After quite a long time, I decided to do some considerations on the status of OpenSUSE as a community and as a distribution, starting from everyday experience. I'll start from some bug reports, which affects me directly and which have been waiting for a solution for a long time since the release of 10.2 final. They're only examples, you can find many others on bugzilla. * main-menu Hangs https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240727 * Banshee doesn't recognize ipod https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=215301 * yast is still unable to list printers https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240727 * Gimp can't print: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=230887 which sends to bug #226710, which is not accessible. The main menu bug is a blocker and it's really strange no-one in the development team noticed it during the development stage. A patch was recently released on bugzilla, but it only partially solves the problem for some user and does nothing for others, which indicates the issue is quite serious. The helix-banshee bug is really a mystery. It's there since beta stage, but no solution is coming. It seems that recompiling a package is impossible at SuSE. The yast-printer bug seems solved, but I still can't see my network printers in yast. I've just reopened the bug. The gimp problem was marked as duplicate of a FIXED bug, but this one links to an inaccessible report. In my opinion these issues are serious and the lack of consideration they receive is very disappointing considering that solutions were promised in many occasions, and they're not provided in an acceptable time (~3 months after the official release). The bugzilla is full of other examples of problems which could be easily solved in a short time, but never received a comment. There are many easily fixable bugs with many comments and no solution. OpenSUSE, in the opinion of most users, is the mean through which users know SUSE, evaluate it and start using it. There are many users who approached to SUSE through OpenSUSE to evaluate the enterprise line too and to see how the team/community works. I don't think OpenSUSE is giving a good image of itself neither as a distribution nor as a team/community. The quality of the distribution is lower then in the past due to the choice to release too quickly and the lack of testing. The issue of testing was addressed by adding a beta release for 10.3, but I don't think the team should expect significant improvements from testing provided by users if * a pre-testing is not done in-house. * no guidelines are given to community testers. * no consideration is given to their reports. Especially the pre-testing is important in my opinion, because community users often don't have enough experience and knowledge, or they don't test the distribution for enough time. Guidelines would help us a lot to look for problems in specific areas and to test things more carefully Of course all this makes sense only if reports will be considered in time and seriously, hopefully before release ;-) A final comment, to conclude this already long e-mail, is about the GNOME-KDE question (seriously, for once). Gnome users (not only me, there are a few, but there are) are quite bored to see GNOME considered the de-facto second choice of the distribution because it is less tested than KDE and less maintained. Now, I understand many developers at SUSE love KDE and that SUSE was a KDE based distribution. But in the past at least it was coherent: KDE was the default and SUSE was really optimised for KDE. It was so evident that GNOME appeared out of place, and it was OK. A user who chose SUSE knew it was a KDE distribution. Today SUSE has no defaults, so a user thinks he can choose what he likes more, but it's not that way. In openSUSE 10.2 it is so evident a lot of the efforts were put in creating a KDE which is better than GNOME. Examples are many: from the new kickoff menu, which was developed faster than the gnome main-menu and has none of the issues of the gnome one, to the opensuse-updater, which has no equivalent in GNOME (I know one is coming for 10.3). Both DE should be considered as alternatives, not as rivals. I do myself this mistake, I know. But it's really annoying to read "Use KDE" or "Use a KDE app" when a user asks for help about GNOME. Moreover GNOME is the default on SLED, and having a low quality GNOME on openSUSE doesn't help to give a good image to potential customers. If things are going to stay as they are at the moment, I would really prefer a strong but clear decision to make openSUSE again a KDE based distribution instead of having a two-DE distribution only in appearance. Sorry for the long message. Regards, Alberto --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org