Hello,
>There is indeed an issue of anti-DE at times in #suse, there are times
>when it is GNOME that gets it, sometimes it's XFCE that cops a bucket
>full of buck shot. On the odd occasion I have seen KDE attract the
>swarm of locusts. As people have said, this is slowly increasing; so
>much so that I am copying the board and Zonker in to ensure that they
>are aware of the issue, and hopefully they can advise and assist us
in
>how best to educate everyone. At the end of the day, I'm pretty sure
>that there is a lot of things in KDE that none of us know.
I agree there is some anti-GNOME behaviour in #suse, but I don't see it
increasing at all. In the past, when I joined the community some years
ago, it was a lot more evident. At those times it was really happening
that systematically all GNOME users were instructed to use KDE. Today
it's not that way anymore, even if there still is some tendency to do
that.
I don't think it is fair, but I think there are some reasons for that,
and I will try to explain commenting the following lines.
>The issue of openSUSE's GNOME release being inferior to other distros
>is certainly a concern, and I think it is up to the GNOME team (both
>Novell employees and community militia ;-) ) to rectify with mass
>marketing.
This is exactly the consideration I expected and I have heard in years
of being around the GNOME team and the GNOME channel on IRC, and it is
one of the reasons why I gave up in trying to do something for GNOME in
openSUSE. Everything is considered a marketing problem, when it is
actually, and quite evidently from a user point of view, a software
quality problem. First release a state of the art GNOME, then market it.
Before it's just premature and counterproductive. You are already
experiencing that.
I will sum up the main problems I think contributed to this situation
about DE's in openSUSE:
- GNOME is constantly released in a untested "beta state" in the final
release of openSUSE, with evident bugs (read memory leaks, not working
apps). Patches to these issues are released after long time, leaving the
user with problems. This gives the sensation that the team considers
openSUSE simply as a beta product to experiment with, where the last
idea and the last application can be pushed, while the KDE team doesn't
do that. Examples: yast-gtk, PulseAudio, package-kit, tasque, main-menu
(in 10.3 it was a disaster with the memory leak, and people doesn't
forget so quickly).
- GNOME is bloated in openSUSE, causing major performance issues
compared to other distributions (see Fedora).
- Problems are patched too slowly compared to other DE's. It takes
months or almost a release cycle to have (if ever) the major bugs fixed,
while other distributions do this in about one month. One clear example
are Fedora and Ubuntu: they released with PulseAudio in a clearly worse
state than openSUSE, yet they fixed it quickly. OpenSUSE has some minor
problems and are almost all still there.
>I think a good spate of education for the diehard users of other DEs
>would be a good start, lets try and do something fun and informative
>for all of us.
Education and information are useful if there is a base to build them
upon. And that base has to be a quality release. I saw improvements from
10.3 to 11.0, that's evident, and I'm pleased of that. But we still are
not at the level of RH/Fedora, and the reasons are not clear.
The GNOME team used all the possible excuses that might justify the
difference in quality between GNOME and KDE, and GNOME in openSUSE/GNOME
in other distributions. It is time to stop hiding behind the excuse that
SuSE was a KDE-centric distribution, and that it takes time (the typical
"wait for next release and see!") to have a good GNOME implementation,
because the team had a whole release cycle (10.x) to do that. It missed
the opportunity because instead of preparing a solid base and then
adding features simply skipped the first step, hoping to fix the
problems as they come out. It doesn't work that way on the long run.
Just my two cents.
Alberto
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