Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (89 mails)

["Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier" <jzb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Will Stephenson<wstephenson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > But openSUSE is also a great GNOME distribution - how can we point out
> > properly that openSUSE has both?
>
> I'm sure we now do a better job of promoting that than Canonical do for
> Kubuntu and that would not change.
>
> For me this feature is about 2 things -
>
> First, the project taking the obvious step to recognise what the majority
> of our users want and give them that.  This would go a long way to
> undoing the 'Novell is evil' smell that we can't shake off.

What is it, exactly, that "the majority of our users want," here? A
default? That doesn't seem likely, as our users already know how to
get KDE and having an additional click isn't exactly a major
impediment to this.

Or is it the political statement?

> Secondly, giving openSUSE a very strong distinctive feature as a first-
> rank distribution that says 'We offer KDE by default because it's what
> our users want' compared to other first-rank distributions.  Kubuntu and
> Pardus aren't in that category and our current "The distro that offers
> great KDE and GNOME desktops" position isn't perceived by many people
> outside our close circle of contributors - they take Ubuntu because it's
> highly successful, or Kubuntu because it's related to Ubuntu.

How is this a "feature" exactly? It doesn't make our KDE any better,
easier to use, etc. It just means we've said "we recommend this over
that."

GNOME by default for Ubuntu means that Canonical has chosen to focus
most of its efforts on GNOME, and the community can work on KDE and
they'll support that a bit. If you're wanting the inverse of this,
this feature doesn't get that -- it only means that the project will
recommend one over the other.

> This should not weaken our support for GNOME, XFCE or anything else.
> Look at Kubuntu, which has become a successful project in its own right
> despite initial hostility and neglect from Canonical, or Fedora-kde,
> which has a contributor community that is of the about the same size as
> the openSUSE-kde community.

Then the feature is pointless -- if you're trying to achieve the
inverse of what Ubuntu and Fedora have with GNOME, it would require an
actual *focus on KDE. And that's not on the table, so what we'll have
is a political statement just to say "lots of our users use KDE and
want us to make a political statement that we'll wave the KDE flag a
bit higher than the GNOME flag."

I've always liked that openSUSE is the "big tent" distro that supports
both. I've gone back and forth between KDE, GNOME, Xfce and other
desktops over the years and found that it doesn't suit me to be with a
distro that alienates the other major desktops.

Best,

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb@xxxxxxxxxx>
openSUSE Community Manager: http://zonker.opensuse.org
Blogs: http://blogs.zdnet.com/community | http://www.dissociatedpress.net
Twitter: jzb | Identica: jzb
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