Alberto, Perhaps you misread the original intent of this thread. My bringing this up was not about KDE vs. GNOME. That exists, and sadly we'll never get around that part. My thread was about people telling newcomers that if they want to use GNOME, they should use another distribution. That's a comment NOT about GNOME itself, but about openSUSE's GNOME. It is an unfair, untruthful implication and ignores the hard work of many people contributing to openSUSE-GNOME. When I confronted one person who said this statement, he admitted to having never used GNOME but felt that if GNOME is the user's desired DE, other distros are better. That is wholly untrue and unfair. Please don't hijack this thread to turn it into one of your usual rants. This was not about the existence of GNOME, it was about GNOME on openSUSE. Bryen On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 16:51 -0500, Alberto Passalacqua wrote:
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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