[opensuse] Re: Suse 10.3 install - oh dear (rant only)

On Fri, 23 May 2008 00:10:22 -0400, Edmund Fitzgerald wrote:

Jim Henderson wrote:
On Thu, 22 May 2008 23:21:02 -0400, Washington Irving wrote:

Going from KDE 3 to a KDE with the functionality of Gnome is alpha.

We expect more from KDE.

*You* perhaps do. I don't know who this "we" is to whom you refer.

Jim, you earlier said you work for Novell.

Now, are you interested in the opinions inside the Novell echo chamber
(every company has one about their products), or are you interested in
hearing about how the rest of the world views and uses your products.

Let me be absolutely clear about one thing: My role inside Novell has
nothing to do with the Linux product lines. I'm the manager of the
instructor programs.

My specific areas of product expertise (from when I was an IT
professional) were NDS, eDirectory, and the identity management products,
along with NetWare.

My participation here is solely as an openSUSE *user*, not as a corporate
person with anything to do with the product. Most of the openSUSE team
here - if not all of them - don't know me from Adam. Nothing I say about
the product should be taken by *anybody* as any sort of official
statement. I'm just another participant in the community; an end user.

I mentioned my affiliation earlier because I felt it only fair to
disclose that so people wouldn't accuse me of being a corporate shill of
some sort (I've seen that happen in other venues) trying to push a
corporate perspective on the community. That is *absolutely not* my
reason for writing on this list. My purpose in reading and writing the
messages here is the same as nearly everyone else's - to learn what's
going on in 11.0, to get help with problems I might run into, and to get
a feel for what it's going to be like.

And I have to say, I'm damned impressed with Beta3. If it hadn't been
for the factory kernel that breaks when ACPI is enabled on my laptop, I'd
have said it was already an outstanding release.

[...]

Forget what the company THINKS users should be doing with your product
and think about it, and start paying attention to how we, the user base
think use it and think about it. What people on this list like about KDE
as opposed to Gnome is that KDE has so much more functionality and
configurability. Push a KDE version which has no more functionality than
Gnome, and you're going to have a LOT of pissed-off people.

This is very easy for me to do, because I don't know what "the company
thinks" users should be doing with the product. I'm not particularly
privy to that information. All I know is what I see as a user who is
using the product. Like I said, I use GNOME (and have since long before
Novell acquired Ximian - I started using Red Carpet because I was too
cheap to buy update support from RedHat, and Ximian provided the same
updates at no charge), and I happen to like it. Before GNOME, I
preferred Enlightenment, and if DR17 had been developed faster, I'd
probably be using that instead. I've tried KDE and found that I don't
like it. <shrug> That's my personal preference; not because it's what
Novell wants to put on the corporate desktops in SLED, but because I've
tried both and it's what works best for me.

The other thing I do know (and this is not directed at you, Edmund, just
something I want to say) is that there are some on this list who seem to
think that swearing at the developers is a way to effect change. In my
experience, that's a great way to get ignored. Hold an intelligent
conversation, debate the merits, and understand that when an organization
says they'll listen to you, that doesn't mean they'll implement every
change everyone suggests every time. In the first place, invariably two
suggestions will come in that directly conflict with each other.

I trust that the openSUSE team is taking all of the input into account
and will make what they feel is the best decision. As users, we have two
options once those decisions are made - live with it, or move. But a
development team makes decisions based on *facts*, not *emotions* (or at
least IMO they should), so people need to stop being so emotional over
the appearance of KDE4 in the menu and just state the facts from their
point of view. Calling people names is not only unhelpful, it's
counterproductive.

Jim

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