On 11/27/2013 04:58 AM, Manuel Trujillo (TooManySecrets) wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:29 AM, agustin benito bethencourt <abebe@suse.com> wrote:
As you know openSUSE has a solid reputation about a heavy distro, and for "heavy" I'm thinking about to be a slow system. This is one. I'm using Linux since 1993 and I know more or less the Linux community. This perception is changing, but in a slowly way. By the way, openSUSE has a very strong reputation about to be a solid and stable distro.
And in terms of the project as a whole?
I think it's very unknown. There are other projects with much more community (like Fedora or Ubuntu, for example). But I'm confident that this will be changing in the future.
3.- What is your perception, your picture?
My picture is that openSUSE needs a Long Term Service (more than the 3 years that we can afford with the EverGreen program). I'm talking about 5 years. If we can penetrate in the server market like Ubuntu LTS (sorry for the comparisons but are inevitables), openSUSE will be a very used and strong distro.
So in your opinion, increasing the maintenance cycle would be enough to get a perception of being a competitor of Ubuntu LTS? Where (in which niches/areas/market) do you think we could compete?
We are very strong in the areas of desktop and workstations, but if all the system administrators could use openSUSE in the servers, the developers could use more openSUSE because it would be the same as used on servers. It may be stupid, but I have many years watching this dynamic.
I agree with the correlation you are trying to draw, more users pull more developers, but I disagree that it is related to Ubuntu LTS. I think: - mindshare and perception are huge factors in garnering not just user, but also developer attention. + for better or worse mindshare and perception is still mostly created by marketing and a constant loud noise of messages, Shuttleworth is good at that - for developers tools are important + we have great tools and lots of choice + there is a large contingent of Java developers and those are out of our reach, we do not have eclipse and comparatively our Java dev stack is not as complete as other distros - developers like to have the latest and greatest at their fingertips + I think developers want the latest incarnation of the tools in their area of interest, while they want everything around those tools to remain mostly stable and slow to change + I think openSUSE is perfectly positioned for this with our devel project model, where a developer working in Perl, Python, Go,.... can have that part of the distribution in flux with the latest and greatest from OBS while keeping the rest moving at an 8 month or so pace. Not having this well known is a marketing thing... ;) I agree with you that there is a strong correlation between users, or I should say perceived popularity of a distribution and the number of developers that use that distribution. I do not think that Ubuntu LTS is at the heart of creating the perception that Ubuntu is the leading distribution in terms of usage. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org