On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Vincent Untz
I'm not sure it's not working -- it seems to be working, although not perfectly. In the KDE thread, there were certainly too many emotional replies, with no arguments, and too many people just re-stating the same thing. I don't know if this is something that we can easily "fix" -- I've certainly seen the same things in other communities...
One of the problems as I see it is that we who have attempted to make use of KDE4 have just been so turned off to it by the lack of things that we need that we haven't went through and tried to find out what is missing. In my case, I have noticed that KDE4 is still slower than KDE3 on the same hardware. Granted, a lot of my hardware is slower(P3 based), but I do have a Core2 and an X2 based systems). I don't have the newer and "awesome" graphics cards. The fastest one I had for years was a GeForce4 MX 440, and I got that for free. I've even seen that memory usage isn't as conclusive as eveyone thought. While KDE4 looked like it used less at first, after letting it run for a while, it seems to use about the same as KDE3.
I wouldn't agree with the fact that we want feedback from all regular users on all topics. It's up to some people to either gather this feedback and report it to the list (or where it belongs) or to have the "user vision", where they clearly understand the regular point of view and can explain it to others. In a perfect world, it'd be fine to have feedback from regular users -- but we're not in a perfect world, and it would just be too much information.
Yes, a lot of us just aren't regular users and we just can't see the new user point of view. We're prejudiced because of of experience. I've used SuSE continuously since 1999, so I guess I'm just set in my ways.
Just restarting what I said so people actually read it: a good way to make all this work better is to volunteer to gather feedback from users (users from the forums, from IRC, from the user mailing lists, ...).
That's wh I started the other thread. And, honestly, I've been suprised by the almost total negative comments about KDE4, especially from hearing so many that like it on this list. There have been some good comments, but most have echoed some of my own, and some of the other's, comments about KDE4. But even then, we still have a limited amount of user experience there to go on. We do need more input from others.
Ah, there's also the fact that Novell has some priorities with SLE that might be different than the priorities of the community. And sometimes, they might conflict. It'd be nice to have a clear way to know what we should do in this case to resolve the conflict (something like: the community wins ;-)). If we want openSUSE to succeed as a community project, that's quite important.
The "decision" to base SLE 11 on KDE4 is mind boggling to me. I seriously think that if that is the case, that Novell may lose some customers over that. Corporations who have standardized on SLED 9 & 10 with KDE3 will not be happy about having to support and roll out a radical new desktop that will require re-traing to some extent. I may be wrong, but I feel that the Novell guys should talk to their customers about that before just deciding to change things. If replacing KDE3 with KDE4 is meant to make it easier to support, then they aren't thinking about what their customers want. And that's strange because Novell has been selling to corps for a long time.
Here's my view of what the experience in the GNOME team (others might see things in a different way). What we're trying to achieve in the GNOME team is to have the development as open as possible, with most (if not all) important decisions discussed in public meetings or on the mailing list. Things that need some work (work as in code, packaging, testing, etc.) are usually advertised so people can jump in and help. And we do have some people helping.
I'm personally not a fan of IRC and other chat type things, so I don't contribute in that way. I do try to add to the list of things to be discussed. I also really can't take the time to do the IRC meeting if I wanted to because I do have a job, and while I can take a minute here and there to check up on these list mails, I can't dedicate my time to that.
I guess other teams have a similar experience. I think that this is only getting better with time (at least, at the moment). And as other people mentioned, something like the contrib repository will help make more people understand they have the power to change openSUSE.
Definately. Before 10.o, there wasn't really that much of a way to contribute for myself. I even had problems trying to get the US ISBN to buy a newer version as they came out. Sometimes it took several emails ust so I could buy it at the book store I worked at(had to do that to enjoy my discount). I haven't piad for it since 9.x because I've had a hig speed connection since then, but I now try to contibute by beta testing as I have time. Also, to be honest, if I'm gonna buy it, then I would expect that the codecs and stuff should come with it. Maybe they should have a 2 tired approach like they used to, but have on copy as all OSS(which can just be downloaded so make it cheaper) and have one copy with the codecs and other proprietary stuff. Users from the WIndows world aren't going to care about the FOSS philosophy. They just want it to work with their iPods and DVDs out of the box. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org