On August 4 we discussed the possibility of openSUSE defaulting to KDE during the installation routine. This was raised as a feature request within the openSUSE community, and quickly gained the favour of many, become the most popular request. The openSUSE board and variousother leader within the project have discussed the issue, and have decided that yes, from now on, openSUSE will default to KDE during the installation process.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2008-12-26
Does anybody have any thoughts on that ?
All they did now was change the default on a radio button.
It's a good start, but not earth shattering news. For that, we'd have to see them pushing KDE on their "enterprise" distros.
Member since:2005-07-24
Perhaps they should take their cue from Microsoft's browser ballot plan. If the user selects Gnome then Gnome is installed. If the user selects KDE then Gnome and KDE are installed. KDE comes up by default, but there are icons on the desktop and in the panel to switch to Gnome.
Member since:2009-07-22
One thing is the Novell as an enterprise and other is the community driven Opensuse.SUSE has always been KDE oriented and most of SUSE's users use KDE, so preselecting KDE is simply a logical step.
The bold movement happened when Novell bought SUSE *and* Ximian the same year.
Member since:2005-07-06
SUSE Enterprise will stay with GNOME. In fact, SLED does not even have a simple radio button where GNOME is pre-selected. SLED users have to dig into a submenu to select KDE, similar to the way Xfce and other environments have to be selected under openSUSE (SLED ships with no DEs other than GNOME 2.24 and KDE 4.1).
Edited 2009-08-20 20:07 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-11-24
Member since:2006-12-20
<cynicism>Well it would totally scupper their whole openFATE initiative and destroy the nice "community" image of OpenSuse if they just ignored the request, wouldn't it! </cynicism>
It is an interesting choice though, seeing as this creates really quite a divergence between OpenSuse and Novell's enterprise Linux offerings, which (IIRC) are solely GNOME-based. At the time of their decision to go with GNOME, Qt was still GPL or paid proprietary, so GTK/GNOME made an awful lot of sense. Qt would actually be a very viable choice these days, but I doubt they're about to change over, since they're quite heavily invested in GTK now I'd imagine. So I can't imagine that's the reason behind their choice.
Still. really this is great news for me as a KDE fan and I think for the power of end users everywhere. Nice one Novell! 
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-05-31
SLED defaults to GNOME and there isn't a "desktop selection" page in the installer, but the KDE desktop and apps can be selected as well as or instead of GNOME in the installer's detailed software selection, or post-installation of course. This isn't publicised for complex reasons, but SLE customers tend to know what they are paying for and how to set it up. And Novell provides the same level of enterprise support for KDE.
Member since:2005-07-07
I'm a die hard gnome... I don't have even one piece of desktop software on my computers which isn't gnome. I remove firefox, openoffice... and replace with smaller gnome alternatives.
But... I like this move very, very much. Suse always was wonderful kde distro (I know that from all my kde loving friends). Since they moved to gnome, it is the same feel as they would lose their game. Bad gnome, not finished kde. Maybe there is a hope they'll pick up where they left and return to former glory.
Beside that... There are to many gnome centric distros and too few kde.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2008-06-12
While I certainly welcome the change it somewhat caught me by surprise. I mean, OpenSuse, a Novell distro 'switches' to KDE while they have Miguel de Icaza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza) employed.
Does anybody have any thoughts on that ?