To the Green Blooded, The excitement is building as yet another release of our beloved openSUSE is just around the corner. This coming release looks as though it may be yet more exciting than 11.4 was; 11.4 being the distro I run only and place my clients on as well. Last release was a bit rough around the edges at launch, and had issues that shook confidence of new users. Though it brought enormous improvements in speed and stability, I must still worry about the first experience. As you most likely will recall, there were several discrepancies and throwbacks to previous versions that sullied 11.4 upon release. Primarily ones I noticed were the oddity of the DVD using the old Knetwork Manager as opposed to the current plasmoid version that was present in the KDE Live CD version. There was also the matter of the pre 11 series behavior of AppArmor in blocking Samba; this I found was more pronounced in the DVD install. (To this day I can't get Samba to work properly in a DVD install.) Since I am not a developer, and have only a brief familiarity with many of the logistical issues facing a project of this magnitude I will not offer an immediate critique. However as an Ambassador I must emphasize that these sort of anomalies, no matter how technically minor will shake the confidence of someone trying the new release. The things that we may consider minor, a new user will consider to be clues to the overall experience and what to expect; this is especially true for new users coming from Windows. Thus we lose a potential asset to the community in favor of some other distro (usually Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, or Mandriva). Frankly, I would rather we be a bit late on releasing 12.1 than to release it as finished with the same sort of issues 11.4 showed. 11.4 was a grand milestone, creating enormous buzz with its massive improvements. 11.4 launched openSUSE to a new height of interest and popularity, and with that in consideration we must be careful to not put off the new users. Further, openSUSE has long been known as the flagship for KDE and as such many people will be looking to us for an alternative to the much disliked Gnome3 and Unity. Sincerely, Roger openSUSE Ambassador P.S. In this section I wanted to raise some questions, critiques, and a small wishlist. As this is less important by far I have placed it where it is. The odd discrepancies in the DVD vs LiveCD version leads me to wonder where there was some sort of disconnect between teams. I further wonder why there was not a central unified repository for the two versions, as I imagine that would have helped remove discrepancies. Why did this occur and how can it be prevented? Though I know its late in the game to make a lot of changes to the final product, this is my personal wishlist of things to see in future openSUSE (Gnome team disregard KDE specific things): 1. Have a simple default configuration for Samba, like in Ubuntu where it simply works out of the box. a. Fix AppArmor so it isn't battling with Samba constantly. 2. AppArmor desktop notifier. It would be nice for the user to know when AppArmor blocks something, and be able to click straight through to the Profile Update wizard. But even somethin as simple as a system announcement would be superior and be picked up by the KDE notification system. 3. Maintain more current versions of some neglected packages, especially WINE. Rekonq being the other package I would have liked to see updated. 4. Amarok is known as one of the most feature rich players in all of Linux. However, it often suffers from bugs that crash it constantly, or degrade its performance. Also its interface suffers from not using common conventions, and thus confounds new users. I recommend replacing it with Clementine as it is more stable and has a friendlier interface, and is yet KDE native. 5: There has been some talk about replacing the YaST Printer module with a KDE one in userspace. Frankly I think this is a terrible idea as YaST is the only tool on any platform that has actually made configuration of the god-forsaken yet popular HP AllInOne devices simple. Thank you for your time and consideration. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-kde+help@opensuse.org