Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (235 mails)

[Charles Wight <charles.wight@xxxxxxxxx>]

 On 09/14/2010 02:04 PM, Thomas Hertweck wrote:
> On 14/09/10 07:36, Philipp Thomas wrote:
> > [...]
> > As long as you don't make the error of saying "we're not loosing
> > ground to other distros, we just target different users" that question
> > is important. This whole strategy talking just makes me uneasy as what
> > use is talking about the next five or ten years if you don't know why
> > you're (perceivedly) loosing ground to other distributions. It was
> > suggested on the german list to start by asking people you know
> > (frieds, collegues etc.) why they abandoned openSUSE, stayed with it
> > or stared to use it.
> >
> > And no, most of them won't join this discussion here because their
> > knowledge of English is small to non existant. Which brings up the
> > next problem in that we leave out lots of users if we force them to
> > use English in order to participate.
> As I've started the whole thing on the German mailing list, I should
> perhaps add a couple of comments. ;-)
>
> First of all, Philipp is absolutely right that there are quite a few
> people on the German mailing list who feel somewhat uncomfortable
> participating on English-only mailing lists. I assume that there exist
> similar situations on other local-language mailing lists. It's therefore
> important that we gather feedback from all the mailing lists (I know,
> that's quite a bit of work but probably unavoidable to give all openSUSE
> users a voice).
>
> Coming back to what Philipp said, I think he's again absolutely right in
> saying that first of all we need to better understand the current
> situation. It doesn't make sense to me to discuss strategies which will
> hold for the next couple of years without knowing the target. Using the
> GPS analogy again, it seems as if the strategy team is trying to decide on
> a direction without knowing the current position. However, we should
> certainly only decide to head, say, North if we know where we are right
> now and if we know where our destination is. Otherwise North might be the
> completely wrong direction. I doubt that a strategy which doesn't go along
> with addressing the fundamental issues (e.g. losing openSUSE users to
> other Linux distributions) would do openSUSE any good. It must go hand in
> hand.
>
> I've therefore suggested (and Sebastian and other people on the German
> mailing list have taken over at that point) that we should first of all
> look outside of the openSUSE mailing lists and forums to check with people
> who have deliberately decided to leave openSUSE and use other Linux
> distributions, or people who have never come to openSUSE in the first
> place, why they made these decisions. If we managed to get such (honest)
> information from quite a lot of people in various countries (and I am
> pretty sure all of us have friends, colleagues or we know other people who
> fall into above mentioned category), we would hopefully be able to find
> the strengths and weaknesses of our current openSUSE distribution and also
> of the openSUSE project itself. Given the language barrier, it would
> obviously be better to ask people in their native language instead of
> English.
>
> I personally would only decide on targets and strategies once I've
> obtained the information where we are right now. There must be reasons why
> Ubuntu and maybe other distributions as well have overtaken openSUSE
> although openSUSE (or S.u.S.E. as it was called at that time) has existed
> for over 15 years and, hence, had quite a bit of a head start. Knowing
> these reasons is crucial.
>
> I am not sure whether the proposal of asking around will really work in
> practice, it's just a suggestion. But if all of us managed to get feedback
> from, say, 10 people, there would be quite a bit of data that could be
> analysed. This would then clearly help us to check why openSUSE has lost
> ground to other distributions. For obvious reasons, we can't gather such
> information on the openSUSE mailing lists and forums or via homepage etc,
> we won't find the people we are looking for in this way. The personal
> approach seems to be the most promising one.
>
> Regards,
> Thomas
Hello all,

Why not survey all folks registered as users?  I you don't know, ask!

cwight


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