On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 17:04:18 +0200 Guido Berhoerster wrote:
AFAICS the main problems we have are: - a lack of manpower in release engineering - a lack of manpower in maintaining core components, in particular work-intensive ones like the kernel and systemd - no marketing
So possible benefits are: - no more seperate maintenance of core components, less work mostly for SUSE staff who maintain those packages - greater stability of these components due to more testing, SLE QA work
whereas possible drawbacks are: - likely less supported (consumer) hardware - likely less packages - aforementioned problems combining new high-level components with old low-level components, possibly resulting in more work after some time - losing users and contributors who are not served by this model
With all its problems I use and contribute to openSUSE because it delivers a certain balance of stability and resonably new software every 8 to 12 months and because it has a lot of stuff packaged, something I do not get from other distros such as Debian (too outdated), Ubuntu or Fedora (too much breakage). Changing that balance of hardware support, coverage of packages, recent version and stability means also potentially exchanging or losing parts of our base of users and contributors.
I totally agree with Guido. +1 -- WBR Kyrill