FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Jon Stanley wrote:
> However, I'm willing to entertain discussion on it, because I think
> that the topic is important.  As has been said elsewhere in this
> thread, there is no "separate but equal" doctrine in play here. GNOME
> gets more support than KDE in Fedora.  Adam Miller brought up a great
> point on IRC - if I were a GNOME user using OpenSUSE, I would have no
> expectation that I'd be getting the same level of support and having
> the same experience as a KDE user on that distro.  It is the way it
> is.

Except it's not. OpenSUSE:
* has a "select your desktop" screen in their installer DVD. You don't have
to go to the full package selection, uncheck KDE and check GNOME to get
GNOME, you get asked for it before package selection. See e.g.:
http://gi812.net/media/images/openSUSE_10.3_install_08.gif
http://images.howtoforge.com/images/opensuse_11_perfect_server/big/6.jpg
(Also note that GNOME is actually listed first there.)
* likewise, if you choose the Live CD option on their download page at
http://software.opensuse.org/ (the default is the DVD which ships both KDE
and GNOME with the desktop selection screen described above), you get "Live
CDs (choose one)" followed by 2 links: "Live CD GNOME" and "Live CD KDE 4"
(the order is somewhat random, I got GNOME listed first for the 32-bit
BitTorrent download and KDE listed first otherwise). They also have
radiobuttons for x86, x86_64 and ppc.

The way they're doing things is actually a good example of how to do it
right. We are NOT doing things their way at all. OpenSUSE is NOT calling
the KDE edition "Desktop Edition", hiding the GNOME live image behind an
extra click, making it hard to select GNOME from the installer DVD or
anything like that! Please stop using this bogus "OpenSUSE does the same to
GNOME" argument, it's just FUD. Their example actually shows that it's
perfectly possible to have 2 equally-supported desktops instead of one
single default.

        Kevin Kofler