Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (349 mails)

[C <smaug42@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 13:23, Martin Schlander wrote:
> I'm in Denmark :-)
>
> And here Ubuntu (+derivatives like Mint) have at least 60% of the home user
> linux market, maybe even more. And steadily growing.

And therein lies a question... why?  Why is Ubuntu gaining so much at
the expense of others like openSUSE?  Maybe because it's dead easy to
install.  I am amazed at how well 10.04 works, and how easy it was to
install... openSUSE on the other hand... not so easy.  It's not hard,
but t's certainly a lot more involved and cryptic than Ubuntu is to
install and use... ease of use.. ease of install go a LONG way towards
acceptance and uptake.

Outside of our little openSUSE Ivory Tower, I'm seeing the impact of
this.  Commercial vendors that used to fully support openSUSE are
dropping it from their lineup of supported distributions... they
support Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora.  Inconveniently the RedHard
rpms fail due to dependency issues... not because the dependency
doesnt' exist, but because openSUSE gives it a slightly different
name.  I got into a discussion about this with support at a company
that recently dropped openSUSE from their lineup.  For them it came
down to work vs return.  They said in the past few years openSUSE went
from being a significant portion of their paying customer base to
pretty much zero.  The way the conversation went, I have a feeling I'm
the only openSUSE customer they've got left :-(  I'm the only one who
complained to support.  With essentially zero customers on openSUSE,
there was no point in providing an RPM anymore.

Anyway... this is beyond the scope of the original discussion.

C.
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