[sles-beta] Desktop Environment for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12

[Jan Weber]

Dear Beta Participants,

there have been a lot of discussions related to the desktop environment
in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, let me try to clarify some commonly asked
questions and provide some background to our reasoning behind this move.

Let me start that SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, which includes SLES and
SLED, there will be only one supported desktop environment GNOME.

As already outlined in our beta call earlier this week one of our
targets for SLE 12 has been the credo "One Tool For The Job". This has
mostly affected components where there is a de facto industry standard,
one example for this being Apache as the web server.

Now there are also examples where we did not follow our credo, a
prominent example being command line editors, where we are shipping vi,
emacs and also e3, the last one featuring compatibility modes for some
other editors. The reason for this is that there is no industry standard.

Our main objective with this credo is to provide better support and
quality by focusing on less, because less is more.

When desktop environments are concerned there is a de facto industry
standard which is GNOME, which also has been the default installation
option with SLE 11. This lead us to the decision to focus our efforts on
GNOME over other desktop environments.
As we are currently still talking about a beta release the look and feel
of our GNOME desktop is not yet final and there are some rough edges,
yet the look and feel should be comparable with many other desktop
environments already and we are working on improvements.

As far as upgrade scenarios are concerned we will have upgrade paths
from SLE 11 to SLE 12 for both SLE 11 desktop environments, as we are at
the first beta release, not everything might work yet but is planned to
be included in future beta releases.

Another noteworthy fact about our focus on one desktop environment is
that this is not related to GUI toolkits, as there is no industry
standard in place there, we are supporting both GTK and Qt, also we are
including some KDE libraries for smoother migration and application
compatibility, however this is not a fully functional KDE.

If you are having concerns with this move please let me know what your
requirements for the desktop environment are, so that we can work on
improving what we deliver.

Thanks,

Jan

-- 
Jan Weber          E jweber at suse.com      SUSE Linux Products GmbH
Product Manager                           HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
SUSE Linux Enterprise                     GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild
http://www.suse.com/                          Felix Imendörffer