On Mon, 19 Feb 2018 16:29:19 +0100
Richard Brown
Hi Liam,
Your proposed approach would necessitate that we test each one of those spins comparably.
Would it? Presumably there is some kind of testing that picking each desktop works, right? So that means that something is ticking each box, checking it installs cleanly, checking it runs, then moving on to the next one.
That would be a rather dramatic increase in our required test coverage.
How does changing the source medium mean a dramatic difference?
That would require a significant investment from more community testers, and probably more testing hardware. It would probably also increase the workload on both OBS and our Release Engineers (more things to go wrong with each media)
As I said, this is a task Ubuntu at least has outsourced to its community. Inasmuch as Gecko Linux exists at all, so has SUSE -- no?
I think Ubuntu and Fedora can get away with it because they don't try to run their Projects in a way where the community shape it's very nature. Their corporate overlords can declare a default and all the rest have to deal with it.
I do not see that at all, no.
I see the Ubuntu and Fedora way as being highly inefficient - forcing the fragmentation of their community and creating double work - Our model requires us to find ways of working together - which has proven to be of significant benefit to our KDE & GNOME offerings in particular.
TBH, the different desktop communities are fragmented _anyway_. I find the GNOME 3 tools almost unusable myself. Not only the desktop, but the new accessory apps, with their missing title bars, missing toolbars, weird merged things that you can't middle-click to send to back, etc. KDE is a world unto itself, with its own versions of everything. When it reproduces functionality from Windows, it does it in such a way as to require 3-4× as many mouse clicks, or misses out whole areas of functionality. Actually, come to that, Cinnamon and Maté and KDE _all_ miss out significant chunks of functionality from the OS they're copying. Oddly, the lightweight ones, Xfce and LXDE, are the ones that keep the stuff I personally really want. Sure, people move between them, people change allegiances, but there is already a _huge_ amount of duplicated effort between them all. Nothing SUSE does or doesn't do will change that.
But even if I did agree with that approach, the fact is that for openSUSE I would prefer not open a discussion about focusing on a single desktop environment first
AIUI, SLE only supports a single desktop: GNOME 3. There's no option for anything else, including KDE. So SUSE has _already_ made that choice.
All indications are that no DE in openSUSE has a majority of our userbase (eg. https://twitter.com/sysrich/status/947169171632205826 )
Really? I'd say the answer to that poll is a pretty clear indication of the favoured desktop. There are just 2, all the others are a rounding error (by definition, <=10%). And of the 2, one has a 25% lead. The fates of countries have swung on less, as you and I discussed in Brussels. So yes, I'd call that _very_ clear, myself.
So the best outcome I could expect from following this train of thought would be pissing off the majority of our userbase with whatever decision we could come up with.
I don't see that at all.
The best I think we can do is perhaps consider defining objective criteria for '1st tier' desktop environments and '2nd tier' desktop environments, to give the teams involved a more clear set of guidelines on how to be sure they are seen at the forefront of the Project's offerings.
That's not really what I was arguing at all.
But no, no spins for us please..I don't like that model at all.
And that's your right and that's fine. It does work, though, and it does make the installation process simpler with fewer questions. I think it arguably could _simplify_ testing. Does that not merit examination? -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org