-----Original Message----- From: Cornelius Schumacher [mailto:cschum@suse.de] Sent: 28 July 2010 09:18 To: opensuse-project@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [opensuse-project] Re: openSUSE Strategy Discussion: The Linux Distribution Platform Strategy
On Wednesday 28 July 2010 09:53:32 Jim Henderson wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:00:55 +0200, Pavol Rusnak wrote:
The openSUSE distribution acts as a reference distribution, providing an environment for testing the used technology, a stabilizing ground for common components, and a real-life use case for applying technology and distributing Linux software. It's targeted at technically interested users, including programmers and system administrators. It has a focus on good user experience and making technology available to end users. It doesn't target users with highly specific technical needs.
To me, "good user experience" isn't very specific, and in some ways might come across as contradicting the "no focus" area of "non-technical users" - not that technical users can't have a good user experience, but that there's an implication of 'polish' that's more associated with a non- technical audience. I hope that makes sense, because it seems at the moment to not be easy to explain what I mean.
Good user experience isn't very specific, that's right. But the important part is that it is a focus. That we actually care about the experience of the user and take this into account when taking decisions about what to do and how to do it. What this means in details of course has to be worked out, but if this is a serious direction, this is just a natural part of development.
I don't think it's a contradiction to not focusing on non-technical end users. These are orthogonal issues. Focus on good user experience is one thing, which users are our target group is another thing. The "polish" will be different dependent on the target group, but it needs to be done to provide a good experience in any case.
I agree - I interpret "good user experience" mostly as "it works out of the box" and "you can do normal configuration using a GUI". Technical experts will always want to edit the config files, but most people (I included) like to be able to install most of the stuff I use without error messages and without it breaking other stuff. Some of the stuff I focus more attention on and delve into the internals, but only some. One aspect of this which is important is stability - it worked yesterday and it works (the same) today and I expect it to also work tomorrow, even if I've updated / installed security patches etc. That's a big factor in encouraging commercial companies (e.g. ATI) to provide drivers or ported software (e.g skype) - it costs them money if they have to do extensive retesting and incompatibility fixing every few weeks. David -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org