On 9/2/23 17:49, Richard Brown wrote:
Hi all,
I've been looking at the results from the recent contributor survey to gauge the interest and feasibility of replacing openSUSE Leap with a new community-built offering.
For those who may not have been keeping up with the efforts, their are proposals to build two very different distributions to replace Leap:
"Linarite" - a regular old fashioned release desktop distribution, likely with a narrower package selection than we're used to with Leap unless we find significantly more contributors to be able to support everything
"Slowroll" - a derivative of Tumbleweed, built automatically as much as possible, using automation and metrics to copy packages from Tumbleweed only after certain conditions (max age, X weeks without change, etc). Basically an attempt to provide something less scary than full speed Tumbleweed.
Rather than bombard everyone with all the data, I've decided to take the approach of asking specific questions and seeing what data from the survey best helps answer that question.
--- Some thoughts/analysis
Our users seem to overwhelmingly favour rolling releases, with 51%-64% expressing a preference for either Tumbleweed or Slowroll regardless of whether they're being asked if they'll use it for Server, Desktop, or whether they'll contribute or think it's the best direction for the project.
This preference increases when contributors are asked, with the preference ranging between 55%-71% depending on the question.
In the light of these results, it is my suggestion to the community that if we are to build something to replace Leap, then the option we should focus on is Slowroll.
It is the most popular with our users, and the option more closely aligned to what our contributors use themselves.
I also think its more important for the Leap replacement to focus on Desktop use cases, as openSUSE will also be hosting 1:1 copies of SUSE's ALP products. Those products should be awesome for folk who want Enterprise-like server distros.
Given that it seems silly to spread ourselves too thin trying to make a Leap replacement that is both a Server and Desktop OS.
That said though, I am still concerned that we do not have enough contributors to make any Leap replacement viable.
Leap has struggled even with 61 folk contributing directly to the codebase and backports/PackageHub. And this is when we've had the SLE codebase to borrow from, which dramatically reduced the work required.
Either Slowroll or Linarite would require considerably more packaging and maintenance work than Leap.
And yet, based on these survey results, we look like we're going to be replacing Leap with significantly _fewer_ contributors than we have even for Leap.
Outside of the survey, only 17 people have expressed an interest in working on a Leap replacement, and so far Slowroll and Linarite have both been one-man-shows.
Being hopeful, Slowroll does seem to be the concept that promises to convert more users into contributors.
And if we focus on Desktop-only (relying on the 1:1 ALP copies for Server) we might not need as much effort.
But I worry that we'd do more harm than good for our community to push forward towards any effort that doesn't really have much enthusiasm behind it.
The survey clearly shows a tendency for folk to believe openSUSE should do things which they themselves are not willing to contribute to.
For a Leap replacement to be viable, both to be made and then supported for years, I'm convinced we need a significant increase in folk rolling up their sleeves and working towards it.
So, I want to challenge the community with a few questions
Shall we go on with these efforts? If so, are you willing to help?
Thoughts, comments, flames all welcome
So I've seen enough from the granite discussions along with enough user and developer interest (which didn't have to be much) to want to work on / build a Granite++ I.E. Rather then just doing a 1:1 rebuild, having an additional repo similar to openSUSE_Backports for Leap and allowing contributors to submit whichever packages they feel they'd like on top. I think that this will be a sustainable approach in that Granite gives us a good base OS and we will only be adding on top of it the stuff that people care enough about to contribute and to the people who do contribute it will be more useful then plane granite plus keeping a bunch of there own packages in there home repo's. At some point I should probably also talk to the package hub team, because if they are interested in a package hub concept for ALP its likely we could also share some effort. Will it be functionally comparable with Leap, probably not will it be comparable enough to be marketed as a Leap replacement at this stage who knows. Will it be a useful standalone distro that's worth doing in my opinion yes. If it reaches the contributor and user level of something like MicroOS then i'd be willing to call it a working success. To answer your final two questions, I still plan to go ahead with these efforts once the ALP repo's are successfully synced back into OBS at least to the point of starting to get some of the packages I care about working. As for a timeframe personally i'm not planning on doing too much until Granite is a little more fleshed out and more of the package set starts being added to ALP. Otherwise it will probably lead to a bunch of duplicated effort. Finally I think slowroll is a fun concept and I look forward to seeing the results if people keep playing with the idea. Cheers -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B