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.
Before we detail the rationale behind this decision, let’s make it absolutely clear that this decision does not mean GNOME will be removed from the installation routine. All it means is that in the desktop selection screen of the installer, KDE will be selected by default, with GNOME as the other option.
Michael Löffler of Product Management announced the decision on the opensuse-project mailing list. “After consideration of the project discussion I discussed the feature request further with the openSUSE Board and other leaders within the openSUSE project and came to the decision to follow the request: we will default the radio button to KDE in the DVD installer,” he writes, “Therefore, with openSUSE 11.2 release, the KDE desktop will be installed if the user accepts the default setting. Users can also choose the GNOME desktop at this stage.”
He further adds that GNOME will still be treated as a top-class and equal citizen, and that they will continue to strive to offer a top-notch GNOME implementation. “We want to make clear that both desktops are considered equal citizens within the openSUSE Project, and this will not have any impact on the quality of the GNOME desktop within openSUSE.”
A good decision, and there was really no way around this one for the project. It was quite clear that KDE is the preferred desktop of a large majority of the openSUSE community, so it only makes sense to make it the default.
Even though I primarily use Gnome (Ubuntu and Redhat Enterprise Desktop), I like the idea of there being a major distro with KDE as the default desktop. I do think Kubuntu doesn’t get the “love” it deserves. Previously I had used SUSE (when KDE was the default), and I always chose Gnome and I never had any problems. Gnome was definitely a first-class citizen. I believe the same is true with Mandriva – KDE was the default (I don’t know if it still is), but Gnome was equally supported – from my perspective at least.
[EDIT] tried to change the Title – oh well, maybe the decision is gooey as well as good!
Edited 2009-08-20 17:44 UTC
Mandriva still uses KDE as default and it’s superb.
Unfortunately Mandriva is not a major distro anymore in some senses. It just doesn’t have the mind share that Mandrake had back in the day, and I get the impression that few developers run it as their primary distro.
Edited 2009-08-20 21:51 UTC
I just recently tried 2009 version. I am not a KDE expert, but KDE4 felt more like KDE3.
People who use KDE 100% will probablt differ on my opinion as they actually do know better
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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
Funny. When I used NLD (this was a few years ago when it was called Novell Linux Desktop) there was and I got KDE installed pretty easily.
Getting KDE under SLED is not complicated, but you have top know it’s there, because it’s only listed under “Advanced Software Configuration” or whatever that button is called.
How come they’re still shipping with KDE 4.1?
<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!
Novell bought Ximian first and made the Ximian bosses the new bosses of Novell’s new Linux division.
Only later SUSE was bought.
If Novell had bought SUSE first, the Linux product lineup would be very different. I’m sure.
No, I don’t think so. I am a big fan of KDE, but if I were selling a Linux distro I would want to make it a nice target for proprietary developers. Having Qt with the GPL/paid licences made this realistically impossible, because how could you justify sending people elsewhere to get a development licence for your platform, for which they would also have to pay £££? No way.
Having a bunch of GNOME developers on board probably helped make the decision a lot easier, but I really don’t think KDE stood a chance there with that old Qt licencing issue.
So you think that Novell+SUSE (and without Ximian) would have tried to ban KDE altogether? Because that’s what’s actually happened a short while after SUSE was bought.
Do you think that Novell+SUSE would have another MS fanboy like De Icaza who’s pushing stuff like Mono?
I really don’t think so, especially as openSUSE+KDE doesn’t even install by default and KDE is still maintained by the old SUSE team.
The Ximian guys took the lead in Novell’s Linux division simply because they were the first in that division. If Novell bought another Linux company first, its managers would’ve taken the lead in the division.
If Novell bought SUSE first, Novell may never even bought Ximian at all. Hey, maybe Novell would’ve bought Trolltech or a former “United Linux” partner.
Neither SLED nor SLES are primary targeted towards developers. Just count the number of proprietary GTK apps on Linux that are actually distributed.
The GPL is not an issue for internal development, because internal deployment is not distribution (check GPL FAQ if you don’t believe me).
And even if Novell+SUSE would propagate GTK for development, that has nothing to do with the default DE. openSUSE KDE installs Firefox by default as well.
For a Microsoft fanboy, De Icaza is doing an awfully lot of Linux development.
Pushing Microsoft technology.
Pushing great technology.
Fixed that for you.
Hi Miguel!
Hardly anything Microsoft makes is “great”
Miguel also pleasured himself over ActiveX, IE for Unix. A lot of the technology that went into Gnome was him loving microsoft and making his own versions of their stuff.
I remember back in the day with Gnome 1.x, thinking Sawfish looked a lot like Explorer and my friend bashed me for using KDE which he said was copying microsoft.
Your username looks and sounds almost like what that statement is ;-).
I never cease to be amused that this reasoning still exists even years later.
How many proprietary developers got on board with SLED because they wanted to develop for nothing? None, that’s how many. The first complaint that anyone seems to make is that the LGPLed alternatives like GTK and Gnome’s libraries are just totally unacceptable to develop for. The fact that you can develop for nothing never seems to outweigh that observation. If that were the case then Microsoft would have made Visual Studio free years ago to bolster Windows’s installed base still further, but they don’t because developers are OK with paying for it. There also wouldn’t be a developer tools market worth billions either. The second complaint is that any Linux distribution is a PITA to install software on, but that is a perennial issue I’m not sure will be solved completely.
Fast forward a few years and Qt has been LGPLed, but that’s not why people are excited. They are excited because Qt is actually half-decent first and foremost. The LGPL license has just been a bonus that will boost Qt’s usage, but Qt got to being half-decent by being funded through its dual license. It remains to be seen whether Qt Software and Nokia can keep it focused.
Fast forward several years and SLED hasn’t stood a chance nor has it attracted any proprietary developers writing applications that would attract businesses to using it. If that was what the decision for SLED was at least partially based on then we can conclusively say that it has failed.
http://www.microsoft.com/express/
Free…. I even got a copy of Pro for watching a few videos extolling the benefits of Visual Studio awhile back.
Express is a token gesture to get people started with development because they know they can still charge for full-blown versions of Visual Studio and its tools, and people will pay. A whole Microsoft division depends on that. However, the fact that you got a token copy of Pro shows how the company feels about it overall within the context of bolstering Windows application support.
That’s not free as in freedom, its free as in beer.
That aside, the express editions are nothing compared to their full versions.
Also, most developers working with VS are working on commercial software, be it open or closed source. I’ve had the chance to work on both with VS myself. In the scheme of things the cost of a VS Pro license is fairly small to the overall cost of the project. Not that license cost doesn’t matter; it is just that it is worth spending if it saves one developer even one day’s worth of time over the course of one project.
However, the upfront cost can be too high when first starting out or working on non-commercial software.
MS answers both groups with the Express vs Std/Pro/TS lines, as well as some specific programs to lower startup cost for commercial projects like its ISV program.
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.
Last time I checked, Novell had no interest in improving Kontact at all and groupware is pretty crucial for the enterprise. For example: OpenChange integration for Evolution is pushed, but not for Kontact.
In fact, the full Akonadi port of Kontact is delayed over and over again, because almost nobody is contributing. Now 4.5 is the goal…
What happened about the plan to port Evolution to Akonadi, anyway? Why isn’t Novell pursuing that? That way redundancy is fought by using a unified back-end and Evolution and Kontact would benefit equally from new Akonadi resources.
Given how Groupwise usage has severely declined over the years it really doesn’t matter who supports it these days sadly. Novell can barely get Outlook to be a stable client for it nevermind Evolution, whose stability seems to have got steadily worse over the years. Years ago it was a decent e-mail client but the addition of groupware seems to have knocked it out of kilter.
Well that would seem to be the sensible option for all. If it’s one thing the open source desktop needs it is to just stop stupidly duplicating effort when it comes to groupworking off-shoots. Less effort will be required and stability and credibility amongst people that it will actually work will get better.
I would have thought this would have been of some use to Novell because, if anything, Evolution development itself has slowed dramatically from them over the years with a number of layoffs. Mind you, common sense technical decisions have never been Novell’s strong point.
Edited 2009-08-21 23:43 UTC
I do what maintenance I can for Kontact (and Groupwise) on SLE and openSUSE but it’s no longer my only responsibility and as segedunum says, doesn’t come close to being a top priority. Upstream KDE does a great job maintaining Kontact and I mainly just package that.
With the new everyone-can-be-a-maintainer policy at openSUSE, I’m trying to gather and educate interested and capable community members to look after areas like KDEPIM in more detail than I can afford.
There’s never been an in-house plan to do that. I keep suggesting it. As a first step we wanted Akonadi hosted at freedesktop.org, but shenanigans occurred, trying to keep Akonadi marginalised as ‘just a KDE project’.
There are upstream plans to write native glib client libraries and then reimplement the libebook, etc libraries Evolution uses to talk to e-d-s using them, but it’s been slow going – it was proposed for GSoC 2009 but wasn’t taken up.
You’d think wouldn’t you? Horse, water – drink. I’ll keep pushing it as KDE’s use of Akonadi gets closer to production quality.
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.
WTF? openSUSE is one of the best KDE distros. GNOME support is also top-notch. The only difference compared to most other GNOME distributions is the Slab menu, which can be reverted to the original with a few clicks.
gnome support is sucky at best (simply not robust and it can break very easily). while kde support has fallen lengths beyond what it used to be.
you misunderstood my point, packages and support suffers when gnome is used and kde is way off to be polished as it used to be in suse.
and don’t get religious… Suse is still a great distro, I just think they can’t follow two desktops and still be 100% polished as they were in kde times (no distro can, this is why they pick their main desktop). And since majority of suse users are kde users… well, here is the reason why they would only benefit from this move
So you provide no arguments at all. I actually use openSUSE with KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.26 installed. I see no problems with both.
I also use (K)Ubuntu with KDE and GNOME. Except the butt-ugly default theme (= negligible cosmetical issues) and not using Slab, both GNOME versions are pretty much the same.
KDE under (K)Ubuntu looks like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/19616885@N00/sets/72157608562200171/
openSUSE’s KDE does not have any of those issues at all. openSUSE’s Build Service packages the latest KDE packages every few days.
No need for personal attacks against me. Is this the only way you can try to cover up your complete lack of proof for your claims?
So you provide no arguments at all. I actually use openSUSE with KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.26 installed. I see no problems with both.
ok, you want proof? Try being a bit more avid gnome user like me. Suse has way too many repositories (and many incompatible) as gnome software is concerned. If you need some piece of software which doesn’t reside in base repository there are great odds that some repository will try to change way too many libs. Many of the packages are not built with exact version (but should be) and so it replaces whole load of libraries. Which can lead to either unworking software or complete desktop collapse. I suffered 3 smaller errors exactly (nothing what few hours couldn’t fix) the same way. And one larger where my only chance to repair was upgrading distro to 11.1. That was in one year. I didn’t suffer one error like that in fedora
This doesn’t happen on fedora or ubuntu. But suse having too decentralized gnome package repositories… it leads to whole load of trouble. Gnome packaging on suse is so decentralized that I can calmly call it worst gnome packaging ever.
Besides the fact that you talk about completely different topic than me. You talk about initial look and feel, I talk about maintenance. (p.s. can’t talk about kde on fedora, I don’t use it, but I really like (K)Ubuntu separation… different maintainers, different focus)
openSUSE’s KDE does not have any of those issues at all. openSUSE’s Build Service packages the latest KDE packages every few days.
it is not about the last, it is all about polished. Suse was wunderkind for kde distros. The way they polished complete setup was simply brilliant. Now it is just ordinary nothing special out of the svn. I’m not kde user my self so I can’t talk about packaging of kde in suse nowadays.
And this always happens when distro starts losing its focus. Hopefully with this move they will be what they were in 90’s. Best kde distro ever
??? Personal attack? lol, you seem to misunderstood, in your first answer you acted like I stepped on your favorite hamster. You answered almost religiously… please read your answer and try to connect who attacked who,
Edited 2009-08-24 12:06 UTC
So, the only difference is that the radio button is defaulted to selecting KDE instead of GNOME. Hmmm. So after all that rabble rousing from the KDE camp, they don’t have to move their damn mouse to the button and pick ‘KDE’. Good God, what a bunch of lazy-ass whiners.
Heaven forbid a default-selecting-n00b would get GNOME installed ‘by mistake’. Oh, the horror!
So you’re proposing that Ubuntu and Fedora both offer the same select screen openSUSE 11.1 currently has?
I wasn’t proposing anything. I don’t understand why the openSUSE KDE community was so mad that GNOME was the default when all they need to do is select KDE instead of GNOME (on the DVD install) and it’s done. It is just a radio button away. I’m sorry but it doesn’t get any easier than that but still they complain, whine and fuss about KDE not being ‘default’.
I really don’t care because I don’t use openSUSE. I was just making an observation.
Somebody requested to make KDE default, and submitted it to features.opensuse.org.
It became the most popular request of all.
openSUSE Team implemented that request.
It’s called democracy, not madness.
I don’t get it either. Is the default setting that important? As long as both are equally well supported, I don’t care what the default is.
>60% of openSUSE users use KDE. That’s a simple fact.
The decision was to just acknowledge that fact.
Simple is that. Nothing more, nothing less.
What about the ~40% who prefer Gnome? If there are 1000 people, that makes 400 who just had their preferences demoted. Poor bastards.
> What about the ~40% who prefer Gnome?
Actually it’s more like 26%
It does not change anything at all.
Default is for those who just clik next, next, next, finish.
> Poor bastards.
Every Gnome user knows how to clik Gnome radio button. I hope.
Maybe openSUSE should make GNOME default. After all, KDE (and Xfce) users are used to configuration possibilities, unlike GNOME users who are not. 😉
*just kidding*
LoL
Well, it’s not 40% who prefer GNOME. Those 40% are split between GNOME, Xfce, other window managers, and no window manager at all.
It’s been clear for years, even after Novell took over Suse, that KDE was still the most popular Suse desktop certainly as far as what can be measured. The ‘enterprise’ desktop has clearly become irrelevant because we don’t have any figures for it and it’s a safe bet that free distributions are doing more for open source desktop usage.
In itself it’s not exactly Earth shattering but it will be interesting to see some diversity between a major(ish) distribution and others and what they can do with a default KDE 4 desktop. It’s not going to change anything by itself though.
With defaulting to KDE, I really hope KDE gets more support for non-english languages, such as the german one. While I always found that openSuSE’s Gnome had better German support than KDE, I think this may change. Many Linux distributions do default to KDE, and systems like PC-BSD are fully KDE-centered. This is a good chance to improve in the formal field of language, allthough this might be considered unimportant to the majority of (english speaking) users.
So that could be another step forward.
OpenSuse defaulting to KDE is great news to me. I’ve always felt that Süse had the best KDE integration out there.
On my linux machines I’m mainly using Ubuntu (and thus Gnome), but I’ll keep on checking on new opensuse releases.
And it is. It’s the best KDE distro, IMHO!. Only followed by Mandriva. The problem with Mandriva is that software isn’t updated as frequently as in Opensuse (in mean in repos, and anyway this is not such an issue) and that suse is a bit more polished.
For any of both I’d suggest completely dumping other DE aside of KDE and concentrate on it so they can compete for home and SOHO users. But this is probably never going to happen.
My desktop runs Gnome (Debian & Ubuntu Studio) while my netbook runs Openbox (CrunchBang) , so I’m not power KDE user.
I haven’t used OpenSuse in a long while, and my only recent KDE experience was with PC-BSD (I believe it was still KDE 3.5+), but if that’s what the Suse crowd want, then more power to them. Their KDE integration is the best around, I’ve been told.
Yeah, pointless post, this one…. Sorry >_<
KDE is better so this makes sense. With KDE 4.4 the next version of opensuse will be ready for prime time…
openSUSE 11.2 will be released with KDE 4.3. Novell will as usual offer unsupported KDE 4.4 packages once it’s released.
I think there are two things for them to work on for openSUSE that are far more importaint.
I wasn’t aware of the ‘openFATE’ before (although the acronym doesn’t fit, it should be openFARMS (Feature- and Requirements Management System) but that doesn’t sound as cool, or possibly is already taken?
These two things are “Menu structure” and “combine repositories.”
The Menu structure is crap. Why do you have a submenu for one item? This has been broken for a very long time (most RPM based distributions do this, why? Debian/Ubuntu have it right. You only need submenus for if there are 5 or more objects in it.
In comparison;
Debian/Ubuntu: Applications -> Internet -> Firefox
openSUSE/Mandriva: Applications -> Internet -> Browsers -> Firefox
Repositories are as bad (worse!) as Fedora used to be with Fedora Core, Extra, and all the different repos for nvidia and ATI cards used to be.
Changing a radial button is only a fix for lazy people. Personally I just download the Live Gnome and KDE disks, and then if someone wants KDE or Gnome just burn them a copy of the appropriate disk.