On 1/25/19 2:40 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
I think you are seriously overestimating the relevance that Phoronix has.
SUSE's primary customer base are enterprise users and I can guarantee you that an enterprise customer is not choosing their distribution over Phoronix testsuite results.
This is the same error in thinking that cost Novell the NOS industry. Big businesses choose things based on the opinions of technical experts. People become technical experts because of years of skill and experience. They do that learning because they are interested. They engaged their interest because they played around with the tools and technology. When someone plays around for the purposes of learning, they do not use expensive enterprise tools. They use free tools or cheap educational tools. So in this business, they get started with some old junk PCs and a free copy of whatever software is involved. Possibly, as in my case, by temporarily installing some expensive commercial stuff that is, in future, going to go onto a real customer's machine. But you do some test runs first, in the lab, so you know how it works and what it will do. *Nobody* does the first ever deployment on a real live (or future live) customer system. And nobody worth employing *only* has knowledge they got from a training course. If they haven't practiced, they're not worth having. So what you must do, in order to eventually win that lucrative enterprise market, is make sure that future enterprise tech staff can get free versions of your products, or cheap educational versions, to play around with so that they can get to know it. Every big company started out as a small company. Every professional started out as a beginner. Netware 2 and 3 were great small-company products, which did not scale well to bigger deployments. But they ended up in big deployments, because those big companies started off as 1 or 2 people in a shared office, and when they got a secretary or a receptionist, they needed to network their 3 or 4 computers. Netware 4 and NDS were great for big companies, because they were designed to scale using a network directory. But they were a pain to install on a single machine in a small office, because all that NDS stuff just got in the way. Unfortunately, at the same time, Windows NT 4 Server came along. It looked like Win95, it was nearly as easy to deploy as Win95, and you could just work it out. And when you did, it did everything Netware 4 did, and it was also a good application server -- for instance it could run a local Web proxy, or a dial-on-demand firewall. It was terrible for large companies, because it had no network directory, but it took over the low end. So 4 or 5 years later, it took over the high end as well, and Netware died. Source: I was a trained, certified Netware and NT Server engineer at the time, doing this in real life, alongside writing about it. About a decade later, there were 2 types of Linux distro: * ones you paid money for and came with manuals and support * free ones, which were much harder to install and set up Professional distros like SUSE Pro dominated the commercial world. At home, people played around with Red Hat Linux because it was free, but it was kinda clunky. Mark Shuttleworth made US $600 million selling Thawte to Verisign. After going to the International Space Station ($20M) he started a Linux company to give something back to the community. He took the leading freeware distro, Debian, famous for being hard to install, configure and use, with no fancy paid version, and he made an easy-to-install, easy-to-use, freeware distro. It really caught on. Any kid learning Linux used Ubuntu because it was free and it was easier than Red Hat Linux or Slackware or Gentoo or whatever. A decade later, many of those kids are professional Linux engineers. And what do they recommend to their boss? The distro they know best. The free one they played around with at night after school. Ubuntu. Is it less mature? Yes. Does it have a special supported enterprise version? No. So are you getting anything less or inferior to a paid-for "full version"? No. It's the same. Result -- slightly to Canonical's surprise at first, I think -- Ubuntu becomes a widely-used server distro. Just as NT 4 did. Because you could find your way, it was easy, and it was the same as the cheapo home version. Summary No, enterprises do *not* choose distros based on benchmarks on free ad-supported websites. Absolutely. You're right. They base their choices on experts' opinions. And those experts started out learning... from free ad-supported websites. So neglect the free home stuff for amateurs, hackers and know-nothing beginners, and you're doomed. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org