openSUSE Release Engineering meeting 03.05.2023
All meeting minutes can be found here: https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/ReleaseEngineering-meeting The meeting is hosted here https://meet.opensuse.org/ReleaseEngineeringMeeting ## Attendees ddemaio, lkocman, DimStar, GuillaumeG, Wolfgang, Sarah, Marcus, maxlin ## Leap Leap 15.5 RC, Leap Micro 5.4 GA, Leap Micro 5.2 EOL as of last Thursday https://news.opensuse.org/2023/04/27/leap-micro-54-leap-155-enters-rc/ (part 2) https://news.opensuse.org/2023/03/28/leapmicro-54-beta-hands-on/ (part 1) We did reuse IPRQ approval from SLE Micro 5.4 GA docs/i18n Need to revisit https://github.com/openSUSE/desktop-file-translations release-notes publishing setup (onging discussion with Lukasz, and Frank S.) Lukasz is working on a RN submission for 15.5 No release-notes failed builds as of now. openh264-repo 4k key setup 15.4 image respin based on QU2 - TBD ## openSUSE Tumbleweed openSUSE:Factory build fail stats: 65 failed 18 unresolvable (one week ago: 74 / 3) https://tinyurl.com/ysy4nnnz * Linux kernel 6.3 currently staged - initial version had issues with NFSv3, fixed last niight , tests rerunning * Boost 1.82 was shipped * Staging:C: openssl 3.1 incoming; a few packages failing to build * systemd maintainer is planning on replace the preset handling macros with file triggers (work in progress) * 2k key formally being revoked from TW setup - the openh264 repo needs to be republished first ## Richard (MicroOS) No news besides the MicroOS Desktop Plasma/KDE is still in desperate need of help else could be at risk of being dropped (again) https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma... User reports suggest MicroOS Desktop KDE has broken, and with no one to maintain it I'm not expecting it to be fixed any time soon https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135hm38/unable_to_perform_upgrade... https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135na8x/managed_to_brick_my_micro... ## Richard (ALP Architecture) The general direction seems to be towards building a Leap-like product (Desktops, not immutable, etc) based on ALP (and Tumbleweed?) Sources The biggest challenges facing this plan all revolve around having sufficient contributions, as (compared to Leap) this concept will need a lot more work as will have less already done by SUSE lkocman: I'm not even sure if interlock would be possible, like if we will get any actual 0.X numbers. Would very much appreciate folk from Maintenance, QA, Desktop Teams, and ideally also most devel Projects speaking up about how much they will support this effort, what challenges they see, what they'd like to see changed to make it more viable for them, etc. Have made a general call for volunteers, because currently no one has https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/N... https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135x5qs/opensuse_alp_call_for_vol... ## Max Leap 15.5(build stats in Backports: 1 unresolvables, 7 fails. Prehaps thoese failing package will not be fixed before GA, I've tested them that they're installable and executable though) * More uninstallable package are removed from ftp-tree according to the repodata installcheck result * Update 15.5 server list to d.o.o on github https://github.com/openSUSE/download.o.o/pull/43, but it needs https://opensuse-community.org/openSUSE_Leap_155_Community_Additional.xml as https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/113959 described, I'm not sure who is maintain that file. Note that, with/without this change should not affect product since we use $relesever in the these files * Waiting for doc team to upload a 15.5 release-notes rpm to doc.o.o, https://doc.opensuse.org/release-notes/x86_64/openSUSE/Leap/15.5/release-not... * Got instlux update and release-notes update I'll reach out to commnity additional folks, we might want to add openh264 there too (would help existing installations). ## Guillaume - Arm Tumbleweed: * Boot problem on RPi4 with u-boot 2023.04, but it looks like related to the openQA hardware setup - https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210949 Leap: * 15.5 aarch64: dtc package has been updated (for libkrun) - https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210812 is now fixed * 15.5 armv7: no blocker ALP: * shim not signed by MS (at least for aarch64, not sure for x86_64) - jsc#ARM-100 WSL: * Works with x86 emulator since appx installer is x86-64, but this is not really an issue since arm64 Win11 includes x86 emulator by default. Team is ok to publish it on Microsoft store anyway, but this would require some testing in openQA which is currently not possible (due to technical issues and MS licensing issues) https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/126083. Steps documented on the wiki to install the appx from download.o.o: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:WSL#With_Appx_from_openSUSE_download_server ## Sarah - s390x Tumbleweed * release is rolling Leap: * working * waitingSubmissisions with fixes for gtkd and gnu-cobol: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1072852 https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1078385 Nothing really new ## Doug * Google Summer of Code * Accepted projects announced on May 4 * oSC23 * 139 registered * Items staged in storage * Minor schedule adjustment affecting Saturday, May 27, between 16:00 and 18:30 * openSUSE.Asia Summit * No update * Leap 15.5 release annoucement being translated * Need another meeting concerning Fastly CDN * Working on clearing out storage area and meeting to discuss future storage * Finalizing AlmaLinux, openQA, OMP article * More TSP requests * AI topics (static) ## Dirk Not available Improved the CDN setup a bit further (https working now, caching issues fixed) and in progress of collecting in put from early testers. It looks like we have more issues to resolve. Did a strategic benchmarking exercise with various zypper options and a huge part of the slowness appears to be related to the choices of zypper options. In evaluation with zypper folks. A > factor 5 improvement even for european is possible over current setup. Other locations could be better. Sarah can provide mainframe acess - he has received VM from Sarah * also todo announce tumbleweed maintainer policy draft currently working on testing those in a private staging test project * Started ALP:RISCV:* builds in the new build setup Biggest speedup can be observed by switching zlib to zlib-ng, so looked into fixing the build failures caused by switching to zlibo-ng- compat ## Wolfgang (Package Hub), Scott Bahling * adding 168 missing Haskell packages (install dependencies) and some more to subpackages for SLE-15-SP5 ## Maintenance team (Marcus or Maurizio (m4u)) Leap Micro 5.4 maint-setup is active. Leap 15.5 setup is done, SLE export channel is still being refreshed occasionaly. Key rotation: openSUSE:Leap:15.5 is done, Backports are bit more challenging because of SLES. Wolfgang: we're injecting the key. Marcus we probably want to do only Backports 15 SP5 for now. Marcus is working also on the SLES side, the update of package with the new key was released last week, it's just not activated yet, but it will be already trusted by Leap 15.5 systems. Leap 15.4 is working Leap Micro 5.3 is working Leap Micro 5.4 testing is now passing as well Leap 16.0 - we should revisit the update/sle repo as the current setup not exactly mirror friendly. Solutions could be dropping not so popular architectures or split repositories per architecture. securebootkey for SLES was rotated, it should be autotrusted and not noticeable. This will be in QU3, QU2 is already done. lkocman: 15.3 EOL could lead to stopping our physical Source DVD effort, as it seems we will not produce. As this was the last release which you could still get on a physical media. Lkocman: anything against decomissioning it? Not a single valid request since I've joined SUSE. We did receive only requests for binary install media which are not subject to ^. We do not plan to offer this for any new releases. ## Adrian - OBS No update ## Open Floor https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1211022 Fedora enforcing stricter RPM GPG signatures
On 5/3/23 06:16, Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory wrote:
## Richard (MicroOS)
No news besides the MicroOS Desktop Plasma/KDE is still in desperate need of help else could be at risk of being dropped (again) https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma...
User reports suggest MicroOS Desktop KDE has broken, and with no one to maintain it I'm not expecting it to be fixed any time soon
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135hm38/unable_to_perform_upgrade...
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135na8x/managed_to_brick_my_micro...
FWIW, I just updated my MicroOS KDE test machine to the latest build and encountered no problems, rebooted, and so far everything seems to be working fine.
Am 04.05.23 um 16:48 Uhr schrieb Joe Salmeri:
On 5/3/23 06:16, Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory wrote:
## Richard (MicroOS)
No news besides the MicroOS Desktop Plasma/KDE is still in desperate need of help else could be at risk of being dropped (again) https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma...
User reports suggest MicroOS Desktop KDE has broken, and with no one to maintain it I'm not expecting it to be fixed any time soon
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135hm38/unable_to_perform_upgrade...
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/135na8x/managed_to_brick_my_micro...
FWIW, I just updated my MicroOS KDE test machine to the latest build and encountered no problems, rebooted, and so far everything seems to be working fine.
Thanks a lot for testing and feedback :-) However I'm really curious how these two Reddit posts listed in the protocol are supposed to indicate a desolate state of KDE on MicroOS in the first place: The problem in the second link was caused due to a full hard disk; the cause in the first link is undetermined, but it doesn't look like a problem of the desktop environment in the first place. Just putting random accusations into a protocol and using these as a *proof* to make something you don't like intentionally look bad is unacceptable. I had to fight exactly these kind of accusations in the past, just that Linux itself was declared the culprit for everything. And this will stick to people in the long run. I really hope I don't have to read such a foul play in the future. Ignaz, who is using neither GNOME nor KDE
Hi Ignaz< On 5/5/23 09:31, Ignaz Forster wrote:/
FWIW, I just updated my MicroOS KDE test machine to the latest build and encountered no problems, rebooted, and so far everything seems to be working fine.
Thanks a lot for testing and feedback :-)
However I'm really curious how these two Reddit posts listed in the protocol are supposed to indicate a desolate state of KDE on MicroOS in the first place: The problem in the second link was caused due to a full hard disk; the cause in the first link is undetermined, but it doesn't look like a problem of the desktop environment in the first place.
I agree. I did have an issue a month or so ago, but it was because the update would partially install and then fail but then next day it was never build and that worked. That is expected behavior though I believe because transactional-update will not switch to the new snapshot if it detects a problem. Since then I have not had any issues. I just did another update and that also worked without issues.
Just putting random accusations into a protocol and using these as a *proof* to make something you don't like intentionally look bad is unacceptable. I had to fight exactly these kind of accusations in the past, just that Linux itself was declared the culprit for everything. And this will stick to people in the long run. I really hope I don't have to read such a foul play in the future.
Ignaz, who is using neither GNOME nor KDE
I would have thought that KDE on MicroOS would be basically as solid as on TW since that's where it gets the packages so I clearly don't understand the issue. What do you use ? -- Regards, Joe
On 2023-05-05 15:31, Ignaz Forster wrote:
the cause in the first link is undetermined, but it doesn't look like a problem of the desktop environment in the first place.
And with no one, at all, currently taking care of MicroOS Desktop KDE, then the cause of any MicroOS Desktop KDE issues will remain undetermined. That is the consequence of the current lack of maintainers. Whether the fault is KDE or something elsewhere in the stack doesn't really matter..no one is even triaging any bug that only occurs on MicroOS Desktop KDE and redirecting reports/attention to the right people. This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE. -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman
Hi Richard, On 5/8/23 04:46, Richard Brown wrote:
And with no one, at all, currently taking care of MicroOS Desktop KDE, then the cause of any MicroOS Desktop KDE issues will remain undetermined.
That is the consequence of the current lack of maintainers.
Whether the fault is KDE or something elsewhere in the stack doesn't really matter..no one is even triaging any bug that only occurs on MicroOS Desktop KDE and redirecting reports/attention to the right people.
This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE.
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small. Possible the lack of volunteers is because of a lack of interest in using MicroOS and its transactional-update process ? I don't know if any MicroOS stats exist so I'm just speculating..... If I could help I would certainly volunteer, however, that is outside my areas of expertise. What I don't understand is if MicroOS is using the TW repos, shouldn't just pulling KDE from there keep it maintained since it is maintained with TW ? I suspect the answer to that is why I would not be a good volunteer to help with the process :-) -- Regards, Joe
On 08.05.2023 17:39, Joe Salmeri wrote:
Hi Richard,
On 5/8/23 04:46, Richard Brown wrote:
And with no one, at all, currently taking care of MicroOS Desktop KDE, then the cause of any MicroOS Desktop KDE issues will remain undetermined.
That is the consequence of the current lack of maintainers.
Whether the fault is KDE or something elsewhere in the stack doesn't really matter..no one is even triaging any bug that only occurs on MicroOS Desktop KDE and redirecting reports/attention to the right people.
This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE.
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
I am on openSUSE forums for quite some time and subjective feeling is that there are much more KDE users than anything else (may be KDE users more often have problems and come to the forums :) )
On 5/8/23 10:46, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
I am on openSUSE forums for quite some time and subjective feeling is that there are much more KDE users than anything else (may be KDE users more often have problems and come to the forums :) )
Ha! That could certainly be true! I have not had any major issues with KDE on TW but I am also not a typical end user. -- Regards, Joe
On 2023-05-08 16:39, Joe Salmeri wrote:
Hi Richard,
On 5/8/23 04:46, Richard Brown wrote:
This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE.
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
Possible the lack of volunteers is because of a lack of interest in using MicroOS and its transactional-update process ? I don't know if any MicroOS stats exist so I'm just speculating.....
It's possible. I don't judge. The GNOME variant of the MicroOS Desktop has lots of contributors and lots of users. That's great as it's my daily driver. The absence of a KDE flavour isn't going to hurt the goals the MicroOS Desktop set out to achieve.
If I could help I would certainly volunteer, however, that is outside my areas of expertise.
What I don't understand is if MicroOS is using the TW repos, shouldn't just pulling KDE from there keep it maintained since it is maintained with TW ?
The MicroOS Desktop is striving to be more than just 'a pile of packages people can lego together into a nice desktop' that usecase is covered really well with Tumbleweed and it would be stupid for MicroOS Desktop to compete with something we do very well already. The MicroOS Desktop was created to target very specific goals [1] aiming for very specific types of users [2]. To overly simplify, it's aiming to be a highly polished, less customisable, less maintenance needed Linux Desktop, for lazy developers (like myself) and other folk like Grandparents and such who just don't care about the nuts and bolts the same way that some Linux Enthusiasts do. Based on the effective resignation letter of the last MicroOS Desktop KDE maintainer [3], I think it might be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to say that KDE just doesn't fit those goals, and it might not be in everyones interest to keep trying to smash that square peg into the MicroOS Desktop round hole. And that might be precisely why no ones stepping up to volunteer. Nothing wrong with that, not every idea needs to succeed :) Regards, Richard [1] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Design_Goals [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Who_is_the_MicroOS_Desktop_fo... [3] https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma... -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman
On Mon, 2023-05-08 at 16:52 +0200, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-05-08 16:39, Joe Salmeri wrote:
Hi Richard,
On 5/8/23 04:46, Richard Brown wrote:
This, in my humble opinion, is not a responsible way to deliver software, which is why we need to consider ceasing to offer the unmaintained flavour of the MicroOS Desktop KDE.
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
Possible the lack of volunteers is because of a lack of interest in using MicroOS and its transactional-update process ? I don't know if any MicroOS stats exist so I'm just speculating.....
It's possible. I don't judge. The GNOME variant of the MicroOS Desktop has lots of contributors and lots of users. That's great as it's my daily driver. The absence of a KDE flavour isn't going to hurt the goals the MicroOS Desktop set out to achieve.
If I could help I would certainly volunteer, however, that is outside my areas of expertise.
What I don't understand is if MicroOS is using the TW repos, shouldn't just pulling KDE from there keep it maintained since it is maintained with TW ?
The MicroOS Desktop is striving to be more than just 'a pile of packages people can lego together into a nice desktop'
that usecase is covered really well with Tumbleweed and it would be stupid for MicroOS Desktop to compete with something we do very well already.
The MicroOS Desktop was created to target very specific goals [1] aiming for very specific types of users [2].
To overly simplify, it's aiming to be a highly polished, less customisable, less maintenance needed Linux Desktop, for lazy developers (like myself) and other folk like Grandparents and such who just don't care about the nuts and bolts the same way that some Linux Enthusiasts do.
Based on the effective resignation letter of the last MicroOS Desktop KDE maintainer [3], I think it might be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to say that KDE just doesn't fit those goals, and it might not be in everyones interest to keep trying to smash that square peg into the MicroOS Desktop round hole.
And that might be precisely why no ones stepping up to volunteer. Nothing wrong with that, not every idea needs to succeed :)
Regards,
Richard
[1] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Design_Goals [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop#Who_is_the_MicroOS_Desktop_fo... ? [3] https://microos.opensuse.org/blog/2023-04-02-state-of-microOS-Desktop-Plasma...
To be fair, I haven't given up, I'm just stuck. For the people who haven't installed MicroOS Plasma and given it a whirl, the current state of the desktop is roughly the same experience as if you're installing Tumbleweed and Selecting the KDE Desktop. Which is fine, if somebody wants to maintain "Tumbleweed with an Immutable Base, and the KDE Desktop" that's basically what we have at the moment, it still requires a fair bit of tinkering under the hood to do a number of things. That being said, that's not a project *I* am interested in using or maintaining, which was about half the reason I made the post I did. I'm still regularly checking the bugzilla when I get notifications, but I'll be honest, there aren't bugs being filed, for the most part, since I made that blog post, it appears that there have been two, or three bugs filed against MicroOS Plasma specifically, the two remaining open, one of them is a "Feature Request" as far as I'm concerned, and the other is something I've been unable to reproduce in my own testing reliably. There are lots of folks using it, if Reddit or the Matrix chat are anything to go by, so it isn't as if the thing is a massive dumpster fire, but as I agree with Richard, that the stated goals of MicroOS Desktop aren't currently achievable with the Plasma Desktop, at least not at my skill level to make it happen, it basically is going to remain as a "beta" level subproject, if it stays around.
Hi Shawn, Could you point me on how to start helping in some way? Thanks.
On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 13:14 +0000, Giant Sand Fans wrote:
Hi Shawn, Could you point me on how to start helping in some way?
Thanks.
Everything is done in the open, All of the configurations and microOS Desktop specific stuff are in devel:microos on OBS, so you can submit fixes just like you would to any project. The documentation that exists is at https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS/Desktop I don't actually think there is "MicroOS Desktop" specific mailing-list There is a matrix channel #microos-desktop:opensuse.org And all of our bugtracking is done on bugzilla https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/buglist.cgi?component=MicroOS&list_id=13884356&product=openSUSE%20Tumbleweed&resolution= --- There isn't a specific "Desktop" subcategory, so generally, filtering for the words Gnome, Desktop, Plasma, or KDE will find you what you're looking for.
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him. If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Possible the lack of volunteers is because of a lack of interest in using MicroOS and its transactional-update process ? I don't know if any MicroOS stats exist so I'm just speculating.....
It's possible. I don't judge. The GNOME variant of the MicroOS Desktop has lots of contributors and lots of users. That's great as it's my daily driver. The absence of a KDE flavour isn't going to hurt the goals the MicroOS Desktop set out to achieve.
Again. You should not only look after yourselves. Evaluate how many users of openSUSE used KDE and how many used Gnome or other interfaces. Then you can decide what is important and what should be pursued further. But not as long as you stay in your own bubble.
To overly simplify, it's aiming to be a highly polished, less customisable, less maintenance needed Linux Desktop, for lazy developers (like myself) and other folk like Grandparents and such who just don't care about the nuts and bolts the same way that some Linux Enthusiasts do.
So my grandparents has been using Leap for about 10 years now without any problems. No idea for what she should then need MicroOS and what should be better.
Based on the effective resignation letter of the last MicroOS Desktop KDE maintainer [3], I think it might be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to say that KDE just doesn't fit those goals, and it might not be in everyones interest to keep trying to smash that square peg into the MicroOS Desktop round hole.
well. But maybe MicroOS will no longer suit the users. And the other day I read a post that KDE wants to shorten the release cycles and wants to sit down with opneSUSE Leap, among others. But if KDE falls away, so then also quite a few users, the request of KDE is also invalid. Strange strategy the whole.
And that might be precisely why no ones stepping up to volunteer. Nothing wrong with that, not every idea needs to succeed :)
I don't think that is the reason. More like snootiness when asked or statements like "the user is unimportant" and then of course the marketing and HR department. Now you can stone me again. Regards Eric
On 5/10/23 18:06, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen. -- 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
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 10:55:29 CEST schrieb Simon Lees:
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
However, this then amounts to the fact that the contributors are and will remain alone among themselves. Because the user is not interested. Strange. If that should be the intention of openSUSE.... Regards
On 2023-05-10 10:55, Simon Lees wrote:
On 5/10/23 18:06, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
Exactly, and in the case of the MicroOS Desktop, those volunteers have decided to tackle use cases that apply to themselves, and people who think like themselves. This is core open source principles "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." The MicroOS Desktop doesn't have to appeal to anyone besides the people making it. Never mind anyone else. It doesn't need to attract a bigger userbase as long as the volunteers are volunteering. It doesn't even need to appeal to others who currently uses openSUSE - We have Tumbleweed for them. So I wholeheartedly disagree with the premise that volunteers should spend their time being commanded by unpaying users to develop software that the users want to use. That's the business of commercial software, which is great, I like my job and working for users when I'm being paid for it. But voluntarily? I think all volunteers should have the freedom to do what they want to. Nothing more, nothing less.
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 14:54:44 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
Exactly, and in the case of the MicroOS Desktop, those volunteers have decided to tackle use cases that apply to themselves, and people who think like themselves.
This is core open source principles "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
The MicroOS Desktop doesn't have to appeal to anyone besides the people making it. Never mind anyone else. It doesn't need to attract a bigger userbase as long as the volunteers are volunteering. It doesn't even need to appeal to others who currently uses openSUSE - We have Tumbleweed for them.
So I wholeheartedly disagree with the premise that volunteers should spend their time being commanded by unpaying users to develop software that the users want to use.
That's the business of commercial software, which is great, I like my job and working for users when I'm being paid for it. But voluntarily? I think all volunteers should have the freedom to do what they want to. Nothing more, nothing less.
A user base, as the name suggests, lays a foundation for the commercial product. Microsoft has mastered this like no other company. So if the developers keep to themselves and don't focus on increasing the user base, sooner or later the commercial sector will feel the effects. So, the more openSUSE users, the less users who support SLES at work. Thus SLES has sometime no more e relevance. I have made the experience that if you want SLES products, you have to fight for it. That used to be different. Regards Eric
On 2023-05-13 09:40, Eric Schirra wrote:
A user base, as the name suggests, lays a foundation for the commercial product. Microsoft has mastered this like no other company. So if the developers keep to themselves and don't focus on increasing the user base, sooner or later the commercial sector will feel the effects. So, the more openSUSE users, the less users who support SLES at work. Thus SLES has sometime no more e relevance. I have made the experience that if you want SLES products, you have to fight for it. That used to be different.
Your seem to think there is a direct relationship between the size of the openSUSE user base and the size of the SLE userbase. There is no proof of that. Again, the statistics suggest there is no such relationship. SUSE's SLE sales have grown many, many times larger than openSUSE's userbase, at rates much faster than any growth openSUSE's userbase may have seen. This has included SLE sales growing when openSUSE's userbase has not. Talking to SLE customers, very few cite openSUSE as a reason they chose to buy SLE. And, very few customers have used the new Leap > SLE migration path. So really, no, you cannot make a strong argument that SUSE needs to invest in openSUSE's userbase for it's business. SUSE will invest in it's userbase. openSUSE needs to invest in it's contributor base to keep itself sustainable.
Gesendet: Sonntag, 14. Mai 2023 um 13:51 Uhr Von: "Richard Brown" <rbrown@suse.de> An: factory@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: Re: openSUSE Release Engineering meeting 03.05.2023 - MicroOS KDE
On 2023-05-13 09:40, Eric Schirra wrote:
A user base, as the name suggests, lays a foundation for the commercial product. Microsoft has mastered this like no other company. So if the developers keep to themselves and don't focus on increasing the user base, sooner or later the commercial sector will feel the effects. So, the more openSUSE users, the less users who support SLES at work. Thus SLES has sometime no more e relevance. I have made the experience that if you want SLES products, you have to fight for it. That used to be different. ... Again, the statistics suggest there is no such relationship. SUSE's SLE sales have grown many, many times larger than openSUSE's userbase, at rates much faster than any growth openSUSE's userbase may have seen.
Wow! The number of SLE users have been growing after the recognition, that it is wrong to reject possible customers and partners? That is no surprise. Many escalations were required to achieve a better open source community feeling in your headquarter town. Sometimes I pitied your crisis Manager. In the same time you did your default "marketing only" presentations with the goal to keep all the knowledge. I can say, that you can not receive any new Contributors on this way. The reason is, that nobody knows the background and how to develop on your software until you give some hints. The SUSE user base would be bigger, if you all would be allowed to represent your knowledge and your products. Your competitors have received more new customers than SUSE - or better said - they have received your rejected customers. I can be happy, that I have received a point of contact within SUSE, if such a situation would happen again.
This has included SLE sales growing when openSUSE's userbase has not. Talking to SLE customers, very few cite openSUSE as a reason they chose to buy SLE. And, very few customers have used the new Leap > SLE migration path.
Yesterday I thought a little bit about your principles, that Developers should be the users. If you transfer your statements from yesterday to SLE sales statements, then your growing number of SLE Developers have to be your customers. I know only one company, who has paid their own products for their own employees, that they can be paid afterwards. But that can only work with additional external customers.
So really, no, you cannot make a strong argument that SUSE needs to invest in openSUSE's userbase for it's business. SUSE will invest in it's userbase. openSUSE needs to invest in it's contributor base to keep itself sustainable.
If you do not invest "knowledge" and code sharing into the openSUSE user base or any other community for receiving new Contributors, then you are the single Contributor and you can call your code closed (open) source. I think back to a time, where you said, that openSUSE Developers should fix their own found bugs and develop their own wished features. After following this thread, I can say, that you are in exactly this wished situation now. You have received a reputation and you are the Developer without sharing the required knowledge. Then you have to fix all for your own. Best regards, Sarah
On 2023-05-14 18:22, Sarah Julia Kriesch wrote a lot Thank you for the diatribe. Your anecdotes seem to confirm and support my observations and related statements. Your attempts to somehow blame me for it all does seem to overstate my influence and responsibility within SUSE, within this community, and beyond. When I have godlike powers in all three realms I promise to reshape them all in a vision that I’d hope I’d more appealing to you.
On Sat 2023-05-13, Eric Schirra wrote:
So, the more openSUSE users, the less users who support SLES at work.
Do you mean "fewer" instead of "more"? Even then I'm not convinced there is such a straightforward correlation. On Sun 2023-05-14, Richard Brown wrote:
So really, no, you cannot make a strong argument that SUSE needs to invest in openSUSE's userbase for it's business. SUSE will invest in it's userbase.
I'd argue that SUSE also is supportive of and investing in the openSUSE userbase. As for openSUSE, I believe we need to invest in *both* users and contributors, not the least since the latter often recruit themselves from the former. On Sun 2023-05-14, Sarah Julia Kriesch wrote:
Sometimes I pitied your crisis Manager.
To the best of my knowledge there is no such role within SUSE (though indeed one of mine sometimes feel like it
In the same time you did your default "marketing only" presentations with the goal to keep all the knowledge.
Not sure who "you" refers to here. If it's about presentations by Richard, personally I found all I recall interesting and helpful, consistently among the best I have seen at various events. In any case this looks like a bold, unsubstantiated, and inappropriate allegation regarding Richard's, or someone else's, motives.
The SUSE user base would be bigger, if you all would be allowed to represent your knowledge and your products.
I really do not know what you are trying to imply. SUSE employees are allowed to share their knowledge regarding technologies, open source projects, and SUSE products at conferences, open source events, on mailing lists, and in many, many other ways.
Your competitors have received more new customers than SUSE - or better said - they have received your rejected customers.
This really is not the right place to discuss SUSE policies, SUSE's business, nor veiled insinuations or anecdotal stories related to these. Let's stick to openSUSE matters, please, shall we? Gerald
Hi Gerald, On 14.05.23 22:28, Gerald Pfeifer via openSUSE Factory wrote:
This really is not the right place to discuss SUSE policies, SUSE's business, nor veiled insinuations or anecdotal stories related to these.
you are certainly right. And I already partly regret responding to this thread a few minutes ago, before reading all the replies. However, Richard continuously telling us implicitly that SUSE could not care less about openSUSE and that openSUSE does of course not matter at all is not very helpful in keeping emotions down ;-)
Let's stick to openSUSE matters, please, shall we?
right. The rest we can talk about next week in person ;-) Best regards and sorry for not reading the whole thread before then not replying... :-) -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman
Hi Sarah, I'm not going to address the inaccuracies present, which Gerald has already aptly pointed out. I recommend reviewing his response for clarification. However, I would like to draw your attention to the matter of personal attacks in your reply, specifically directed towards Richard. This appears to be a recurring issue on your part. I would like to remind you to adhere to our Code of Conduct, which serves as a valuable resource for understanding and implementing respectful communication. The CoC is made available here: https://en.opensuse.org/Code_of_Conduct While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, it is crucial to express it in a manner that upholds the guidelines outlined in the Code of Conduct so we can ensure a safe and inclusive community for all. A.
Hi Richard, I have not responded to any of your recent mails on the topic yet, because as a non-native english speaker, I am certainly not able to contest your decently honed skills of always carrying an undertone of derision and slight aggression in your mails and honestly just do not care enough anymore, but this one can't be left unanswered. (If I am wrong with my impression that every single one of your mails carries a slight tone of aggression, derision and putting down your opponents, then maybe you should think about how you come across and maybe realize that you write here to many non-native english speakers, and maybe you should resort to using simple english to not evoke this impression). On 14.05.23 13:51, Richard Brown wrote:
There is no proof of that.
Again, the statistics suggest there is no such relationship.
Statistics. Please show *all* the underlying numbers so that we can judge your "statistics". If that's not possible, then I can only think of the old saying (apparently wrongly) attributed to Winston Churchill.
SUSE's SLE sales have grown many, many times larger than openSUSE's
Sales in numbers of subscriptions or sales in amount of money? The amount of money number could be because of some significant price increas and customers not able to run away quickly enough.
userbase, at rates much faster than any growth openSUSE's userbase may have seen.
This has included SLE sales growing when openSUSE's userbase has not.
Again, sales in numbers of subscriptions or sales in amount of money? This could for example also be existing customers, which just extended their volume, because they already had some kind of (even if only mental) "vendor lock-in".
Talking to SLE customers, very few cite openSUSE as a reason they chose to buy SLE.
Well, you know who'm you are talking to? At least at customers with more than a few SLES subscriptions? The purchasing department. Or middle to upper management. People who don't even know what they are purchasing and why. You'll almost never talking to the people who are laying the foundation for such a decision. I am, as you know, at one of the "slightly bigger" SLES customers. I often had to explain to people why we were using that complicated SLES stuff where nothing was readily available on the internet and they should not just use a debian derivate where packages are readily available and which would get them charged zero on their cost center. If people like me are not "selling" SUSE / SLES to their coworkers and the management from bottom up, this might be hurting SUSE sales badly long term. Not in our case, in our case SUSE has actually managed to do it the other way round by convincing upper management that they have to look for alternatives :-) I'm not going to share details here but I'm available for talking at OSC2023 :-)
And, very few customers have used the new Leap > SLE migration path.
Of course not. Because most of them will be old customers just extending their subscription. You say I'm wrong? Then "Show me those weapons of mass destruction^W^W^W^Wnumbers."
So really, no, you cannot make a strong argument that SUSE needs to invest in openSUSE's userbase for it's business. SUSE will invest in it's userbase.
Sorry, but I have not seen any indication of that, apart from spam-like marketing emails that are very hard to unsubscribe off, trying to sell me additional products of the SUSE portfolio that we clearly not want (and where I am certainly the wrong person to send these mails to).
openSUSE needs to invest in it's contributor base to keep itself sustainable.
Sure. But if openSUSE does not succeed in that, this also will hurt SUSE long term (and I am pretty sure that "long-term" is something that SUSE's upper management could not care less about) -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 4:55 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
On 5/10/23 18:06, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
If you want to only hear from contributors, then we should have split this mailing list into two a long time ago. It was openSUSE's choice to have a merged users+contributors mailing list for openSUSE Factory based stuff. I even argued for this a few years ago during the Mailman migration. But the community wanted to retain it, so we did. I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with. Keep in mind that "listening" != "doing". Having empathy and consideration for the people that use or want to use openSUSE can have lasting positive effects. This doesn't mean "overcommit yourself" (unless you want to!), but it does mean not being a jerk and making the developer community appear kind and approachable. A project with no users is also a project with no contributors. That said, while what contributors want to do ultimately wins out, the messaging should be oriented around helping people become part of that group, not saying "your opinion doesn't matter because you're not a contributor". Overall, I'm more concerned about how difficult it is to become a contributor, much less a regular one. The way openSUSE is developed makes it very hard for people to figure out how to contribute because it's splattered all over the place with no guidance available. Some time ago, we set up https://contribute.opensuse.org/, but it only points to very generic guidance. We don't have guidance for working on openSUSE KDE as far as I know. Improving openSUSE KDE improves the KDE experience for all openSUSE "products" (Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Leap, etc.). -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On 2023-05-10 14:57, Neal Gompa wrote:
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
That is a concept that has absolutely zero empirical data to support it. If you look at openSUSE's own statistics, there is absolutely no evidence that more users can lead to more contributors. Our highest contribution numbers where when we had the least users. All of our periods of user growth have seen either a decline or stagnation in our contributor numbers. Looking outside of our little bubble, this is not an isolated phenomenon. Fundamentally, Projects that work hard to appeal to contributors, gain contributors. This is totally separate and unrelated to growing a userbase. Lets stick with the MicroOS Desktop as an example. I know that starting with GNOME as the default/recommended/most developed Desktop Environment immediately turned off a significant number of the openSUSE userbase. Regardless of that, the GNOME flavour of MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing contributor base, because we worked on that. We haven't really worked on gathering new users (I kinda plan that push once the thing is Release quality), but regardless the GNOME MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing userbase, and is being touted in places far outside of the regular openSUSE bubble as being "the future of the Linux Desktop" This experience would actually imply the opposite of our tautology - the experience of the MicroOS Desktop is that focusing on contributors, and giving them the environment to build precisely what they want to build, is now what is attracting users. So yeah..I'm going to ignore Eric and his antagonistic attitude..and note my disappointment to see you encouraging it.
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 9:06 AM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
On 2023-05-10 14:57, Neal Gompa wrote:
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
That is a concept that has absolutely zero empirical data to support it.
If you look at openSUSE's own statistics, there is absolutely no evidence that more users can lead to more contributors.
Our highest contribution numbers where when we had the least users. All of our periods of user growth have seen either a decline or stagnation in our contributor numbers.
Looking outside of our little bubble, this is not an isolated phenomenon.
Fundamentally, Projects that work hard to appeal to contributors, gain contributors.
This is totally separate and unrelated to growing a userbase.
Lets stick with the MicroOS Desktop as an example.
I know that starting with GNOME as the default/recommended/most developed Desktop Environment immediately turned off a significant number of the openSUSE userbase.
Regardless of that, the GNOME flavour of MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing contributor base, because we worked on that.
We haven't really worked on gathering new users (I kinda plan that push once the thing is Release quality), but regardless the GNOME MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing userbase, and is being touted in places far outside of the regular openSUSE bubble as being "the future of the Linux Desktop"
This experience would actually imply the opposite of our tautology - the experience of the MicroOS Desktop is that focusing on contributors, and giving them the environment to build precisely what they want to build, is now what is attracting users.
So yeah..I'm going to ignore Eric and his antagonistic attitude..and note my disappointment to see you encouraging it.
You are benefiting from the seed of existing openSUSE Tumbleweed contributor users. That doesn't change the nature of what I'm saying. You already know you've hit a ceiling though, because openSUSE MicroOS KDE is struggling, and no other desktops in openSUSE have anyone trying to build MicroOS variants. Given the enthusiasm for these kinds of operating systems, the question should be asked "why are you having trouble?" MicroOS is a pioneer in this regard, and accordingly, there should be all kinds of efforts going on with MicroOS based *everything*. But there isn't. In my view, that means there's a problem somewhere. But perhaps you're right, and we'll see this funnel widen when you believe MicroOS GNOME is "Release quality" and start trying to attract users. We'll just have to see. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
On 2023-05-10 15:17, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 9:06 AM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
On 2023-05-10 14:57, Neal Gompa wrote:
So yeah..I'm going to ignore Eric and his antagonistic attitude..and note my disappointment to see you encouraging it.
You are benefiting from the seed of existing openSUSE Tumbleweed contributor users. That doesn't change the nature of what I'm saying. You already know you've hit a ceiling though, because openSUSE MicroOS KDE is struggling, and no other desktops in openSUSE have anyone trying to build MicroOS variants.
That is not a 'ceiling' though The original goal of the MicroOS Desktop was NEVER to support anything other than GNOME The addition of KDE was pushed by someone who ultimately has not demonstrated a willingness to remain an active contributor You could argue this entire problem is because we DID listen to users. We made the KDE flavour of the MicroOS Desktop, it got users. Now where's the promised contributors eh?
Given the enthusiasm for these kinds of operating systems, the question should be asked "why are you having trouble?" MicroOS is a pioneer in this regard, and accordingly, there should be all kinds of efforts going on with MicroOS based *everything*. But there isn't.
We're having trouble because there's more people willing to make demands upon the MicroOS Desktop project than willing to contribute to it. I fundamentally disagree with the suggestion there should be all kinds of efforts going on with MicroOS based everything. MicroOS was fundamentally designed to be a more narrowly defined operating system for more narrowly defined use cases. The whole premise for a transactional system is to be more refined, to limit the scope of failures, and to reap the rewards of reliability and scalability that come from that. *I* started the MicroOS Desktop to extend that to the GNOME Desktop, but without compromising on that core premise. As long as I'm involved as its creator, it is always going to be a more refined, polished, and less customisable affair than the wild-west anything-goes style of distributions we've done in the past. I do not think you, or anyone else, has a right to redefine the MicroOS Desktop and to broaden it's scope beyond that which I'm willing to build. Feel free to build your own stuff if you have a different vision.
Hello about the removal of microOS KDE. I personally want to contribute. But I will only start to have time for it starting with next month (but from what I can foresee long term at that point). So, my question (or rather request) is to maybe wait for that until July (I will need some time to get started too)? About the problems from the Blog post from beginning of April from the last contributor: - Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are problems with SDDM. These issues (and others) are known by the KDE devs, but since the SDDM dev (SDDM is not a KDE project) started to become unresponsive over the last year, they plan to take over the development themselves. So, only time will tell how this exactly will go long term. - Point 6, I am not even sure what the person means here. They wrote that they can access it just fine, but not mount it. If they read it, further explanation would be nice. - Last but not least, it seems like according the KDE developers that contributor didn't try to engage with them, even if only via Bug reports. Kinda hard to know if that's true or not from my pov, but well. -- Sincerely Kilian Hanich
Hello
about the removal of microOS KDE. I personally want to contribute. But I will only start to have time for it starting with next month (but from what I can foresee long term at that point).
So, my question (or rather request) is to maybe wait for that until July (I will need some time to get started too)?
About the problems from the Blog post from beginning of April from the last contributor: - Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are problems with SDDM. These issues (and others) are known by the KDE devs, but since the SDDM dev (SDDM is not a KDE project) started to become unresponsive over the last year, they plan to take over the development themselves. So, only time will tell how this exactly will go long term. I'm very aware of the sddm issues. And it's part of the reason that I haven't just decided to abandon what little work I am still doing as a Maintainer for MicroOS Plasma. I actually have a suspicion many of my
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 15:54 +0200, Kilian Hanich wrote: personal hardware issues, and some of the more general issues are going to be easier to fix/deal with, when we get the anticipated release into Tumbleweed.
- Point 6, I am not even sure what the person means here. They wrote that they can access it just fine, but not mount it. If they read it, further explanation would be nice. This speaks to "Suitability for Purpose" One of the goals of the MicroOS Desktop project, as Richard has stated it is:
"MicroOS was fundamentally designed to be a more narrowly defined operating system for more narrowly defined use cases. The whole premise for a transactional system is to be more refined, to limit the scope of failures, and to reap the rewards of reliability and scalability that come from that. *I* started the MicroOS Desktop to extend that to the GNOME Desktop, but without compromising on that core premise. As long as I'm involved as its creator, it is always going to be a more refined, polished, and less customisable affair than the wild-west anything-goes style of distributions we've done in the past." I thought I was relatively clear in my blog post, but I'll explain. If you install the current MicroOS Gnome, and open Nautilus(Files), and go down to the bottom of the side panel, click on "Other Locations", I can then navigate to the SMB shares on my NAS, I can then right click on those shares, and select "Mount" and it will mount them in userspace, as a non-privileged user (/run/user/{UID}/gvfs/sharename) in which the sharename is the same *everytime* I perform this operation (predictable mount points). This isn't currently possible through Dolphin. You can navigate to shares within Dolphin just fine, and interact with them *through* dolphin for whatever file operations you want to use, but you can't actually mount them through dolphin, onto your local filesystem, and access them that way. Doing so requires using something like automount through /etc/fstab, using an application like smb4k, or cracking open a terminal and using kio through what isn't the most intuitive process in the world. Is it a small, personal, annoying usecase and nitpicky on my part? Sure, I'll admit to that, maybe it is. I've been using Plasma on Tumbleweed for *years* and I'm just used to doing that sort of thing, but if I'm considering the product based on Richard's stated purpose, It's a failure of fitness for purpose. I happen to agree with the stated purpose of the Project, to provide "a more refined, polished, and less customisable affair than the wild-west anything-goes style of distributions we've done in the past"
- Last but not least, it seems like according the KDE developers that contributor didn't try to engage with them, even if only via Bug reports. Kinda hard to know if that's true or not from my pov, but well.
No, I haven't bugged the openSUSE-KDE team much, much of what I'm running into the wall on, aren't technically *bugs*, the software is doing what it was designed to do, they're more like feature requests, for things it currently doesn't do.
-- Sincerely
Kilian Hanich
Shawn W Dunn composed on 2023-05-10 07:37 (UTC-0700):
if I'm considering the product based on Richard's stated purpose, It's a failure of fitness for purpose. I happen to agree with the stated purpose of the Project, to provide "a more refined, polished, and less customisable affair than the wild-west anything-goes style of distributions we've done in the past"
IMO, the nature of Plasma, reputed to have the most customizability of any FOSS DE, is for that reason, antithetical to Richard's stated purpose. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion, based on faith, not based on science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata
On 2023-05-10 15:54, Kilian Hanich wrote:
Hello
about the removal of microOS KDE. I personally want to contribute. But I will only start to have time for it starting with next month (but from what I can foresee long term at that point).
So, my question (or rather request) is to maybe wait for that until July (I will need some time to get started too)?
I quite like the idea of being able to forget about MicroOS Desktop KDE until August. That should give you time to get started and settled in. Sounds like a good plan
About the problems from the Blog post from beginning of April from the last contributor: - Points 1, 2, 3 and 5 are problems with SDDM. These issues (and others) are known by the KDE devs, but since the SDDM dev (SDDM is not a KDE project) started to become unresponsive over the last year, they plan to take over the development themselves. So, only time will tell how this exactly will go long term.
The person (or persons) who will own MicroOS Desktop KDE are fully empowered to decide what DM they use. SDDM? GDM? I don't care as long as it works and is aligned with the goals of the MicroOS Desktop. One of the benefits of doing this as a separate distribution is that complete freedom to diverge from what the KDE Team does in Tumbleweed or Leap, and I'd certainly advocate for making the most of that freedom in cases like this.
- Last but not least, it seems like according the KDE developers that contributor didn't try to engage with them, even if only via Bug reports. Kinda hard to know if that's true or not from my pov, but well.
there's more than one way to skin a cat. Given the history of MicroOS Desktop KDE (originating from an openSUSE KDE team member, then being picked up by someone else), I can totally empathise with Shawn's style of handling issues to date. If you take the mantle, it's your prerogative to do things your way. I'll just be there to help and keep things aligned with the MicroOS Desktop project as a whole :) Look forward to seeing you in some weeks.
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 15:06:12 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
On 2023-05-10 14:57, Neal Gompa wrote:
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
That is a concept that has absolutely zero empirical data to support it.
If you look at openSUSE's own statistics, there is absolutely no evidence that more users can lead to more contributors.
Our highest contribution numbers where when we had the least users. All of our periods of user growth have seen either a decline or stagnation in our contributor numbers.
Looking outside of our little bubble, this is not an isolated phenomenon.
Fundamentally, Projects that work hard to appeal to contributors, gain contributors.
This is totally separate and unrelated to growing a userbase.
Lets stick with the MicroOS Desktop as an example.
I know that starting with GNOME as the default/recommended/most developed Desktop Environment immediately turned off a significant number of the openSUSE userbase.
Regardless of that, the GNOME flavour of MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing contributor base, because we worked on that.
We haven't really worked on gathering new users (I kinda plan that push once the thing is Release quality), but regardless the GNOME MicroOS Desktop has a happy and healthy growing userbase, and is being touted in places far outside of the regular openSUSE bubble as being "the future of the Linux Desktop"
This experience would actually imply the opposite of our tautology - the experience of the MicroOS Desktop is that focusing on contributors, and giving them the environment to build precisely what they want to build, is now what is attracting users.
So yeah..I'm going to ignore Eric and his antagonistic attitude..and note my disappointment to see you encouraging it.
This has nothing to do with an antagonistic attitude. I find it an insulting insinuation. You ignore opinions and facts. You ignore and do not accept other opinions. But good. From me from.... Eric
On 5/10/23 22:27, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 4:55 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
On 5/10/23 18:06, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
If you want to only hear from contributors, then we should have split this mailing list into two a long time ago. It was openSUSE's choice to have a merged users+contributors mailing list for openSUSE Factory based stuff. I even argued for this a few years ago during the Mailman migration. But the community wanted to retain it, so we did.
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
Keep in mind that "listening" != "doing". Having empathy and consideration for the people that use or want to use openSUSE can have lasting positive effects. This doesn't mean "overcommit yourself" (unless you want to!), but it does mean not being a jerk and making the developer community appear kind and approachable.
A project with no users is also a project with no contributors. That said, while what contributors want to do ultimately wins out, the messaging should be oriented around helping people become part of that group, not saying "your opinion doesn't matter because you're not a contributor".
As a contributor let me say that I do value users opinions and that weighed heavily on my decisions to start looking at a ALP based Leap alternative because I could clearly see it would be useful for alot of people other then me. But this is very much something I am willing to contribute to that I know with minimal effort I can do some things that users need. On the other hand if there is no one willing to do the work then there is also likely no one ready to listen to users about it.
Overall, I'm more concerned about how difficult it is to become a contributor, much less a regular one. The way openSUSE is developed makes it very hard for people to figure out how to contribute because it's splattered all over the place with no guidance available.
I'll provide a bit of a counter argument here, I started contributing because at the time (12ish years ago) no Distro provided good enlightenment support. With obs and our review processes and willingness not to have gatekeepers as to what goes into the core distro it was far easier for me to contribute enlightenment to openSUSE then it would have been for say Debian (fedora although that may have got better) or ubuntu. The fact that Arch and openSUSE are the only two distro's that have continued to have support over that time period while others have come and go says something about how easy it is to contribute new things here.
Some time ago, we set up https://contribute.opensuse.org/, but it only points to very generic guidance. We don't have guidance for working on openSUSE KDE as far as I know. Improving openSUSE KDE improves the KDE experience for all openSUSE "products" (Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Leap, etc.).
I do agree though that while its not that hard for users who see a problem to become contributors who fix that problem, for people who'd like to contribute but don't know where to help or were to start we certainly could do better because this is important for keeping parts of the project going as some contributors naturally move onto other things. But just because we could do this better doesn't necessarily mean it is difficult to become a contributor at least not for myself, and for a number of people over the years who i've helped contribute there first package. -- 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
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 14:57:44 CEST schrieb Neal Gompa:
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
If you want to only hear from contributors, then we should have split this mailing list into two a long time ago. It was openSUSE's choice to have a merged users+contributors mailing list for openSUSE Factory based stuff. I even argued for this a few years ago during the Mailman migration. But the community wanted to retain it, so we did.
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
Keep in mind that "listening" != "doing". Having empathy and consideration for the people that use or want to use openSUSE can have lasting positive effects. This doesn't mean "overcommit yourself" (unless you want to!), but it does mean not being a jerk and making the developer community appear kind and approachable.
A project with no users is also a project with no contributors. That said, while what contributors want to do ultimately wins out, the messaging should be oriented around helping people become part of that group, not saying "your opinion doesn't matter because you're not a contributor".
Overall, I'm more concerned about how difficult it is to become a contributor, much less a regular one. The way openSUSE is developed makes it very hard for people to figure out how to contribute because it's splattered all over the place with no guidance available.
Some time ago, we set up https://contribute.opensuse.org/, but it only points to very generic guidance. We don't have guidance for working on openSUSE KDE as far as I know. Improving openSUSE KDE improves the KDE experience for all openSUSE "products" (Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Leap, etc.).
There is nothing more to add to this. Written more dimplomatically than I can. Regards Eric
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 10:36 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this resolves around KDE in MicroOS, which is clearly marked as ALPHA state. KDE as Desktop environment in Tumbleweed or other products is not the topic here. AFAICS it has never been the question whether KDE remains present there. Only for MicroOS. Best, phoenix
On 2023-05-10 11:48, Felix Niederwanger wrote:
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 10:36 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this resolves around KDE in MicroOS, which is clearly marked as ALPHA state.
KDE as Desktop environment in Tumbleweed or other products is not the topic here. AFAICS it has never been the question whether KDE remains present there. Only for MicroOS.
Best, phoenix
You are not wrong, at all, on any level. This is precisely the situation.
Hey, we're having some contradicting statements here. According to Richard's statement KDE is in the risk of being pulled from Tumbleweed*, which contradicts Shawn's statement that this is only about MicroOS KDE. The subject and following correspondences (e.g. Richard's follow-up on Monday) suggests that the context was only MicroOS. That was also the starting point of the thread (See first mail Wednesday). So either I missed a change of paths within this thread, or we are talking about two different things. Best, phoenix * That's what I read from "on any level"
Am 10.05.23 um 16:27 schrieb Felix Niederwanger:
According to Richard's statement KDE is in the risk of being pulled from Tumbleweed*, which contradicts Shawn's statement that this is only about MicroOS KDE. No that is definitely not true. Tumbleweed's support of KDE is among the best you can get in a Linux distro and I am very confident that it will remain like this in the mid-term. Even SLE/Leap gets a fair amount of new KDE stuff through the various channels (see the published 15.x repositories from the KDE:* projects on OBS).
Fabian, Luca, Christophe, Wolfgang, Antonio and many more do an excellent job here. - Ben
On 2023-05-10 16:27, Felix Niederwanger wrote:
Hey,
we're having some contradicting statements here.
According to Richard's statement KDE is in the risk of being pulled from Tumbleweed*, which contradicts Shawn's statement that this is only about MicroOS KDE.
The subject and following correspondences (e.g. Richard's follow-up on Monday) suggests that the context was only MicroOS. That was also the starting point of the thread (See first mail Wednesday).
So either I missed a change of paths within this thread, or we are talking about two different things.
Best, phoenix
* That's what I read from "on any level"
You misread KDE is not being removed from Tumbleweed Your initial assessment was wholly correct The only thing being discussed is removing the unmaintained KDE flavour of MicroOS desktop -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Martje Boudien Moerman
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 11:48 +0200, Felix Niederwanger wrote:
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 10:36 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this resolves around KDE in MicroOS, which is clearly marked as ALPHA state.
KDE as Desktop environment in Tumbleweed or other products is not the topic here. AFAICS it has never been the question whether KDE remains present there. Only for MicroOS.
Best, phoenix
Correct. KDE is still there in Tumbleweed, and Leap. Nothing going on in MicroOS Desktop has anything to do with it in other products.
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 11:48:33 CEST schrieb Felix Niederwanger:
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 10:36 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this resolves around KDE in MicroOS, which is clearly marked as ALPHA state.
KDE as Desktop environment in Tumbleweed or other products is not the topic here. AFAICS it has never been the question whether KDE remains present there. Only for MicroOS.
Well. If I understand it correctly, then ALP / MicroOS should be the successor of Leap. I'm only talking about Leap here. Then a very simple question. Will there be for the successor of Leap, no matter what it will be called, a KDE surface from the SuseTeam? Yes or No? PS: Somehow the statements here in the mailing list contradict with those in Matrix. I would like to see finally a very clear, simple, understandable statements about the successor of Leap. And not superficial marketing slogans, but facts, goals and tasks. What should it be called, what can it do, what not, what does it have, what not, what are the differences to the current Leap, technically and especially for me as a user, what will change for me as a user. Regards Eric
On Sat, 2023-05-13 at 10:07 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 10. Mai 2023, 11:48:33 CEST schrieb Felix Niederwanger:
On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 10:36 +0200, Eric Schirra wrote:
If you remove KDE, then in my opinion the project is dead for most users and they will use another distro, myself included.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this resolves around KDE in MicroOS, which is clearly marked as ALPHA state.
KDE as Desktop environment in Tumbleweed or other products is not the topic here. AFAICS it has never been the question whether KDE remains present there. Only for MicroOS.
Well. If I understand it correctly, then ALP / MicroOS should be the successor of Leap. I'm only talking about Leap here.
Then a very simple question. Will there be for the successor of Leap, no matter what it will be called, a KDE surface from the SuseTeam? Yes or No?
This has yet to be determined, there is a thread in this very mailing list discussing exactly what "Leap" is going to look like after 15.5. To the best of my knowledge, and I could be wrong, but I don't believe there are any SUSE employees being paid to maintain or develop KDE directly, and what we have in Leap, Tumbleweed, and MicroOS are currently all volunteer efforts. So if you're asking if SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH is going to "provide" a KDE desktop, I would suspect the answer is no.
PS: Somehow the statements here in the mailing list contradict with those in Matrix. I would like to see finally a very clear, simple, understandable statements about the successor of Leap. And not superficial marketing slogans, but facts, goals and tasks. What should it be called, what can it do, what not, what does it have, what not, what are the differences to the current Leap, technically and especially for me as a user, what will change for me as a user.
You are asking for clear answers to questions that haven't been answered yet. I suggest you read the current thread regarding this exact issue. This thread is probably the best starting point. https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/G...
On Mon, 2023-05-08 at 10:39 -0400, Joe Salmeri wrote:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
According to a currently ongoing, non-representative Reddit Poll, it's currently 424 KDE Users (60%) vs. 225 Gnome Users (30%). https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/13a0mef/your_preferred_opensuse_d... This is only indicative, but still. Best, phoenix
In data lunedì 8 maggio 2023 10:46:22 CEST, Richard Brown ha scritto: Hello Richard,
And with no one, at all, currently taking care of MicroOS Desktop KDE, then the cause of any MicroOS Desktop KDE issues will remain undetermined.
Perhaps it's because I've been living on Mars most of my recent times, figuratively speaking, but I didn't even *know* that MicroOS had KDE Plasma in its offerings: as far as I remembered, there was just GNOME. I'm not aware of anyone poking the KDE team either? But I might have missed the communication. -- Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team GPG key ID: A29D259B
On 2023-05-08 22:13, Luca Beltrame wrote:
In data lunedì 8 maggio 2023 10:46:22 CEST, Richard Brown ha scritto:
Hello Richard,
And with no one, at all, currently taking care of MicroOS Desktop KDE, then the cause of any MicroOS Desktop KDE issues will remain undetermined.
Perhaps it's because I've been living on Mars most of my recent times, figuratively speaking, but I didn't even *know* that MicroOS had KDE Plasma in its offerings: as far as I remembered, there was just GNOME. I'm not aware of anyone poking the KDE team either? But I might have missed the communication.
Why should folk run around poking others like that? It would seem to imply that the KDE team would have some obligation to support KDE on random new platforms..and I don't agree with that mindset When the MicroOS Desktop project started it was firmly intended to be GNOME first/only..but then a member of the regular KDE team dived in and added the KDE flavour If enthusiasm has dropped off, that's fine, but that would make general calls for attention more appropriate - That's how we got Shawn in the first place after the first time we hit this problem..and so it's the route we're taking again I'm looking forward to your contributions if you're stepping up to take care though :)
Il 09/05/23 10:16, Richard Brown ha scritto: Hello Richard,
It would seem to imply that the KDE team would have some obligation to support KDE on random new platforms..and I don't agree with that mindset
No, that's not what I meant: I guess I worded it incorrectly. I meant that to consider (or not) to contribute to MicroOS one had to be aware of such an effort. As I said, it is probably the fact that I'm involved less (change of jobs two years ago), but I never thought MicroOS had Plasma.
I'm looking forward to your contributions if you're stepping up to take care though :)
Well, for now I'm just wondering about how contributing to MicroOS works... any pointers to docs, etc.? -- Luca Beltrame GPG key ID: A29D259B -- Luca Beltrame GPG key ID: A29D259B
participants (19)
-
Andrei Borzenkov -
Attila Pinter -
Ben Greiner -
Eric Schirra -
Felix Miata -
Felix Niederwanger -
Gerald Pfeifer -
Giant Sand Fans -
Ignaz Forster -
Joe Salmeri -
Kilian Hanich -
Lubos Kocman -
Luca Beltrame -
Neal Gompa -
Richard Brown -
Sarah Julia Kriesch -
Shawn W Dunn -
Simon Lees -
Stefan Seyfried