What is this ?
It is said that this change is useless and won’t make any difference. In a few words, you consider that the request was stupid.
On that point, and also as a Gnome user, I agree.
In that case, why would you change anything ?
No one is going to be satisfied with this. It is not a compromise, just nonsense.
KDE users will be disappointed and Gnome users will feel marginalized.
The only thing that would have made sense were either following the request and focussing on KDE integration, or clearly reject it and leave things as they are.
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Comments 8
In my opinion the simple change of the default radio button for the desktop environment would mean that more casual installers of opensuse would get kde4 instead of gnome. i hope that the nett effect of this is that publicised features developed and announced in the release marketing for these releases would be better incorporated into kde as well as gnome. At least I hope this is the case. The lack of feature parity in early releases of network-manager and compiz was quite annoying, although understandable.
Maybe its just wishful thinking, but I sincerely hope that the the already excellent opensuse kde releases rocks even harder. i see no reason to be disappointed or angered at this change. i welcome the fact that they responded so quickly to the original request.
for the record, I am a long time gnome user who has switched to kde 4 and currently see no good reason to switch back.
Posted 20 Aug 2009 at 10:17 pm ¶No. It won’t change anything. Therefore it doesn’t cost the Gnome camp anything either. But KDE was hit particulary hard during the layoffs and Novell seems pretty hardheaded in their efforts to increase focus on Gnome.
Novell and OpenSuse really needs the KDE crowd. If the KDE users decide to leave, it will improve KDE in other distros. In particular Ubuntu, but also Arch and Mandriva.
The last thing Novell needs is Ubuntu with equal attention on Gnome and KDE. That will reduce Novell’s potential wrt Mono influx. If Novell loose the *buntu crowd in the monobattle they will indeed be in trouble.
Keep in mind that the future Gnome DE will be different than it is now, thus there will be a need for hard work when Gnome 3 enters into the distros. Some Gnomeusers might see themselves in a limbo. That makes the userbase far more volatile than it normally is. It will be important for OpenSuse and Novell to have a high quality KDE 4 available to prevent migration to other distros.
Novell/OpenSuse gave 1/8 inch in the direction of KDE. Anything less would have been a recipe for trouble. In fact, I’m not convinced that the KDE users are at ease – they will keep a close eye on the development. After all they ARE 2/3 of the userbase.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 12:32 am ¶The request was not about focussing on KDE.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 2:39 am ¶I agree with what you say in the post.
@Nona: this is not true. The request from developers belonging to the openSUSE KDE team was exactly to focus on KDE.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 11:19 am ¶KDE shouldn’t be default for any distribution that is geared towards real end users (not nerds / developers). Unfortunately the fact that “the community” consists primarily of developers taints the preferrence towards bad usability and bad choices.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 1:53 pm ¶The best thing would be simply making (toggle)buttons of this two (three) Option fields, and that you need to toggle one of this buttons to choose your favorite desktop of choice.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 3:00 pm ¶If you don’t choose anything you can’t proceed.
That would be most neutral and simplest resolution for all kinds of problems people had with the option present
@Leszek: what you are proposing is the current situation in openSUSE 11.1 and some previous release. OpenSUSE had no pre-selected desktop, and you could not proceed without selecting one.
Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 8:40 pm ¶About every Linux distro made has a default desktop and the stats show that the majority of users install KDE plus the fact that Novell SLED is GNOME default so why all the crying. One is still going to be able to install GNOME if one chooses during the install in the Software area breakdown.
If they chose GNOME default I would be stating the same above except changing the desktop wording around. One still has the option of what desktop they want installed as the only thing one is the default install now.
Posted 22 Aug 2009 at 8:52 am ¶Post a Comment