On Wednesday 03 May 2006 23:29, Mark H. Harris wrote:
I am amazed at some of the comments on this thread. Ok, basics... Linux is not Winblows... the desktop is *not* tied to the OS in Linux... the desktop is *not* tied to the distribution in Linux... Suse doesn't support the KDE desktop, the KDE community supports the KDE desktop... If Suse ever ships without KDE (and it won't anytime soon) I will add the KDE desktop myself.
Well, it _used to be_ that SUSE took the basic KDE, at a certain version, integrated it and tested it with their distribution, customizing the eye candy and ensuring a nice fit. Yes, you can do all that stuff yourself. Yes, you can compile every little thing, including the kernel from source. And good for you. But they have these things called "distributions" that do much of that work... especially the integration and testing and getting all the drivers together and working, and giving the whole thing a nice look-and-feel... which many of us like and some of us even pay money for. You know... so we won't have to spend our lives searching out thousands of source files, matching up their versions, compiling, re-compiling because we found something else that we like and it needs a different library... like that? So, even though many people seem inarticulate and may have given the impression that they think KDE is part of the OS, most of us know that it is separate and that what we are looking for from SUSE (and maybe even paying for) is the integration and prettifying. And all that testing and tweaking that they do... so we don't have to. We are talking two different mentalities here, with only a bit of overlap: - the people for whom Linux is a hobby and an end in itself - the people for whom Linux is a tool to do other stuff that they could do about as well (though perhaps differently), with Windows or Mac OSX. The first group reached saturation long ago. There's not much growth to be had anymore among hobbyists. There's plenty of room among users-with-actual-lives. Eventually, some of the hobbyists will get so pissed with the expectations and limitations of users-with-actual-lives, that some of them will get together and create a new hobbyist platform... well, they will after the wars about switching to a "pure" form of BSD or some such. Some of them will rise above such things and simply go to work for SUSE/Novell or other distro company, so that they can play to their heart's content with compiling and testing and re-compiling everything in sight. Well, that's my take, and it likely differs from yours. Kevin