Am Freitag, 31. Juli 2009 16:49:10 schrieb Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier:
Con:
* We may alienate our GNOME users -- while a smaller percentage than our KDE users, ~30% of the community is still important to me. * We may alienate our GNOME contributors * We will not encourage any GNOME contributors to choose openSUSE if they're not already here * We probably wind up having further conversations about "defaults" with future releases, such as burying GNOME to "other" with 11.3, or worse.
What I do not understand from a user's point of view is the following. In this thread it is argumented that having a default or even having a pre-selection on that installation page would send a message which could offend, insult, disappoint etc. Gnome users. Fair enough, let's say I agree with that, i.e. pre-selecting and even more so defaulting to a DE offends, insults, disappoints. Then there are a) a lot of distros that do so and still have more users than openSUSE and b) and far more importantly, since who cares about other distros?, Novell and those managing SLE have to admit that they send that exact message to the KDE world/users. Do they acknowledge that? I think that if one does not, one applies double standards. Even if there are reasons that might justify the defaulting, the message is sent. If I take your Cons, then SLE alienates KDE users, contributors and does not encourage KDE contributors to choose SLE. Sounds pretty harsh to me. Would all those claiming that there is an alleged "anti-Gnome message" in pre-selecting KDE agree that SLE sends and even clearer "anti-KDE message"? Further, and I stole this from somebody else ;), the argument that having a default or at least a pre-selection is useful, e.g. because it would make it easier for new users, is denied by some. If one denies the need for a default even for openSUSE which is aimed at all users from newbies to experts, then one surely has to agree that a default makes even less sense if a product is aimed mostly at experts. Or does it make sense to anyone that one has to take the decision off the shoulders of an expert but not of those of a newbie or normal user? Yet for the SLE products which are mostly installed by admins, which clearly have a clue of what DE they want, get a default. So those need a default while openSUSE users don't? What's the justification for that default? Most SLE users want Gnome? Easing the installation process? Proposing the better technology? I fail to see what argument could be offered that would not apply for openSUSE as well. Sven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org