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On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 05:46:18PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On 2/5/19 10:29 PM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
From your e-mails, both here and in the recent discussion about bogus Phoronix benchmarks, it seems that you believe the goal of openSUSE is (or at least should be) attracting as many users as possible which mostly means adapting the distribution to meet the expectations of people who don't want to think, learn or work. I don't agree with such goal because it would mean way too many sacrifices which would make the distribution less attractive for me.
That is nearly as inaccurate a representation of what I am saying as Stefan's.
I am not saying that at all.
What I am saying is this:
* The Linux market is very competitive. Different distros have different strengths and weaknesses. It is fatally short-sighted to ignore what other distros and other companies are doing, for any reason, whether the reason is "Not Invented Here" syndrome, or because $DISTRO is not seen as a real competitor, or because of tradition.
If a company wants to survive, it has to attract new customers. Capitalism mandates growth.
I'm afraid we don't agree on the premises so there is little sense for me to comment on the conclusions. First, SLE is in the "Linux market", openSUSE is not. So the rules of market or capitalism do not apply to it directly. Second, even for SUSE/SLE (or any other of our products), attracting as many customers as possible is not necessarily the right goal. We could possibly get a lot of customers by combination of low price, very long support contract lengths, very short response times etc. We would quite likely lose some sane customers who would be reasonable enough to realize that under these conditions we would be out of business very soon. And they would be right. Even for a commercial company, it's not just about attracting the customers. We need to attract them in a way which will leave us with reasonable profit after subtracting the costs. And we have a lot of people whose job is to weigh carefully how to do that.
Ubuntu decided on a fairly simple play. Pick a free distro with, at the time, the best packaging tool -- i.e. Debian, circa 2002-2003 or so -- and put a really nice easy desktop on it, with a complete set of integrated apps, and an easy installation program, and give it away for nothing. This was so the sponsor could give something back to the FOSS community that made him a billionaire (or near enough).
This has made Ubuntu the #1 end-user desktop distro.
Many people argue with this and it's very hard to prove, but in terms of mindshare, press coverage, etc., I think it's obviously the case.
Now, a decade and a half later, that means that there are hundreds of thousands of Linux folk who learned on Ubuntu first and know it best, and because of that, Ubuntu is what they choose to deploy on their servers and in their VMs and clouds.
According to https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ubuntus-financials/ there is 14 times more Ubuntu instances than RHEL in AWS. And yet, when you look at the financial results, Canonical is not exactly thriving - and even less so compared to Red Hat. Sure, Red Hat is not only RHEL but I'm pretty sure even the part of Red Hat's profit coming from RHEL would be way bigger than Canonical's $2M in 2017 or $6M in 2018, not to mention the continuous seven years of loss before that. No company could afford doing business the way Canonical used to until ~2 years ago without also having a "generous uncle". So please don't use Ubuntu as an example of how to do things if you want to talk about "market" and "capitalism" at the same time. It doesn't have anything in common. And the same as what I wrote above above having to take the costs into account actually holds for openSUSE. We have limited resources and we have to weigh carefully what we use them for. Focusing on the kind of users you want to attract (unwiling to think about problems, unwilling to learn things, unwilling to invest their time and energy) means getting a lot of users who will need a lot of help even with the basic tasks. That means that skilled users will either spend a lot of time helping them or (more likely) will simply stop helping. Or even worse, when they see that we rather compromise their security just to make life of the lazy ones easier, that we make the distribution less usable just to rank better in bogus Phoronix "benchmarks", they may leave completely. Am I imagining things? I don't think so. Which distribution is the most popular? Ubuntu. Did you notice that when you google for a solution of some nontrivial problem, almost always one of the first results least to launchpad.net - but that while there is usually a lot of comments, it's quite rare to find anything useful in them? OpenSUSE is certainly not one of the largest distributions, measured by number of users. But I dare to say that we might have achieved an interesting ratio of skilled users and users willing to contribute, whether it's bugfixing, packaging or testing and meaningful reporting. There is a long running joke that the reason why openSUSE has no community is that whenever someone becomes really active in openSUSE community, he sooner or later ends up as a SUSE employee. Sure, it's just a joke but as with many others, there is some deep truth hidden in it. Do we want to risk these users just to attract a lot of passive ones or even pure consuments of resources? I don't.
To thrive, Linux distros have to attract users from other Linux distros.
I believe this narrow focus on attracting new users or customers is one of the big problems of our society. My term for the problem is "society ADHD". It's the narrow minded focus on attracting new users/customers leading to completely ignoring those one already has and their need and preferences. This leads to focus on these new users - and even more so potential users - being able to use the device, program or distribution without learning anything and without reading boring manuals. What do distribution "reviews" look like? The "reviewer" goes through the installation, makes a few screenshots, boots, takes few more screenshots, logs into KDE/Gnome, starts few well known applications and takes some more screenshots. The more responsible ones keep it running for few hours and maybe even try to simulate some real life activity. What does such "review" tell you about how well is the distribution serve an everyday user after few monts when he learned about its quirks and cool features? Nothing - exactly as those undercooked Phoronix benchmarks, exactly as superficial and meaningless. In early 90's (!) I read an article where the author came with a fitting name for this approach to device design and software user interface: "unuser friendly". The idea is that instead of being "user friendly", i.e. friendly to people who actually _use_ them, design is tailored to being friendly to people who know nothing (and don't want to learn anything) about them, i.e people not using them... "unusers" ("nonusers" would sound better but that would spoil the word play with "unuser friendly" vs. "user unfriendly"). The real problem is that it almost always comes at the expense to being less friendly (or even unfriendly) to actual users. And he came with that in ~1991; I wonder what would he say about today's consumer electronics and software (he died in 2001). If I'm going to use a device (TV, photo camera, phone, car) for ten years, I'm certainly willing to sacrifice few hours to learn to use it efficiently but I would be frustrated to have a frequently used function hidden somewhere in menu just because that way it's easier to find for someone who knows nothing about the device (and with no option to make it more efficient to me). It's the same with openSUSE: if we want to make it attractive to "unusers", it's hardly possible without making it less attractive to actual users. On one hand, you keep talking about people who learn on some distribution and then use the same (or its bigger brother) when they become admins. On the other, you propose changes which directly target at users unwilling to learn _anything_. Even if I forget that in big companies it's rarely admins who make such decisions, I fail to see how are the people who are completely unwilling to learn anything about the system are going to become admins. Michal Kubecek -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org