I have been on holidays for over a week now and another 84 more comments have been added to the original thread. and for what's its worth I totally agree this has nothing to do with a technocratic discussion, but moreover one of userbility, look and feel. I have made the following enhancement request, but my hand in not in the air to offer to write the text. I am not the one who may very well start a war - we need a marketing diplomat to write the text, not a technocrat. https://bugzilla.novell.com/process_bug.cgi Please add any other comments relevant to this suggestion in the bug. and good luck to those trying to still the waters... AJ I hope I have not sent you a dupe leaving you in the CC Scott Couston Michael Meeks wrote:
Hi AJ,
On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 14:16 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
After reading all emails and having many discussions about the default desktop topic, I've wrote up the following draft proposal (at the end of my long email) and propose to enact it.
One of the things that most interests me about this debate is the excessive argumentation and extrapolation from whatever percentage of install-base, to the idea that we should substantially offend our growing Gnome community. Personally, I'm pretty annoyed by claims that openSUSE is, or should be a KDE focused distribution, whatever it's history - that at least is my bias.
Having said that - all this talk of "policy", and logic, reason, marketing and so on suggests to me that this decision is a highly charged, multi-disciplinary, nuanced - and *extremely* non-technical one. In fact, it is hard to discern any technical issue here at all - the code change in question is utterly trivial, even for my basic ycp skills :-)
Indeed, to me this looks like a simple conflict between three opposed view-points[1] "KDE default, no default, and GNOME default" - with apparently no substantial chance of compromise, and seemingly a lack of clarity around who is empowered to make the decision. Indeed - to me, it seems like we have the obvious compromise position selected already.
I believe we voted for a fairly independent board, which would help resolve such conflicts and facilitate the decision making process. I for one, would defer to their view on the matter - and no doubt (like the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland) we will have multiple opportunities to vote on this issue in future, if only as part of the board election process :-)
Have we even asked the board ? if not, why not ? if so, what did they say ? and who should be the ultimate decision maker here ?
Thanks,
Michael.
[1] - it is amusing to see it regularly framed as a choice between only two options: "obedience to (some people's perception of) the democratic will of the majority vs. some unusual disobedience of that". To trot out such a simplified view of democracy and politics is - frankly amazing to me.