Søndag den 1. august 2010 11:58:53 skrev Otso:
On 30/07/2010, Pavol Rusnak
wrote: We cannot compete with Ubuntu for the übernoob segment, and we shouldn't compete with Fedora on being experimental bleeding edge - instead we should pick the middle ground.
Claim that we can't compete with Ubuntu on user friendliness is plain absurd.
Nevertheless that is my claim, the reasons for it are mainly that: * openSUSE engineers are just not very good at making things that are intuitive, simple and non-scary for Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie, even when they try they usually fail, I guess they just don't have the right mindset for it or something. * The level of commitment that would be needed from Novell to compete with Ubuntu in terms of marketing and creating a polished, simplyfied product, is simply not there. Therefore we need to find a niche where we are actually competitive, instead of just being a failed, second-rate Ubuntu - which is how a lot of people currently perceive openSUSE
The main purpose of the strategy in my opinion is to help developers, contributors and marketers all pull in same direction, and to clarify for users what openSUSE tries to be and do.
Your "strategy" is brittle. Labeling oSuse as "distro for powerusers" brings automatical association with Gentoo and Arch, at least in my mind. I wouldn't want to try anything like that.
There's nothing productive or professional about Arch and Gentoo though ;-) Maybe "productive" and "professional" should be emphasized more in this strategy, and perhaps "poweruser" should be replaced with the less excluding "powerful", to avoid this confusion - but still communicate that people shouldn't expect something uber-simple with zero learning curve. I think if we succeeded in branding openSUSE as "the powerful, professional, produtive linux for home users", then there'd suddenly be a bit of a "cool- factor" to using openSUSE, and n00bs would try it anyway - only they would have more realistic expectations about the simplicity, and would probably be happier with it. Also, many (most?) people have a poweruser among their friends or family to help them with distro selection, installation, setup etc. So if we capture the powerusers, it's a good platform to gain grounds with less advanced users.
=== As project, we will not focus on the following anymore ===
1 * Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie
1. What's wrong with being user-friendly again? It's not like it stops the "powerusers" from doing what they want, on contrary, it's a stepping stone if done right. Having easily editable /etc/* configs simultaneously with nice UI with nice how-to's isn't exactly a miracle to perform.
There's nothing wrong with it, we are just not very good at it, and we should accept that, and create a strategy/identity which matches the things we're actually really good at - which is making powerful, professional stuff. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org