On Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:23:21 -0600, Dean Hilkewich wrote:
I'm sorry but if you have a choice of a vocal community vs silent community it is the vocal community that you want to cater too. They are obviously more passionate about the project then the other community.
Posit: GNOME users are generally (though not always) new users and non- technical users at that. Mailing lists, forums, etc where the discussions are largely *technical* in nature are not likely to draw that part of the userbase into the discussion because most of the discussion is over their heads. Creating a situation where people are unlikely to know or are unwilling to participate because they won't understand 99% of the discussion and then saying "well, if you don't participate, too bad for you" is a *great* way to disenfranchise those users while appearing to be looking at the issue in a democratic manner. Let's make sure we're not doing that and at least giving those people a chance to have a voice before we declare them as being dispassionate and uninterested in the future of the distro.
That means that openSUSE is poised for a decline, one way or the other. If we have people leaving and aren't seeking users to replace those who leave for whatever reason, then the result is a net loss no matter how you look at it. If we don't build appeal into the broader Linux community (and into the general computing community), then we only stand to lose users no matter how you slice it, because there's *always* going to be someone leaving.
I can't see it declining at all, otherwise pretty much every other distro out there would be a sinking ship, which we all know is not the case. While there may be always someone leaving that gap can be filled with people who are no longer stuck with a decision they really have no idea about. This is not a case of practicing euthanasia on Gnome. The choice is still there, people can still select gnome if they want. It's a decision of what the gnome community likes to call "sensible defaults". Just like the installer has sensible defaults for filesystem, language, keyboard layout, etc.
And as I've said, I've no problem if the KDE camp is willing to commit that GNOME stays on the menu. I've yet to see *anyone* from that camp say that they find that agreeable. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org