My last post brought in a few interesting replies, the great majority of them showing support (somewhat) to the idea of unifying the Ubuntu name. While I let the caffeine surge do the talking toward the end of the post, I should have added the following statement to completely close my argument:

I’m not suggesting that we stop manufacturing/shipping/distributing the other “flavors” of Ubuntu in the form of CDs and downloads. All I’m saying is that instead of having the names Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, etc in their covers, we name them all Ubuntu Desktop! The title would also contain, directly below the main title, the type of window manager installed by default. The end user would then see Ubuntu Desktop: KDE Edition, for instance. The advantage(?) of this approach is that we’ll keep the same brand across the many variants.

So this could solve any possible identity crisis with the brand name… but in my oppinion, it doesn’t solve the confusion that having different window managers could cause to someone who has just decided to switch to GNU/Linux.

Now comes the part where I drink some more coffee and pitch the idea of a “uhhh… show me the pretty colors” interface that would at least give the user a glimpse of what their desktop “could look like”. My friend LaserJock wrote:

Do you think a few minutes looking at a demo will let people decide? It’s a good idea but I’m a tad skeptical that people will be able to really decide that easily. In the end I think it just sucks that you have to choose between desktop environments. It’s just one of the things you have to deal with being in a open source world I guess.

I sort of envision a mechanism pretty much like those that let you see what a new theme would look like in my WordPress blog… or the way ObConf lets me see what my desktop will look like when I choose a different theme… It doesn’t install anything but let’s you have a glimpse of what it could look like.

As far as not having enough space in the disk, don’t we currrently install OpenOffice (or is it the language-pack for it?) via a sshfs during the first boot?