Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (349 mails)

[Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@xxxxxxxxx>]

Torsdag den 5. august 2010 10:28:23 skrev Jan Engelhardt:
> On Thursday 2010-08-05 08:08, Martin Schlander wrote:
> > S.u.S.E./SUSE Linux had a clear identity and direction. As a stable,
> > polished, powerful, easy to use, professional distro.[...]
> >
> > The current muddy and confusing state has only been around for about 4-5
> > years. Starting somewhere between the Novell takeover and the creation of
> > the openSUSE project.
>
> If there ever was a time of question, it was from the Novell takeover
> until openSUSE was instantiated.

> > And steadily getting worse as the distro strays further and
> > further from its roots. And the damage is enormous. Effective marketing is
> > downright impossible and development is all over the place.
>
> Can you corroborate your statements at least?

Which one of them in particular? ;-)

Let me try

> steadily getting worse as the distro strays further and
> further from its roots.

Novell systematically dropping investment in openSUSE. Naturally this results 
in a product that is quite different from what it used to be.

* firing developers
* making the ones that weren't fired work on webyast, susestudio etc.
* dropping sax2 and yast modules
* dropping 24 month support
* outsourcing the boxset completely
* dropping ppc
* I heard rumours that jimmac won't be replaced and artwork will be fully 
dependant on volunteers going forward.

And all these resources being taken away from openSUSE are not re-applied 
elsewhere in the project. They're just freed up so we can barely maintain the 
status quo.

> Effective marketing is downright impossible

Some will say "openSUSE is great for n00bs" others will say "openSUSE is cool, 
innovative bleeding edge stuff" and some will say "openSUSE is just so stable 
and powerful and high-tech", etc.

When everybody is conveying different (and mutually exclusive) messages - and 
most of the time the message is out of sync with the reality of the distro, 
marketing is extremely ineffective - often damaging even.

> development is all over the place

Well. I see three main directions.

Some developers will treat openSUSE like in the good old days. Striving for a 
powerful, polished, stable distro that "just works".

Others are treating openSUSE like a testbed/Fedora. Where testing and 
showcasing the latest stuff is the most important thing, and functionality and 
stability is secondary.

And finally some will treat openSUSE like an Ubuntu, trying to make it 
appealing to Aunt Tillie and Joe Sixpack.

The end result is of course that noone is very happy with it.
* The people who want a functional stable distro are dispappointed.
* The people who want all the latest, hyped, exciting non-working stuff are 
disappointed.
* And finally the people who just want a n00b distro where non-free drivers 
and codecs are as easy as possible to install - and hope they'll never, ever 
need to launch a terminal are disappointed too.
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