Gnome is a problem for OEMs

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I've spent all afternoon trying to figure out how I, as an OEM, can 
configure Gnome before giving it to a user. I just want to change some 
icons on the panel and maybe a menu entry.

After exhaustive search, I can only conclude that there is no way to do 
this. You are stuck with what the Gnome developers think everyone in the 
world needs. You can't even add a new icon to the default panel. Every 
user must learn how to locate software on their own and add icons on 
their own, and if they don't like it, they can go use Windows.

At this rate, I have serious doubts about Linux or Ubuntu being "ready 
for the desktop". I work for a very pro-FOSS OEM. We contribute heavily 
to open source projects. We are *trying* our darn best to give Ubuntu 
desktops to our customers. But Ubuntu/Gnome just don't give us any way 
to offer even the tiniest bit of configuration. So we'll have to keep 
selling Windows computers instead.

The problem is not that Microsoft has a deal with us to block Linux, 
they don't. It's not that we don't know Linux, I've been using 
exclusively for 8 years. The first computer I owned ran Slackware Linux. 
The problem is that Gnome just doesn't give us any way to make any 
adaptations, no matter how small. The problem is that the damm thing 
just wasn't designed with an OEM in mind.

Daniel.
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