On Wednesday 04 August 2010 15:47:32 Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas@kde.org> wrote:
My experience as a user of openSUSE is that this focus on the user experience is clearly lacking, things work, but the product is missing the Wow. (And I'm not talking about the "Wow, my harddisk is properly recognized" that we Linux geeks are so used to, I'm talking about the Wow a new user could experience when first trying openSUSE. It could well be that we fail to walk the last mile in terms of user experience, because we do not focus but rather spread the little energy we have, and thereby missing the opportunity.
I sounds to me like you're proposing a "Wow" strategy.
Essentially, yes. To me that means: - Things work - They do so intuitively - They are beautiful in the process - ... and at the same time very powerful - All that is Free. I've always been impressed that even complex tasks are fairly easy to do in openSUSE. That is if you get past being afraid of the monster that is Yast. To me, the challenge really is "Harnessing the power that is there in openSUSE and make it also attractive" Now Apple, and to a certain degree Canonical try to get to this attractiveness by removing complexity, which has negative effect on the "powerful" bit. Apple very much so, since they even severely limit the number of hardware options -- and it works: All things hardware related the Linux desktop has been struggling with forever "just work" on Apple systems, think of fast suspend, accelerated graphics and, yes, audio and multimedia. The Linux desktop, or rather "workspace" (taking mobile devices into account) and specifically openSUSE has a real chance if it can meet the standard Apple set in design and UX, but deliver a very powerful and Free system. What needs to happen is that we as the people who create openSUSE fully concentrate on delivering the power within openSUSE to the users, and that has everything to do with the UI and the quality. It's not about technology, it's about making technology accessible to users so it's actually applied. One might wonder if a strong vision won't make up for people that are walking away because they find their pet technology underrepresented, can't cope with change, or simply have other objectives. I'm pretty sure it would make up for that -- the real question is if the openSUSE community is able to take a decision that might hurt in the beginning, but provides a real chance of success and thus away going forward. -- sebas http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org