Hi. I have been using opensuse for a while and while I really like it there are two things about it that I wanted to know whether M$ is enforcing them (through the interoperability partnership) or there is something else going on.
1)With each version the bootplash is becoming darker (the background in the 11.2 splash is blackier than the one in 11.1)

2) All the opensuse DE's are configured to look like windoze (one panel at the bottom mimicking the windoze taskbar, using only the applets which reflects the contents of the windoze taskbar, in the same order they come in the windoze taskbar, desktop icons left aligned, and window title buttons right aligned such that the menu button is at the left and the minimize, maximize and close buttons are to the right).
Thanks

Honestly, I don't see why it's that big of a deal, I mean I've got Arch set up with Xfce and Compiz, and I've got the "quick-lauch" items on the bottom panel (which is the only one), and I've got the window buttons on the left instead of the right as well. Personally I like it. IMO e.g. when Ubuntu switched the buttons over to the right (and changed their appearance to be more rounded), it seemed like they were trying to imitate Mac OS X.

Really, any DE is probably going to have a similar look and feel to some already pre-existing DE out there, whether it's Windows', Mac's, or maybe even BeOS's (that's actually a theme you can have in Xfce)

It's not that big of deal. The problem is that all those menus suck. I keep a close-to-default GNOME setup.

I know that it can be changed. I was only wanting to know if those two aspects stem from decisions that M$ pushes through their partnership with novell. Because if they can force specific defaults, god knows what else (patents or copyrights, perhaps) they can push.

This is only an opinion, but my money is on the 'something else' possibility.

What I believe is going on is that, in the wider marketplace, MS 'makes the weather' and if MS makes the wider marketplace believe that darker themes are more modern, anything else starts to look old fashioned to most people. If it worries you, you can always change it....

I think if you take the default look and feel of the environment not really being the way that you would like it, at least for an environment for which there is an easy and fairly obvious way to change it, as a show stopper, maybe you have to worry about whether you are really cut out to be using a computer which gives you freedom. Deep down, wouldn't you rather be an Apple fanboy (I hope the answer to that is no, but you can never tell, can you?)