Well ... I went to the wiki page and posted stuff there, so I'll re-post it here. :) M. Edward (Ed) Borasky comments -- 15 April 2009: 1. Gentoo should be on your list. :) 2. The "differentiators" between distros that I find most relevant are a. Number of packages available in the repository b. Predictable release engineering schedules and availability of user-friendly LiveCDs and installers that I can give to my friends c. GUI system administration tools d. Desktop color and other eye candy / branding Notice what's *not* there: a. Licensing -- as long as what *I'm* doing is legal, the lawyers can fight amongst themselves about the rest. I'm sick unto death of all the arguments about "blobs" and digital rights management and freedom and software patents, etc. I want quality software and I don't want to get sued. :) b. Package format -- .deb, .rpm. .ebuild: who cares, as long as the dependency tree is correct. c. Bleeding edge vs. stable -- 90 percent of that is upstream of the distros, and the other ten percent is how well I manage my systems. And I can install open source or proprietary software on my machines anyway. So, with that said, I am now running openSUSE, having migrated from Gentoo over the six months from June to November of last year. But I do track Ubuntu and Fedora -- I am currently beta-testing Jackalope and Leonidas, for example. By my criteria, Debian has the most packages, followed by Gentoo. I haven't really compared openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora on this metric yet, but I think Ubuntu is going to be way ahead because almost anything in Debian's repositories should work on a Ubuntu system. I think Fedora is slightly ahead of openSUSE, but I haven't done an actual count of what's in the distro-specific repositories. The lack of a predictable release engineering schedule and LiveCDs is why I left Gentoo for openSUSE. And the recent decision by openSUSE to slip 11.2 is a ding against the distro. I really wanted an 11.2 in June, even if it was only marginally different from 11.1. I did a network install of "Factory" on my test system yesterday and it looked reasonably good when it came up. Is there a chance an 11.2 could come out in June and a 12.0 or 11.5 in December? :) GUI system administration tools -- I have to give this one to YaST by a wide margin. Ubuntu still (Jaunty Jackalope) expects people to do server administration from the command line for the most part. And I couldn't get Fedora (Leonidas) to even install. I would bet that Fedora's GUI server system administration tools are better than Ubuntu's though, given the Red Hat heritage. Gentoo is dead last here, of course. :) Desktop color -- again, openSUSE is by far the most visually pleasing. The Ubuntu brown-orange native color scheme is ghastly to my eyes, and the Fedora heavy blue is annoying but not repulsive. I'd actually rate Gentoo number two here -- the Gentoo purple, logo, Larry the Cow, and the availability of quite a bit of Gentoo artwork is nice. So what should the focus be? 1. openSUSE is number two behind Ubuntu on the Distrowatch poll. Mint, another Debian derivative, is number three and Fedora is number four. So openSUSE is doing *something* right. :) It probably all boils down to marketing budgets and social media at this point, but number two is a *much* better place to be than number four. 2. I'm going to harp on predictable release engineering schedules and LiveCDs again, because I think that's important. A week or two slip because of an upstream security issue or something like that is OK, but a totally unmanaged chaotic process like Debian's or Gentoo's isn't. Code cutoffs, feature freezes, continuous integration, test-driven development, etc. -- this stuff all works! :) 3. openSUSE Build Service: as far as I can tell, nobody else has this, with the possible exception of rPath. I haven't had a chance to really use it yet, but I certainly intend to. Making it easier to use, making Kiwi easier to use, making LiveCDs and LiveUSB sticks "point, click and ship", etc. I think would be a big win. While you're at it, can you package Gentoo ebuilds with it? ;) 4. Virtualization and cloud computing: Red Hat and Ubuntu have thrown their weight behind KVM over Xen, and I think openSUSE has some catching up to do. The main reason I decided to test Jackalope had to do with Eucalyptus and Open Nebula and all the other cloud management / virtualization software being available. Can we at least get Eucalyptus in a factory repo somewhere? :) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org