FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> How many of those users are potential Fedora users?

If we present KDE as a fully-supported choice, most of them. If we present
it as "that hobby project those amateurs in KDE SIG do", few of them. Take
your pick.

> You're presenting a false choice. Given current resources, it's not
> possible to support both Gnome and KDE to the same level.

Unjustified claim.

KDE works just fine even now, in fact we actually update KDE much more
actively in post-release updates than the GNOME maintainers update GNOME.
The only part of "support" we're truly missing is political /
presentation-related.

> Treating both identically would mean reducing our involvement in Gnome,

Huh? I'm not expecting our GNOME developers to suddenly work on KDE! Nobody
is asking for that. Better KDE support will have no effect at all on GNOME.

> without there being any strong evidence that in doing so we'd increase the
> size of the Fedora user base.

KDE is the preferred desktop of about half (give or take a dozen percentage
points depending on whom you ask) of the GNU/Linux desktop users. It seems
blatantly obvious to me that supporting it well is a way to attract users.

> Crippling Gnome in order to ship two above-average desktops might
> be "fair", 

Where did I ask to cripple GNOME? I don't want to cripple anything!

> but Ubuntu would have a better Gnome desktop and Suse would have a better
> KDE desktop.

That's not a given. In fact several people who tried multiple distros have
found Fedora's current KDE packaging to be the best KDE 4 packaging around.
(Of course, it's all a matter of taste, openSUSE is also often claimed to
be the "best" KDE 4, and sometimes other names come up as well.) The
assertion that we do not have the resources to provide a high-quality KDE
packaging is ludicrous and an insult to me and all the other KDE SIG
members.

> The only way we can be relevant is to concentrate development on one
> desktop.

Nonsense. See above. And in fact both the competitors you quote don't do
this, Ubuntu has Kubuntu, openSUSE supports both GNOME and KDE and presents
them as equally-supported options in the installer and on the download
page.

        Kevin Kofler