NO KDE in SLED 12 - why?

We have been told during a support call that there will be no KDE in SLED 12 and have verified that it is not in the current beta.

Why is that happening?
Has it been announced publicly? I think customers would like to know this. Since it is still in OpenSuse 13 it is very unexpected.

I think many customers, including our company. Are not going to be happy.

Hi
Moving thread to “Talk to a SUSE Technical Services Manager”

Closed thread temporarily, nntp user please don’t respond until it’s moved.

[QUOTE=dvcroft;20978]We have been told during a support call that there will be no KDE in SLED 12 and have verified that it is not in the current beta.

Why is that happening?
Has it been announced publicly? I think customers would like to know this. Since it is still in OpenSuse 13 it is very unexpected.

I think many customers, including our company. Are not going to be happy.[/QUOTE]
Thread moved and open for consumption.

[QUOTE=dvcroft;20978]We have been told during a support call that there will be no KDE in SLED 12 and have verified that it is not in the current beta.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have access to the SLED 12 Beta and as such the beta mailing list? There was some discussion about this in the beta mailing list in February which can be found in the list archive which you may find interesting. The thread subject is “Desktop Environment for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12”

No we don’t have access to the mailing list at this point. We were given access to the beta to test for a particular support issue we have open, but we are not an official beta test site.

On the mailing list web page, and in a post that was made on this thread earlier but apparently deleted, there is mention of a “SUSE contact.” How do we get a SUSE contact?

Thanks,
Darren

Just found that this subject was talked about at SUSECon in November. Here is a set of slides that confirm the desktop environment is going to be Gnome 3.

https://www.suse.com/events/susecon2013/sessions/presentations/FUT1405.pdf (start on page 10 for info about the desktop environment)

On 01/05/2014 22:04, dvcroft wrote:
[color=blue]

No we don’t have access to the mailing list at this point. We were given
access to the beta to test for a particular support issue we have open,
but we are not an official beta test site.

On the mailing list web page, and in a post that was made on this thread
earlier but apparently deleted, there is mention of a “SUSE contact.”
How do we get a SUSE contact?[/color]

I would start with whoever gave you access to the beta.

HTH.

Simon
SUSE Knowledge Partner


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[QUOTE=dvcroft;20978]We have been told during a support call that there will be no KDE in SLED 12 and have verified that it is not in the current beta.

Why is that happening?
Has it been announced publicly? I think customers would like to know this. Since it is still in OpenSuse 13 it is very unexpected.

I think many customers, including our company. Are not going to be happy.[/QUOTE]

Any luck on getting any contact or feedback to the SUSE people? I would be interested in STRONGLY suggesting KDE over Gnome 3. Gnome 3 will be a deal breaker for me; meaning, after many years of using SuSE and then openSUSE and then SUSE, I would look for a new distro.

There is no chance of KDE being the default DE. See also
https://forums.suse.com/showthread.php?5014-SLED-12-GNOME-3-Destkop-Environment

[QUOTE=mikewillis;22469]There is no chance of KDE being the default DE. See also
https://forums.suse.com/showthread.php?5014-SLED-12-GNOME-3-Destkop-Environment[/QUOTE]

in this case I can only say if no kde then no more SLES !!!

Hi
It’s a long term support issue and timing…

AFAIK, there is work on a separate channel that is community driven
which would be able to offer KDE (or SLE12 users could install KDE from
the OBS).


Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.28-4-default
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I downloaded SLED 12 for trial purposes and I saw that KDE is not available for installation. Seriously, people I won’t buy it without KDE.

I will tell you that GNOME 3 is VERY, VERY, broken in the initial SLES12 release. We have two support incidents open.

  1. The initial console desktop (right after boot) desktop is broken and must be restarted (CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE or ALT-F2, r).

  2. Remote clients cannot open a desktop (Big “Oh no! Something bad happened!” Message). This even includes openSUSE, and earlier versions of SLES (SLES11). Our windows X-Server also can not establish a desktop (Xming)…

Novell/Suse has yet to offer any type of a solution…

Even IceWM is broken (there is no mouse support on the local console). Who tested this ****?

We are now loading up RHEL7 and evaluating it as a replacement solution for all our customers (we are an OEM systems integrator)…

[QUOTE=evanevery;26368]I will tell you that GNOME 3 is VERY, VERY, broken in the initial SLES12 release. We have two support incidents open.
[/QUOTE]
Two issues does not equate to ‘VERY, VERY, broken’.

I haven’t seen that issue on any of the numerous SLED 12 installs I’ve done. I’ve yet to use SLES 12. (You have posted in the SLED forum but the first sentence of your post references SLES.)

By ‘no mouse support’ do you mean that you can’t see the mouse pointer? If so that is a known issue which occurs in some circumstances. A per-user work around is

$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor active false

It can be set at the system level if required using dconf. I can’t remember the details of the problem, I found a bug report about it last month when I encountered the issue myself, but I can’t find the bug right now.

Hi
Likewise, with my numerous SLED and SLES installs, have yet to have any issues on first boot with the GNOME DE.

Sounds like a graphics driver issue, I have intel, nvidia and amd gpus but are of a newer generation, tested with both the proprietary and OSS drivers. The only thing I noted was with the radeon driver being a bit more power hungry, but this can be fixed fairly easily setting the power profile to low.

Despite your many installs, there IS an issue with Gnome3 on SLES12

  • In fact, in our first SR with Novell (artifacts and toolbar issue) Novell sent us a patch which cures the problem and will be rolling it out publicly in the next maintenance release. Its a coding issue and it effects many people.

  • The remote desktop issue with GDM/Gnome3 also effects many people and many environments. You basically can NOT open a remote desktop on any other system other than a SLE12 box. No known PC based X-Servers will work. Even other SLE platforms (SLE11, etc) will not be able to open a remote desktop session from a SLE12 box.

If you have been able to establish a remote X session with some other platform, I would be quite happy to hear about it. Especially ANY Pc based X-Server which allow a desktop session with SLE12.

Although our first SR has been resolved, Novell/Suse is still working on the remote desktop issues with SLE12. Still no resolution… Its a very real problem!

KDE - manual )
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:KDE_repositories#Latest_KDE_SC_4_release
SLE 12

I feel the same, because I only use kde.
I will however still stick with SLES for two reasons:

  1. Redhat is WAY worse - probably 10 years behind - we have a few Redhat Servers due to software only being certified on Redhat.
  2. I very rarely use the GUI on a server, and normally set it to boot to runlevel 3.