Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (349 mails)

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 2010-08-04 14:51, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> By starting this process of "let's think what we are and what we should be", 

The question is not what we should be, but what we want to be.


> By refocusing on what openSUSE is really 
> good at, and by allowing yourself to take decisions that can be hard, we can 
> regain this focus. Otherwise it keeps being the "Jack of all trades, master of 
> None", and will eventually be surpassed by operating systems that do one 
> thing, and do it really well.

Windows focuses on one thing - basically the core OS. Is it good at it? Ok
maybe that's too rhetoric.

OpenBSD focuses on security. Is it good at it? Certainly.

What does the general public however pick? (Answer: FreeBSD.)

Both in the BSD and Linux world you will see the typical Power Law evolution
when plotting x=distro by rank, y=user count, which tells you that the masses
prefer, in general, Jacks Of All Suits rather than a single-focused distro.


> My experience as a user of openSUSE is that this focus on the user experience 
> is clearly lacking, things work, but the product is missing the Wow. (And I'm 
> not talking about the "Wow, my harddisk is properly recognized" that we Linux 
> geeks are so used to, I'm talking about the Wow a new user could experience 
> when first trying openSUSE.

WoW addicts. I should have known!

Seriously, what is this Wow that this new user should, could experience? That he
was able to install the system on his own? That it's presenting sparkling green
backgrounds? Exploding windows? Desktop cubicles? That would be the
first-impression-wow, a wow only about the outside.

IMHO the real wow effect comes when the user has realized what is actually
possible. What's under the hood and what will actually get you along.


> Besides that, when seeing how much energy is poured into delivering different 
> UIs on the same system, it simply makes me cry. And it makes me wonder how 
> much longer this is sustainable. It might come as a surprise, but it's 
> completely braindead to support two (or more) full UI stacks, with different 
> applications, desktop interfaces and all that.

That's quite Dark Age thinking that everything infeasible is unholy.


Plus I am tempted to say: Other distros, those which choose to focus on a
single desktop, have one problems: either

(1) lack of engineering manpower
(2) lack of audience for another desktop UI, or
(3) assuming the potential audience is there, having lost touch with (/having
lost the feeling for) the surrounding world.
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