David, I've cc'ed this to opensuse-project. Seems like an email they should see. Greg On 7/10/10, David C. Rankin wrote:

Listmates,

11.0 Desktop Summary

All-in-all, kde3 (except for the kde4 induced gtk issue, missing menu and control panel issues on x86_64) finished life in 11.0 in phenomenal shape. It was truly enjoyable to use. Gnome finished in fantastic shape even for remaining at an ancient 2.2.0 release point.

E16 was perfect. E17 was near perfect. Credit for the fantastic shape of both enlightenment desktops goes to Dmitry Serpokryl for his great work there.

WindowMaker, blackbox, fluxbox, openbox and lxde were all in great shape except that many of the desktop components needed to be found and installed from source due to declining interest from the build service maintainers.

IceWM, twm and fvwm2 were in good working order as well.

XFCE was probably the largest disappointment due to newer packages being available and then pulled from the repos during the last 2 months of support leaving a mess for that desktop at 11.0 EOL.

Unfortunately, the desktop selection in all versions of openSuSE since 11.0 has narrowed significantly. Enlightenment remains a bright point due to Dmitry's continued hard work. Gnome is still in good shape in 11.2 and to SuSE's credit KDE3 being continued was in my opinion was probably one of the smartest decisions I have seen made in the past 2 years. No matter how you slice it, KDE4 is still just a mess of differing beta ideas being shoved together in hope something usable springs forward on its own. It's like a desktop with cerebral palsy or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and evidently is shares the same prognosis.

11.3 Opportunities

Hopefully the opensuse devs will continue to put effort into keeping a good desktop selection available for 11.3. I would have gladly transitioned to kde4 if the normal simple things worked reliably, but it is hit and miss. 160+ bug reports opened and counting.

Take it to heart there are many more good desktop choices out there besides kde4 that are stable and efficient right now. If 1% of the effort currently being spent by opensuse on kde4 was committed to packaging these desktops for 11.3, then 11.3 could be just as solid a release as 11.0 was from a desktop standpoint -- and hopefully it will be.

We shall see what the future holds.

[ ...for additional consideration ]

The benefit to opensuse from moving to a rolling-release model and ditching the waste/duplication of effort in maintaining 3 release sets of everything is also something worth seriously considering... Soon resources will be divided between 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3 when resources should be singularly focused on opensuse -- think about it... From what I've seen, that model produces the best linux distribution for the least amount of resources required and the best user experience by eliminating the forced migration from release to release.

-- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

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