Hello, please excuse me, but as a political scientist I have to butt in here and say my piece. ;-) The problem here is a misapprehension of what a majority vote can and can not do. The question at hand (default desktop) is very comparable to a conflict between two rivaling ethnicities living in the same country. As democratic decision-making does and should not take into account ethnicity, there will always be core-issues that _must_remain_unresolved_ if such a country is to exist for any length of time. These are issues which directly correlate to contradicting interests of one or the other ethnic community (i.e. zero-sum games). If one of the ethnic communities (as it usually is the case) is bigger than the other one it could easily decide such critical issues continuously to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the smaller community. A majority decision here would not be the result of a decision-making process or bargaining, which are prerequisite to any meaningful democratic decision, but would simply represent the bigger party pushing its interests at the expense of the smaller party, which would be detrimental to the system as a whole. Here purely democratric decision-making fails. A majority vote will in the end result in disintegrating the country. Majority decisions are NOT a fair solution to solve problems involving two persistent interest groups. The belief that voting is a fair solution to EVERY problem is simply wrong; the theory of democracy suggests otherwise. Reliance on majority votes alone is 'not democratic' in our modern understanding of the word because when we talk about democracy we don't mean majority vote but a system which in addition to that also respects the right of the individual and the interests of minorities. This is why our political systems are NOT democracies but 'liberal democracies' (liberalism is a necessary component that prevents the abuse of majority influence). Coming back to my analogy of two ethnicities living in the same country, there are two ways such a situation can go: a) a split of the country, which brings a whole new set of problems b) ways of decision making other than majority-based are set in place and unresolvable questions (=zero-sum games) are made a taboo These are also the options for the opensuse-distribution, translating into: a) discontinue the DVD-releases and only put out Live-CDs, thus avoiding the issue (a mild kind of split, as I don't think anybody would really want 'KopenSUSE' and 'GopenSUSE'...) b) treat both communities equally by NOT defaulting to a specific desktop (the zero-sum game is made a taboo) and there is always c) declare it someone else's problem (as in 'let Andreas decide' ;)) 'c)' is not really an option because the new decision maker be it a maintainer of whoever - would face the same problems and consequences. But with a vote on a) or b) I think we would have it down to two meaningful, non-destructive options which don't align with the borders of the two 'camps'. a) would mean KDE fans get their petty little victory, as they don't have to see GNOME at the top of that alphabetic list anymore. For GNOME fans nothing would change. The decision would go at the expense of those serious users who actually NEED the DVDs. b) would mean everyone has to either accept that the openSUSE community as a whole is more important than their feelings about a specific desktop, or they'd have to adjust their perception as to view the Live-CD releases as the main form of distro-release. Perhaps we could make that easier for them by hiding the DVD download-option somewhere unobtrusive. These are IMHO the only options that could realistically be voted upon without making the vote a zero-sum game - because the options to decide on don't represent the persistent interests of the interest groups that decide on it (option A: KDE, option B: GNOME). Again, you CAN'T make default desktop choice a majority vote and call it fair. I am frankly quite amazed by the nonchalance with which a KDE-team member has brought up this explosive issue on the very questionable pretext that a default desktop would bring less confusion and attract more developers, with utter disregard to what this aggravating discussion would entail for the community. The correct way to go about it would have been starting a discussion on this ML. Bringing this up topic as a 'feature request' represents a serious abuse of openFATE IMHO and should have been rejected outright. The gains of this whole discussion are close to zero, the damage has already been done and could potentially be serious if the majority of KDE-proponents on the ML continues to push its agenda. I feel sad about it, I would have expected the openSUSE community to behave in a more adult fashion. Greets, Chris Jäger -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org