On Mon, 2023-05-08 at 16:52 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-05-08 16:39, Joe Salmeri wrote:
Hi Richard,
On 5/8/23 04:46, Richard Brown wrote:
This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE.
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
Possible the lack of volunteers is because of a lack of interest in using MicroOS and its transactional-update process ? I don't know if any MicroOS stats exist so I'm just speculating.....
It's possible. I don't judge. The GNOME variant of the MicroOS Desktop has lots of contributors and lots of users. That's great as it's my daily driver. The absence of a KDE flavour isn't going to hurt the goals the MicroOS Desktop set out to achieve.
If I could help I would certainly volunteer, however, that is outside my areas of expertise.
What I don't understand is if MicroOS is using the TW repos, shouldn't just pulling KDE from there keep it maintained since it is maintained with TW ?
The MicroOS Desktop is striving to be more than just 'a pile of packages people can lego together into a nice desktop'
that usecase is covered really well with Tumbleweed and it would be stupid for MicroOS Desktop to compete with something we do very well already.
The MicroOS Desktop was created to target very specific goals [1] aiming for very specific types of users [2].
To overly simplify, it's aiming to be a highly polished, less customisable, less maintenance needed Linux Desktop, for lazy developers (like myself) and other folk like Grandparents and such who just don't care about the nuts and bolts the same way that some Linux Enthusiasts do.
Based on the effective resignation letter of the last MicroOS Desktop KDE maintainer [3], I think it might be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to say that KDE just doesn't fit those goals, and it might not be in everyones interest to keep trying to smash that square peg into the MicroOS Desktop round hole.
And that might be precisely why no ones stepping up to volunteer. Nothing wrong with that, not every idea needs to succeed :)
Regards,
Richard
[1] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Design_Goals [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Who_is_the_MicroOS_Desktop_fo... ? [3] https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma...
To be fair, I haven't given up, I'm just stuck. For the people who haven't installed MicroOS Plasma and given it a whirl, the current state of the desktop is roughly the same experience as if you're installing Tumbleweed and Selecting the KDE Desktop. Which is fine, if somebody wants to maintain "Tumbleweed with an Immutable Base, and the KDE Desktop" that's basically what we have at the moment, it still requires a fair bit of tinkering under the hood to do a number of things. That being said, that's not a project *I* am interested in using or maintaining, which was about half the reason I made the post I did. I'm still regularly checking the bugzilla when I get notifications, but I'll be honest, there aren't bugs being filed, for the most part, since I made that blog post, it appears that there have been two, or three bugs filed against MicroOS Plasma specifically, the two remaining open, one of them is a "Feature Request" as far as I'm concerned, and the other is something I've been unable to reproduce in my own testing reliably. There are lots of folks using it, if Reddit or the Matrix chat are anything to go by, so it isn't as if the thing is a massive dumpster fire, but as I agree with Richard, that the stated goals of MicroOS Desktop aren't currently achievable with the Plasma Desktop, at least not at my skill level to make it happen, it basically is going to remain as a "beta" level subproject, if it stays around.