL programs work that
require or can utilize mouse access? These are just a few of the
questions I've had, and even I still don't have answers for all of it.
I think a lack of documentation and acknowledgment of CLI stuff is
detrimental to a lot of enthusiasts and power users in general.

I realize that's a bit of a wall of text, and I thank you for reading
this far, but it is something that I've been thinking about of late,
and I just wanted to get that out there. What do you all think?

--Cory Sadowski