jdd wrote:
Pascal Bleser wrote:
Come spend some time on IRC and see what people are actually asking for.
but what IRC? on opensuse there are roughly nobody... (on fr 4/5 people :-)))
On #suse there are almost 200 people every evening, AFAICR. At times where I connect (usually around 23:00 CET), I'd say there are around 30-40 active people.
KDE 3.5.2 has a lot of bugfixes compared to 3.5.1. and probably a lot of new bugs :-(.
3.5.2 is a *bugfix* release. And if everyone was thinking like you, we'd still be using a Linux 2.0 kernel.
Answering "don't do so" would be stupid IMO.
if it works, don't change it is always a good answer. what are you doing on your computer? upgrading all the time?
1) I use my workstations at home and at work all the time, development, writing documentation, browsing, email, IMAP server, etc.. etc... - probably heavier stuff than you are doing 2) I'm not "upgrading all the time", but I'm selectively upgrading quite a few packages: latest firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, KDE, dovecot, getmail, .... - and although I'm a software developer and have 10 years of experience with Linux, I don't need to fiddle with it, it works and I've never been bitten by it
I keep up to date the post important apps I use. never the underlaying stuff. I doubt an unsupported kde on suse 9.3 to be better than the original one without a lot of work.
Well that's the way you manage your system. Do however you please, but don't assume that your case is the typical one. From my experience, it isn't. And BTW that doesn't have anything to do with the topic. I wrote at least twice that from what I see on IRC (and anyone hanging around on #suse will tell you the same), web forums or mailing-lists, most users (if not all) always want to upgrade to the latest version of several key applications and packages they use all the time. KDE, GNOME and Firefox being the most frequent. Do you think writing "if it works, don't change it is always a good answer" will make everyone on this planet change their mind ? ;) That's the situation, and you're not going to change it. And I think you're wrong by stating it is _always_ a good answer. It isn't, at least not always. At the very least, on IRC, it would be the best way to drive a lot of people away from SUSE Linux.
I'm very aware of the "featuritis" syndrome, but as far as guerrilla marketing is concerned...
opensuse is free, what guerilla do you see? let the others use factory :-)
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/guerrilla-marketing/
a _stable_ release must do what it's said to: be stable.
KDE 3.5.2 is being very stable for me. You're really missing the actual topic, by a long shot.
You might not think that way, and neither do I nor most people on this list, but from what I've seen on IRC (and I'm on #suse and #opensuse every night)
well how many users there?
Around 200 on each (but more or less the same people on both).
I think that many potential SUSE Linux converts who come asking for information about the distribution would likely rather use another (e.g. kubuntu) than staying with KDE 3.4.x. At least that was the case for SL 10.0. Correct me if I'm wrong but that's really my impression.
frankly these users don't interest me. They can do what they want, but
Those users are a big part of the SUSE Linux community and people we'd want to attract to SUSE Linux (or at least, so does Novell).
don't come to support then...
Who is talking about support ? No one is. This is not what the topic is about. It's about providing the latest stable versions of certain packages, not about support. Just understand that while it is not important to you, it is important to a significant part of users.
I'm not against such thing, but I don't want it become a priority against stability. to have the last to notch, use factory, simply.
I'm talking about a stable distribution release (e.g. SL 10.0 or 10.1)
+ upgrades for a few key packages like KDE or GNOME.
That's very different from using Factory, as Factory is bleeding edge
of everything.
cheers
--
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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