As per the title of this thread, Hubert Mantel has resigned from Novell. What I find dissapointing in this article, aside from the loss of a Suse founder, are: (1) his statement that Suse is not the company he helped start, which can be easily interpreted as a shot at Novell and their approach to Linux. Suse is one of the better distributions IMO. This news does not bode well for Suse’s fate. (2) Suse is dropping KDE as their main desktop in favor of Gnome. It’ll be a sad day when Gnome is the major supported desktop on the primary two distributions. Not that there is a problem with Gnome, but I hate to have focus taken away from KDE. It’s like losing the freedom of choice.
Egad…I have to agree Bud! Although I am not a KDE user (I fell in love with Gnome and use it almost exclusively) However, you are correct, it feels as though the freedom of choice is taken away by dropping support for one DM over another.
BTW…ltns! How’s things been going around here? I haven’t been getting here as much as I should. :flip:
Derrick
AMD A64 3000+ 1. 8GHz Venice ~ Asus A8V, 1Gb RAM running Suse 10.0 and loving every second of it.
Athlon 64 and Linux - Billyware can’t compare! Go big or go home!
If they go Gnome I might go back to suse… personally one thing I found really annoying is that most distributions use KDE as the main desktop, and it doesn’t get along well with me. Ubuntu was my first gnome distro and I loved it from the start, although it is certainly smaller in scope than suse.
In suse, KDE and gnome have always been included but the main effort was by far focused on KDE. I’m sure they’ll continue to include both, and there are plenty of other distros for KDE lovers.
As for changes at suse since Novell took over, I feel they have been mostly positive. The old model of closed development with distribution through boxed sales didn’t gel with the crowd, and I always felt that held back suse from becomming a more widely used distro as it made obtaining it more difficult than the more typical free to download distros. Since then they’ve ramped up live CDs, “personal” install CDs, and now gone all the way to open development and you can get pretty much everything.
Islander! Great to see you posting again! Was beginning to think you fell into one of your volcanos or something. Nice to know you’re still around.
I’m sure they will continue to include KDE, but I don’t think it will be worth a darn without active integration support (kinda like Gnome on Suse is now). Right now they are under pressure to make $$$ off Linux. Fully supporting both desktops would be great for users, but Novell probably figures the Gnome desktop will help them take a bite out of RH’s market share, and I can’t see them spending the extra money to continue proper KDE support once they’ve made the switch. I hope I’m wrong.
LOL! I thought it’s become more difficult to get a Suse distro since Novell bought them. But most of that was because I had to do some digging around their web site to figure out where to download the live CD from. I thought Novell was doing a rather nice job of hiding the “free download” portion of the site. I guess it’s a matter of perspective. You are right that the live CD install is nice though.
