2009/2/6 James Tremblay aka SLEducator <fxrsliberty@opensuse.us>:
I think the reason things like this keep going Ubuntu is not that Ubuntu is better but that LTS makes Ubuntu more usable and more re-installable because its less update intensive.
HP have a lot of Debian experience, ironically at http://lwn.net/Articles/318270/ there's discussion about the lack of Ubuntu branding. Ubuntu LTS gets point release updates. Security updates are also free, no subscription. In long term Ubuntu getting foot in door via desktop with a solid system, is going to get them into the server room, and income generating contracts, rather than deployments which cost.
It's our duty to find a way to keep the libre\free version of SUSE as close to enterprise as possible without stealing it's thunder. We have to find a blend of reliability and pioneering edge. SLED moves to slow for personal usage yet, IMHO , openSUSE seems to move to fast.
On forum, new Linux users are getting unsettled and confused by bugs, and useability nits. Experienced users are often turning off the newer features that cause issues, or bloat eg) Pulse Audio, Beagle etc To me openSUSE's strengths are : o On Desktop, enhanced GNOME, enhanced & most polished KDE 3. OTOH KDE 4.1 with backports with KDE 4.2 so soon after our release, seems to have missed the market. o YaST & zypper, very simple hardware configuration, but very flexible. Hand hacks still an option with a little care. Configuring a dual NIC machine with Ubuntu tools was not straightforward, and involved rolling sleeves up, getting into detailed config o General technical excellence, and contributing to the "state of the art" But how to translate that into a short term user benefit? o General Purpose, so time invested on transferable skills For some reason, zypper & YaST are not fully appreciated, the meme "apt is better than rpm" is rather entrenched, and repeated by Magazine journalists. When I actually did my evaluation, I was shocked by Debian's issues with over-lapping tools, non-unified dependency calculations causing gotcha's, and noted the user base, weren't switching over to the recommended tool (aptitude) but using CLI. Perhaps we can focus on perceived useability issues in YaST modules, and do performance comparisons, but changing peoples minds is always hard, even when you're loaded with solid facts. The weak point of an LTS, with frozen software, is that it supports less and less new hardware. To really overcome the perceived #1 statuses of Fedora/Red Hat & Ubuntu in different fields, don't we have to find something significantly better, that pre-disposes folk running proprietary UNIX or Windows to consider OS & SLE as a front runner? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org