Hi there, On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:23 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
* The choice to *only* set the radio button was something that Vincent "could live with"
I've no idea what Vincent can live with :-) but this choice seems sub-optimal to me. It also, as has been raised several times, rather unwisely upsets one side of a very expensively agreed internal balance: the other side of which was (AFAIR) to continue to include KDE inside the SLE product family. It would perhaps be sensible to re-visit both sides of that decision concurrently - although such business decisions are clearly an internal matter. Separately, the level of straw-man argumentation on this topic is quite excessive. The claim that "the Desktop choice is just like any other default", your desktop background say, or eg. the default MTA (postfix vs. sendmail) - that almost no modern desktop user either uses or cares about - seems very unbalanced. I doubt that many people would disagree that the KDE / GNOME choice has a radical impact on desktop experience, a huge knock-on effect on lots of other software defaults, style of use etc. and this is not an simple choice to make. It is also, a fairly unique, and highly unfortunate historical accident that there are two major desktops, with all the shambolic division and infighting that that appears to generate. As such, having a unique choice in the installer to match, does not seem a hugely radical, or unfair step (to me).
So, my minimal counter proposal would not be "no default" but: * No desktop is preselected * We discuss the order of GNOME and KDE on the screen
Sounds reasonable to me. Personally, the ordering, and the text is not important to me. Since I concede that KDE is the choice of ~2/3rds of SUSE users, and GNOME only ~1/3rd, putting KDE top, and mentioning it's relative popularity in the text seems fine to me - "KDE is currently the choice of the majority of SUSE users" - or whatever. Indeed, further beefing up the text to help users make a more informed decision would seem useful to me, if agreed by some suitably polarised team: say Lubos and (I have no idea whom) from GNOME.
* and most importantly: we make a public statement that both GNOME and KDE are first class citiziens - and discuss what this really means!
Well here is the rub :-) Such decisions are normally 'wedge' issues - and this is perhaps the (not very) thin end of such a wedge. At conferences, eg. when we do openSUSE evangelism, how do we persuade GNOME enthusiasts to hand out and advocate openSUSE DVDs that guide you into doing a KDE install ? or even a live KDE system ? :-) Does the (existing, constant, up-hill struggle) to get GNOME shown at openSUSE conference booths become a lost cause based on this decision - "because of the will of the majority" ? what about marketing collateral, and so on ? The final thing, that interests me most, is the frequent presentation of the proposed change as "doing what the community wants" - and the positioning of those who disagree as "being anti-community" or some-such. Yet, we have no real idea what the community want here. The fact that someone has chosen to install GNOME, does *not* mean that they did not value the choice of KDE & vv. + Do we have good data for whether users really want a choice during the install ? + can we even get this data in a balanced, and not-immediately gerrymandered way ? And of course - I am convinced, -if- we genuinely want to try to do "what the community wants" - then the final decision, which necessarily has to be some grisly and unpleasant compromise that dissatisfies everyone :-), should -surely- be taken by the community's elected representatives: the council. Politics is the art of the possible - and sometimes not everyone can be pleased: including me (of course) :-) That is (I thought) why we elected these guys - to help with the hard choices. As they do that, they might want to consider the phenomena[1], well known in marketing, about people who have a bad experience with a product (or community), and their tendency to be rather more vocal than those who have a good one - multipliers I've heard here are an order of magnitude. Regards, Michael. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias -- michael.meeks@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org