Comment 3 for bug 1055866

"Actually all of these official derivatives are merely meta-packages in the archive. Therefore after the installation, they are in essence the same."

Yes, that is correct. It depends what you mean though by the same. They're all just meta-packages and all I'm proposing is that Uniquity, the installer, give users the freedom of choice to select a desktop environment at installation time. Based on that selection, Uniquity would simply pull the requisite packages.

"Collapsing all of these together doesn't make sense, as I will most likely not use most of the applications offered by different desktop environment, as they are not the most suitable once for the choice of my desktop environment."

This doesn't make sense. I didn't advocate Ubiquity install any other desktop environment and its requisite runtime, applications, and so on, than the one the user selected.

"The installation media you are after are netinstall or mini.iso. Which are tiny images that offer to install any of the above flavours effortlessly by pulling the relevant packages from the archive over the internet."

No, that's not what I'm after. Network installs require connectivity and puts a greater demand on the user, like having to have access to multiple discs simply to try a different desktop environment. It's true that the user can simply pull the requisite meta package, but most new users don't know that and associate an official (desktop environment) derivative as different. The desktop environment packages are small, such as the Gtk+ and Qt runtimes, in comparison to translations which take up a great deal of space and are justified in not shipping on the same disc. Moreover, desktop environments like Gnome, Unity, and Xfce do not require redundant Gtk+ runtime packages on the disc simply because they're all Gtk+ based.

"This is defiantly not a bug in ubiquity. As ubiquity is simply one of the two installers we use across all the flavours and other unofficial derivatives."

Read above more carefully. I filed it as an opinion, not as a bug. This was also to encourage public discussion, as opposed to changing the status immediately to Won't Fix before allowing that to happen.

"All individual flavours exist because there is a target audience for those, dedicated communities of developers and users."

Where did I say that I was proposing that those communities homogenize and aggregate themselves? I was proposing that Ubiquity simply allow the user to select their preferred desktop environment at installation time, and not a political or social philosophy.