Comment # 11 on bug 1165646 from Stefan Hundhammer

At that point in time, the GNOME desktop is not yet running. Look at the
screenshots in this openQA sequence: yast2-firstboot is running straight after
booting, before the desktop is started.

The reasoning for that is that yast2-firstboot might do any kinds of setup,
depending on the specific product. This might easily influence what desktop (if
any) to start and in what configuration. We just don't know; this is a very
generic piece of infrastructure that is being used by our different products in
very different ways.

For example, our SLE for SAP product uses this to do the SAP specific setup
after the base system is installed. Other products can use this for other
product-specific workflows.

Personally, I don't have any strong feelings about this one way or the other.
But we need it to stay generic enough to support all the relevant scenarios:

- With or without yast2-firstboot

- With graphical or text based YaST

- Giving our product-specific installers the chance to do what they need to do

As this bug shows, it is even possible (though not recommended) to run
yast2-firstboot graphically, but without a window manager; we may lose some
functionality, though, and it might sometimes happen that pop-up windows appear
behind the main window (we had that in the past) or that keyboard focus depends
somewhat erratic.