Onsdag den 6. maj 2015 20:53:10 skrev Michal Kubecek:
I don't think marketing is the problem. The problem is that with the change of approach to Tumbleweed and Factory, current Tumbleweed attracted substantial part of those openSUSE users who focus on new versions and new features. As a result of these changes, 13.2 lost big part of its "added value" and became less attractive.
Richard himself showed about 11.000 Tumbleweed users, and ~150.000 13.2 downloads in the presentation. The presentation even showed growth for 13.2 compared to 13.1.
The way I understand Richard's arguments, he believes one way to regain some of the sense to the releases is to move them more away from the Tumbleweed so that they could target a different group of users, in particular group openSUSE failed to target for long time. And I agree with him.
Which group of users is this? The people running CentOS and Debian Stable today? I.e. a few server users who don't need contemporary applications and hardware support (I'm still not convinced about the SLE base supporting recent consumer desktop hardware, especially not 2-4 years from now). The main complaint about the current openSUSE releases from the "stability crowd", is the lifetime in my opinion, and that would largely adressed by going to a 12 month release cycle, equaling 26 month lifetime (2 releases+2 months). I really doubt too many users will be willing to trade package availability, up-to-date applications and hardware support for the bit of extra stability from the SLE base. Particularly if the difference in lifetime is not huge (26 months vs. "at least 36 months")
"The 13.2 release required a large amount of work from a small number of people to make it a success."
will not be resolved just because we pick a different base.
I disagree. People have free will, they won't come just because we need them. They will if we do something to attract them. I believe offering a solution in the area where we have been failing to provide one for years is more likely to attract users and contributors than offering two versions of a distribution that are not too far from each other.
I doubt you can attract packagers to work on this thing. Not Tumbleweed packagers. In my experience even Debian packagers aren't to enthusiastic about working on Debian Stable or backporting stuff to such an old base. And you also have to take into account the less technical contributions of marketing, artwork, translations, testing, writing howtos, supporting people on forums and irc etc. (this group includes me). I just can't see the attraction. As far as I can tell it'll be like Mint/Ubuntu LTS, only more outdated, and with similar or less lifetime or like CentOS, with some more packages available, but with much shorter lifetime. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org