Comments on: openFATE feature 306967, KDE default

By: tos

tos — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:20:00 +0000

IMHO, the most important aspects that have been mentioned in the discussion are:
(1) If Novell invites the community to take responsibility in the development of OpenSUSE, it is extremely important to listen carefully to their arguments and to frustrate their wishes only if essential interests are affected. A default radio button on KDE would hardly have such impact, I guess.
(2) Desktop choices have a high visibility. Delivering the best KDE experience on Linux and a clear commitment to KDE have a high potential to distinguish OpenSUSE from the rest.
(3) This would also make sense historically. SuSE has been a KDE-centric distro, and quite some members of the KDE community do still have a special relationship with OpenSUSE. But that will only last if their commitments are reciprocated.
(4) Of course, OpenSUSE should also do its best to provide the best integration for other desktops as well. And choices should be made as simple as possible (changing a pre-selected radio button doesn’t seem too hard). Providing a default is as such not incompatible with choice — not at all. What about defaults for filesystems, for example? SuSE has always been known for providing choices, sometimes more than other distros. But in many areas, there have been defaults, and with very good reasons.
(5) It must be acknowledged that the early release of KDE 4.0 and the parallel development of KDE 3.5 and 4 did some harm to the public image of KDE. However, KDE 4.3 is really amazing, and a renewed commitment of OpenSUSE to KDE would also be a clear sign that the current version of KDE is, again, an outstanding desktop.

By: Federico Lucifredi

Federico Lucifredi — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:44:24 +0000

hum, still code 500s – is the server being attacked in some way ?

By: Federico Lucifredi

Federico Lucifredi — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:43:15 +0000

and openFATE is code 500 today, which somehow I am sure the conspiracy theorists will love 🙂

By: Stephen Michael Kellat

Stephen Michael Kellat — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:34:35 +0000

I left a counter-proposal here: https://features.opensuse.org/307065

By: Lars

Lars — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:35:08 +0000

There’s nothing more tiresome, strange and awkward for me as a non-developer and regular user than this crazy fuzz and arguments and sometimes war over what’s the best DE and what DE should be the default in our distribution. Please, let ME do the choice — keep openSUSE free from a default DE! If I want KDE as the only DE, I can choose the KDE-cd at download, if I want Gnome, I choose the Gnome-cd. It’s that simple. Keep that. And thank’s a lot for a great distro I’ve been using on my home computer since 2001, on my work computer since 2002 (pretty ordinary office-kind of work at a university).

By: Federico Lucifredi

Federico Lucifredi — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:17:57 +0000

No default is the only sensible choice. We made the mistake of alienating half of the desktop zealots once already.

I don’t think it is such a big deal. The problem, is that many people think it is, and whichever desktop is not the chosen one will perceive the “radio button” as a slight.

openSUSE is already the best KDE distro, and a pretty strong Gnome one as well. I see little gain, and only more politics of the kind I do not like coming out of this.

By: Albertop

Albertop — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:12:28 +0000

There are two, in my opinion wrong assumptions in all this discussion (let’s repeat them, even though I made them clear on openFate already):

1) “listening to our KDE community we may gain more KDE contributors”

Not necessarily true. The right question to ask would be “why does a choice prevent KDE contributors to join openSUSE”, and address that problem. I do not think that a contributor is scared or confused by the need of choosing between two desktop environments, quite clearly described in the installer.

2) “Reason for that, is to make openSUSE more simple for newbies and to make openSUSE the best KDE distribution around”

I think it is quite an overstatement to say that the installation will become simpler for users if a default DE is selected. The user has a lot harder decisions to take, if he is new to Linux, than choosing GNOME or KDE. He has to partition, for example, or choose if he wants root’s password to be identical to the user password, or if he wants or not the automatic configuration. Of course there are defaults for these options, but, especially for the most delicate one (partitioning) he probably needs or wants something different and he has to decide anyway. In such a case I think an informed choice, as we recommend already, is the way to go.

Best,
A.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:20:42 +0000

Really, I read this blog entry again, and wonder how you can be so NAIVE. Do you seriously believe that the 99% of positive comments on this feature request are actually representative of anything? Doesn’t it occur to you that GNOME users simply ignore that feature request as an utter stupidity? What WERE your thinking?

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:13:27 +0000

Any suggestion to default to either KDE or GNOME will alienate the other half of our users.

It speaks of plain ignorance, if not arrogance IMHO. I understand that when one is sooo satisfied with his/her desktop environment of choice one might make such a mistake.

But PLEASE, just DON’T. It would be a giant mistake. That famous one, single mistake that made the difference to the worse.

By: Dmitry Serpokryl

Dmitry Serpokryl — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:19:22 +0000

> my answer here is a BIG no

+1. the power of SUSE is a desktop-neutral system with a stable and polished core base system (kernel, libs, config files, etc). huge thanks to the devs/engineers.

> instead, we really have to say a big THANKS to our gnome team, that saved use 11.1, that provides the DEFAULT DE on SLE

+1.

i’d be really glad to see the possibility to have/get the DE without garbage. right now (yes, according to the LSB-3.1, the “Qt” should be included into the distro core) i can’t have a “pure” GTK DE by default. at least “sax2” require the Qt for GUI config. and that’s not good at all. it’d definitely be a nice option to keep the DE-neutrality and extend the flexibility of a configuration options.