I'm reading a lot here about making a political decision - but is not the withholding of a default Desktop also a political Decision.
From my experience in Opensuse Support I can say - that not choosing of a Default Desktop is really confusing for new users (especially older people)
What most people in my experience want is install and forget - in my Opinion not the ideal choice. But i guess first we need the Question of what we really want - do we want a Product (even a community created one) or do we want a community in the first Place which makes a great product. The Best Product made by the community Choice would be a default Desktop in my opinion and that means not only to put a preselection in a radio button. A possibility for example would be to default to a Desktop in the Auto configuration and make it more prominent to choose the easy setup (with default desktop choice) or the one where you can choose. If you do not choose the auto configuration option you would get all Desktops to choose from (incl. XFCE, minimal etc. ) If you put the Focus on growing the Community to the maximum , you would withhold the Default Choice (and avoid to choose sides) . This would make it a bit more complicated for the inexperienced user, especially if they choose the wrong Desktop for them (and this has happened). If you force the inexperienced user to make a decision - this requires people to know what decision to take and if they don't it leads to frustration. The experienced user should know how to get their choice. But I'm against forcing the decision for 11.2 in the next few weeks - i think it is to late for that and as the feeling of being a little bit sneaky. Lets have an open discussion for 11.3 . A decision taken would also not mean that it is forever ... Circumstances change and in open Community there should always be a way to revisit a decision taken. And to formulate my personal experience here i would favor the first approach - make a strong default choice - and my personal choice for that would be KDE. Why? The majority of people I know and worked with and have supported - liked KDE better. They were mostly Europeans though and in my experience the preference for KDE/Gnome has a strong regional Touch , which may be originating from the start of the Projects . I personally like working with KDE better then working with GNOME. The Auto configuration Feature in the Installation Work flow is well received by inexperience User (in my experience) - so the break for the Desktop choice comes in an unexpected place and is the only stage where it breaks for a choice (other then the install confirmation) The experienced users have their opinion anyway and they know how to get what they want. One of the Main points though is that the current Linux Ecosystem is strongly tilted to Gnome - most major distributions are defaulting to Gnome and for that reason GNOME wins the "War" (scarecrows intentional) for the inexperienced user. This reflects in the Enterprise distributions as well. A default Choice for KDE would in my Opinion level the playing field somewhat and could pave the way to a healthier climate all over Linux. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org