Your mail is quite easy to answer by turning all your arguments around, just see: On Sunday 02 of August 2009, Jim Henderson wrote:
I would suggest that if the ordering of the options (or the inclusion of GNOME in the main selection list) alienated some KDE users, then those users who were alienated need to get a thicker skin and stop worrying
And that is why we cannot aknowledge the simple fact that the reality is that the majority of users do select that option anyway? It's ok to ask the KDE majority to get thicker skin, but it's not ok to ask the same of the GNOME minority?
about the fact that the installation screen provides a *choice*.
As a GNOME user, I'm not bothered by the inclusion of KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 in the installation. People want to use one of those releases, that's cool, it's not my preference, so I'm not inclined to select it as the primary interface at installation time.
And it's the same the other way around. I don't think most users are bothered by the fact that GNOME is provided in the screen too. The point is, it is not provided as a choice, it is required as a choice, where the preference is obvious. This is a clear message for and against the communities.
What I'm really curious about is what it is that those who *are* threatened by the inclusion of a GNOME option (clearly not all KDE users are threatened by this, so we're talking about what I sincerely hope is a small group of vocal people) are so afraid of with the inclusion of GNOME
I think it is rather clear by now that openSUSE currently does not see the benefits of Will's proposal to focus openSUSE on KDE. And even that proposal has nothing against the inclusion of GNOME, so please stop the usual we-poor-minority-are-being-bullied rubbish.
or the lack of a pre-selection being made for KDE. Are they afraid that users might decide to use something other than KDE and that will somehow cause resource allocation to the KDE project (which is not controlled by Novell *or* openSUSE) to be diminished?
Sending repeated messages "you are welcome, but not really as much as others" in the KDE direction is something that has negative impact on KDE contributors. And this is controlled by openSUSE or Novell.
If you don't want GNOME as a choice (or want a pre-selected KDE installation), then there's an answer to that: Use SUSE Studio to create your own installation media that has what you want in it.
Or how about you use SUSE Studio to create your own installation media that pretends that KDE is not the majority of users and give that to GNOME users without offending the KDE ones?
I would far rather see the project's focus not be diverted by what is essentially a religious debate about which desktop is better, because neither is better in an absolute manner, because users have different needs. "Better" for me is not "better" for other users.
I'm not talking about which desktop is better. I'm talking about the fact that we try to grow our community and at the same time we repeatedly shoot ourselves in the foot by alienating our biggest part of the existing community. -- Lubos Lunak KDE developer -------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. e-mail: l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org Lihovarska 1060/12 tel: +420 284 028 972 190 00 Prague 9 fax: +420 284 028 951 Czech Republic http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org