On Thursday 2010-08-05 11:23, Martin Schlander wrote:
And steadily getting worse as the distro strays further and further from its roots. And the damage is enormous. Effective marketing is downright impossible and development is all over the place.
Can you corroborate your statements at least?
Which one of them in particular? ;-)
Let me try
steadily getting worse as the distro strays further and further from its roots.
Novell systematically dropping investment in openSUSE. Naturally this results in a product that is quite different from what it used to be.
* firing developers * making the ones that weren't fired work on webyast, susestudio etc. * dropping sax2 and yast modules * dropping 24 month support * outsourcing the boxset completely * dropping ppc * I heard rumours that jimmac won't be replaced and artwork will be fully dependant on volunteers going forward.
And all these resources being taken away from openSUSE are not re-applied elsewhere in the project. They're just freed up so we can barely maintain the status quo.
You seem to be wanting to dictate where a company has to put its manpower (clearly you are free to make that suggestion). But for all I know, if something like that was so easily possible, $ANYDISTRO could snap their fingers like a Q and suddenly all companies in the world would be working towards $distro rather than their corporate products based on it. You should be happy that Novell doesn't keep all of the SLE stuff - say, ia64/s390x specfile additions - to itself, but merges them back into openSUSE.
Effective marketing is downright impossible
Some will say "openSUSE is great for n00bs" others will say "openSUSE is cool, innovative bleeding edge stuff" and some will say "openSUSE is just so stable and powerful and high-tech", etc.
When everybody is conveying different (and mutually exclusive) messages - and most of the time the message is out of sync with the reality of the distro, marketing is extremely ineffective - often damaging even.
I don't see why a distro could not be appalling to more than one type of user. "Given enough manpower", you surely can link both factory-edge with stability and impress that class of users.
development is all over the place
Well. I see three main directions.
Some developers will treat openSUSE like in the good old days. Striving for a powerful, polished, stable distro that "just works".
Others are treating openSUSE like a testbed/Fedora. Where testing and showcasing the latest stuff is the most important thing, and functionality and stability is secondary.
And finally some will treat openSUSE like an Ubuntu, trying to make it appealing to Aunt Tillie and Joe Sixpack.
The end result is of course that noone is very happy with it. * The people who want a functional stable distro are dispappointed.
They should choose Debian then.
* The people who want all the latest, hyped, exciting non-working stuff are disappointed.
They should choose Fedora then.
* And finally the people who just want a n00b distro where non-free drivers and codecs are as easy as possible to install - and hope they'll never, ever need to launch a terminal are disappointed too.
They should choose something else - Windows? - then. openSUSE's strength could just be _not_ to be specialized, but to have a little bit of everything. After all, a soup should not be unswalloable, completely salty, nor completely stale - http://picpaste.de/ta.png . -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org