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

[David Boyes]

> When desktop environments are concerned there is a de facto industry
> standard which is GNOME,

Desktop and GUI tooling are as personal as editors. Even if we limit the discussion to pure Linux only users that don't use any other system, there are certainly some violent disagreements with calling GNOME the "standard interface" (or whether to use it (or any GUI at all)). To put it in your terms in the presentation, GNOME and KDE are analogous to vi and emacs. Both have fierce partisans, and nobody needs editor wars -- or GUI wars, in this case. 

I'd also argue that the choice is not likely to be up to the people in this group. The people who care most about this stuff are the end users who make the decisions about what they use, not us, and they get super-cranky with people who take away their favorite shiny toys. They also, not coincidentally, write the checks. Trifle not with their anger. 

> 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.

What you default to is one choice, and it's totally OK to focus *your* efforts on that environment. That's been a pretty good compromise in the past, and it's one that doesn't demand a whole lot from you. 

What you provide as alternative choices are a very different animal, and dropping KDE entirely doesn't seem to be a reasonable step. It's still the "other" significant choice, and - better or worse -- it doesn't justify the loss of productivity for the thousands of KDE users. 

> 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.

The compromise of you spending your time fine tuning the default GNOME environment  to however you like it and shipping a working KDE environment only minimally customized as an alternative would be acceptable to us. We customize the shipped KDE anyway, it's not a whole lot more work to do the whole thing if the basic binaries and defaults are there.