Too late to... Fork...please! [LWN.net]

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:03 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: Too late to... Fork...please! by man_ls
Parent article: Fired, simply fired.

SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)

I'm hearing rumours that the upcoming version of openSuse will have switched to Gnome being on the top of the list (maybe it's alphabetical?). It would be a natural thing to do, but from my point of view it's a step in the wrong direction, and there might be more steps to come. BTW, can someone confirm this rumour? Or, real soon now, I'll just download a beta myself anyway :-)

(I talk about this when I meet the ceo of Novell Finland, and according to him there is an official policy in Novell to 1) support both desktops, 2) try to converge so that there would not be a difference whether you prefer kde or gnome (i.e. freedesktop.org) and 3) that failing (which I would put my money on) gtk/gnome is their first choice, and this is based on customer surveys. (Which I suspect were conducted in the US by Ximian people, but still, it's a policy and I respect that.))

I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE.

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Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:41 UTC (Sun) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

3) that failing (which I would put my money on) gtk/gnome is their first choice, and this is based on customer surveys. (Which I suspect were conducted in the US by Ximian people, but still, it's a policy and I respect that.))

No need for conspiracy theories, simply their concept of "customer survey" (and that of others trying to make money from selling distributions) doesn't really involve people just downloading openSUSE, but rather people buying Novell Linux Desktop (or equivalent).

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 19:45 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Yes, I didn't mean it as a conspiracy theory. As I said, it is a decision based on a customer survey, nothing wrong there. But I cannot believe that a majority of current SUSE users - most of whom certainly have paid something for a SUSE cardboardbox, since that was always the way of the SUSE world - would suddenly prefer Gnome after all these years of using the nr 1 KDE distro. So it must mean, that said customer survey would probably have been conducted among US companies, perhaps among Ximian/Novell customers. And there is nothing wrong with that. For instance, it could be that those are Fortune 500 companies and their opinions deserve to be prioritised. But they certainly are not a representative group of SUSE's long time customers.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Apr 2, 2006 17:52 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

I'm hearing rumours that the upcoming version of openSuse will have switched to Gnome being on the top of the list (maybe it's alphabetical?).

I'll answer this myself: Gnome is indeed above KDE, but neither is selected. Seems like Novell has found it wises to not prefer either one at this time :-)

On the downside: Without going into expert mode, you cannot pick both KDE and Gnome, which in my view is an unnecessary restriction.