openSUSE:No 1 KDE strategy

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openSUSE Strategy Discussion
What is Strategy 路 Why do we need a strategy? 路 Process 路 Users and contributors 路 Discussion comments 路 SWOT analysis 路 Industry 路 Community Statement

Proposals: Home for developer 路 Mobile and cloud ready distribution 路 Base for derivatives 路 The #1 KDE distribution 路 For the productive poweruser 路 The Linux distribution platform 路 Status Quo, and quantified so 路 Overview of proposals

Final versions: openSUSE Strategy 路 Community Statement


openSUSE - #1 KDE distribution

Statement

There is a powerful movement towards simple and easy software targeting end users. Most distributions focussing there use Gnome for it, but KDE appplications also have a lot of potential. The technology is there, it's just, by default, cluttered and complicated in some areas. openSUSE has always had a great KDE based distribution, it's our stronghold. Like most distributions, we shipped a mostly vanilla desktop. We polished some area's, stabilized and backported some upstream patches but not much more. Only Mandriva currently ships a heavily modified KDE based desktop, making it look and work like the previous 3.x series. There is surely room for a distribution which changes the focus of KDE software more to end users, making choices upstream finds hard to implement. This means mostly changing default configuration, choices of applications etc, all in all setting up an environment end users should be far more comfortable in.

The proposal is thus: let's focus the openSUSE efforts on KDE as the main application and desktop provider and put a lot of effort in customizing, simplifying and polishing it to be ready for end users. Of course we should also make sure we cater as good as possible for Qt and KDE developers, giving for example MeeGo developers a welcoming home.

Note: This proposal is not meant to start another flamewar, nor to drop GNOME or any other desktop environment (of course there still will be GNOME, LXDE and Xfce Spins available), it's just about our primary focus.

Activities

We need to be excellent in the following

  • create a visual unique desktop experience with KDE
  • adopt the latest KDE technology early, but care about stability
  • offer the best development platform for Qt/KDE developers
  • work together with the KDE community to establish a compatible release cycle
  • integrate MeeGo (focus on Qt)
  • offer a LiveCD spin which contains the latest KDE version (like the KDE Four Live) but a bit more official)
  • lobby for KDE
  • offer KDE reference implementation(s) and the tools to build them (OBS, Suse Studio)
  • improve KDE upstream
  • create a more usable experience by tuning defaults and having a better selection of software
  • market our product as a great, easy end user distribution
  • work to integrate technologies like ownCloud, OCS, Social Desktop and a GHNS centric "AppStore" in openSUSE

We will try to do the following effectively

  • deliver a build service for building distribution and applications
  • provide best desktop experiences with KDE and MeeGo (focus on Qt)
  • offer an good platform for Java, Ruby, Python and other developers
  • improve Kolab integration to offer a complete groupware suite (client and server)
  • create Qt user interfaces for apps which only offer a GTK frontend
  • bugfixing
  • testing
  • collaborate with other Linux distros
  • support community-led spins of other desktop environments to benefit from the rich spectrum of Linux software available
  • improve integration of non-KDE applications (GTK, wxwidgets, Wine) with KDE file dialogs, theming, etc

As project, we will not focus on the following anymore

  • trying to be the best in 'everything', but in tasks where we already rule
  • server stuff?
  • ?
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