Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (68 mails)

[Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@xxxxxxx>]

On Friday 31 of July 2009, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> The first point, that it's "confusing for new Linux users," has some merit
> -- choice means having to think about the relative merits of the options
> put forward, and since most new Linux users don't have a lot of information
> to decide it probably _is_ **mildly_ _**confusing. But limiting choice, in
> my opinion, isn't the best option

 You misread the proposal. This is not about limiting the choice, this is 
about preselecting one of the radio buttons in the desktop selection page 
during installation. Preselecting a radio button is not forbidding the 
selection of the others.

> -- the best option here is to _do a 
> better job_ at informing new users. Or, perhaps, encouraging new users to
> grab a live CD instead of the DVD and _test drive both_ before making a
> decision.

 Sorry, but this is naive. If you give those users something that will explain 
to them what KDE and GNOME are and how to choose, they will probably just 
shrug and do with a distribution that doesn't force them to do this (all but 
openSUSE, incidentally). Or they will just select what is first in the list.

> The next point, that this would be a "unique selling point," because Fedora
> and Ubuntu don't provide a default KDE desktop is not convincing at
> all. We have a "unique selling point," now -- which is we offer two
> outstanding desktop environments to choose from at install time. (And, of
> course, Xfce and other Window Managers if you delve a bit deeper…)

 This is not unique. Fedora installation offers to install KDE too, for 
example. The only thing that is unique about us is that we force the decision 
on the user, regardless of whether they want to choose or just want to use 
openSUSE. We also do not force the decision of whether the CLI editor will be 
Vi or Emacs.

> And of course, there's Kubuntu -- which provides KDE as its default.

 Google for 'Kubuntu stepchild', or any other similar term that will show you 
what many people think about how Kubuntu is not Ubuntu but only some kind of 
add-on.

> **For me, our selling point is choice:** Come for GNOME, come for KDE, we
> have both, plus Xfce, and a whole slew of other great software (like YaST,
> Zypper, etc.) and project tools (the openSUSE Build Service).

 And we keep the choice. But we cannot be 100% fair anyway. GNOME is now 
higher, so it gets pretty much all of the undecided votes. So we made a 
choice there anyway, it's just more annoying for the user and it doesn't 
represent the preference of the user base.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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