On 2011-04-04 Martin wrote:
Mandag den 4. april 2011 18:07:16 skrev Jos Poortvliet:
we're already seen as not-innovative and that's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody, after all, will join openSUSE development if it is seen as boring. So it will BE boring just because of that.
We've done pretty OK with our 11.4 release in terms of features, so now people want to know more. Let's try and give them that.
Why? I thought the strategy was making something productive, not hyped "innovation" for the sake of innovation.
I think you're overestimating the importance of "new (distro specific) stuff". People are craving for something that works and is usable. And whenever something changes a little bit half of the users will whine like crazy - not praise the innovation.
Sure, users want something that works. But I'm not asking what improvements we will do in the stability and performance area but what new things we do because marketing needs those to market openSUSE. Unfortunately, journalists, bloggers and in general techies on the web are entirely uninterested in a list of fixed bugs. And without them writing about openSUSE, nobody will KNOW about the new releases and we won't have many users left in a few years. They want features and cool things. Do you know what got openSUSE 11.4 most attention? Tumbleweed. What got us most criticism? We don't innovate. Now for an end user it might not matter that much - but that end user won't HEAR about openSUSE unless we get bloggers to blog and journalists to write. Hence we need, among the improvements to "just work" things, sexy features. Oh and I'm marketing enough to be able to talk a little innovative feature which make things just work (like finally catching up to other distro's in the area of application installation UI's) as a big one. OK?
What innovation does Debian or Gentoo or Arch do? ... They just ship packages, and they don't seem to have much trouble being hyped or attracting contributors.
Indeed, that is why they get little attention and little users. Debian is a bit of an exception in terms of users (mostly thanks to Ubuntu, I would say) but Gentoo is almost dead and ok, Arch is great for the few thousand powerusers it has. We have a million users, 90% of which would never have come if we didn't get any mainstream tech press. And Arch and Gentoo don't get that while Debian is merely mentioned as a "harder to use Ubuntu", if at all.
We should just accept that there are no resources for major innovations (except susestudio and webyast which most users have no interest in) and set realistic, honest goals. We can barely maintain the distro as it is.
Luckily there are people working on noteworthy features,
And I think we'd be much more succesful if we could deliver functional NetworkManager and updater applets for the first time in years, than providing some hyped "innovation".
As I said, we can talk those up if needed. Having things that "just work" are features too. In general, I mostly see comments in this tread from non-developers with feature requests and suggestions for improvements. I appreciate that you guys have opinions and I could surely add 1000 others to that but it is off-topic and just cluttering the discussion. Couldn't you have spread those opinions in either another tread or where it belongs (openFATE)? I don't want to smack down on you but I have 500 unread mails in opensuse-project@ and I bet I'm not the only one. The large amount of irrelevant traffic is what keeps developers OFF this list. We all know multimedia is an issue, we all know we don't package this and that etc, nothing new you guys said... Sorry to say it but it's true. Can we keep the meta discussions in a separate thread (or just skip them as it's nothing new anyway) and focus on what we're doing here? Thanks, Jos