Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (349 mails)

[Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 31 July 2010 19:30:21 Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jul 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.
>
> I don't think this is a fair characterization of Fedora.  In my
> experience Fedora has been rather solid -- at the edge of things
> in terms of versions and not shy of version updates even after a
> release, but it's not feeling more experimental than openSUSE,
> rather more progressive.

You might be lucky or unlucky, but in the end - being more up-to-date can not 
result in more stable software. If you decided a couple of months ago to ship 
the latest Xorg to your users, after a few weeks of testing, because - it's the 
latest and that's what users want, you would have shipped something which lead 
to occasional crashes on Intel hardware. Suse patched it - but it took a while 
to identify the issue. You don't have that time if you ship with the latest & 
greatest.

Updating an existing, stable system with newer versions (above and beyond 
bugfixes, of course) always runs a risk of breaking things which used to work - 
despite the fact more new things which didn't work before will do with the new 
version.

One reason why Fedora is more up to date is of course it's shorter release 
cycle. If you want Fedora timelyness, you'd have to:
- shorten the release cycle OR make openSUSE a rolling-release distro (horrible 
from a Q&A pov but fine with me, I used to use Arch)
- push the latest packages in each release, eg relax the freeze rules and 
shorten the freeze
- and update packages with newer feature releases in a stable release

> > This strategy would be nicely in line with SLE
>
> Is this a benefit, a disadvantage, or neutral?

I would say benefit. It will align Novell engineering efforts and ours (or at 
least, it could). Moreover this is good for powerusers and thus contributors.

And finally, the average office drone IS a poweruser. After all they sit behind 
a computer all day, and a lot of them care about efficiency of what they do - 
they don't like wasting time. Having a distro focussing on Getting Work Done 
(TM) makes openSUSE very interesting in corporate environments and geeks.

It will also mean we can and will attract new contributors; it will most likely 
increase innovation as a poweruser distro has room for experimentation; this 
will also make our community more fun as innovators are crazy and crazy ppl are 
cool ;-)

This innovation might then in turn make our distro again something on the 
bleeding edge, maybe not by package updates but by being so close to developers 
doing The Cool New Stuff (TM).

> > and what (open)SUSE has historically been
>
> Is this a benefit, a disadvantage, or neutral?

I'd again say benefit, it means staying close to our roots. With this strategy 
not too much will change, except for bringing back the Lost Souls who didn't 
know what direction we had...

> > * Making sure as much as possible just works out of the box
> > * Having good and sane defaults so the user can do what ''he'' wants to do
> > * Focus on providing tools for being productive/creative (IDEs, editors,
> >   authoring tools, graphics manipulation, office productivity, etc.)
> > * Providing admin tools that are powerful yet (reasonably) easy
>
> Hard to disagree with any of these. :-)  The first, second, and mostly 
> fourth, specifically, really would be the same across all serious 
> scenarios, wouldn't they?

Sure...

> Gerald

Greetings,
Jos
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