On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 18:45, Martin Winter me@letsfindaway.de wrote:
Hi all,
I followed the discussion of the revived marketing team and also the meeting on 8.1.2020 from the perspective of a desktop user and having in mind people which want to switch from Windows to Linux. After thinking about this discussion I think we could/should put even more focus on attracting newcomers. This means that we should be more visible also outside the established Linux and openSUSE communities and reduce the entry hurdles.
Some proposals:
- Improve www.o.o. Some ideas below.
- Write articles or article series for computer magazines and web
sites targeted to the general user
- (I should have more ideas, but currently that's it, sorry)
This is going to be addressed when news-o-o starts being published off Github [1]. Anybody will be able to write an article and push it there.
For the www.o.o website:
- First, write openSUSE the right way! At the German version it is
spelled OpenSUSE :(
- Improve the slogan. The German translation sounds like machine
translation and is not appealing. One idea which came to my mind was "openSUSE: Get it! Use it! Be part of it!" linking to the download, the documentation and the community, resp.
- Improve the links in the Tools section. They go directly into some
quite deep pages instead of first telling what this is. E.g. YaST: yes, the linked page tells a little bit what this is. But when you go to `Documentation` you're already at developer documentation level. Keep the user in mind!
- Contributing: are Code and Hardware really the two options? Put
more focus on the community!
- Generally: read the page with the eyes of a user who has heard of
openSUSE recently and now wants to try it out. Give her/him everything she/he needs!
In general, I want to move everything distribution related out of www-o-o, and expand on it on software-o-o (which I started doing in [2]). We cannot possibly explain everything we need to explain on the project page, so having a page that explains more about the distribution in another place sounds like the way to go. As for the slogan, Get it! Discover it! Create it! was a thing back when the only services openSUSE provided were the distribution (get it), Wiki (discover it) and OBS (create it). Nowadays, that's not very representative of the openSUSE Project.
Just some points I stumbled across when I was in about that situation two years ago:
- Download was easy. But the page with instructions on how to create
a bootable USB stick under Windows mentioned SUSE Studio Image writer. This tool is no longer supported for Windows and difficult to install. Remove it in favor of Etcher. Such a hurdle at the very beginning of the installation of openSUSE can be disappointing.
- Mention the Multimedia codec topic in some prominent place. Discuss
openSUSE's decision not to include some codecs in the standard repositories and the user's options. EVERY desktop user stumbles across this point, and quite some stop using openSUSE at this point because this does not work out of the box.
This is mentioned in openSUSE Welcome, which shows up on every installation on the first boot.
- Finding the proper documentation was quite difficult. E.g. I had to
ask on a forum before I found the page in the wiki explaining all the repositories and their content. There is no prominent link called `Documentation` on www.o.o.
Also in openSUSE Welcome.
- Go through the Wiki. There are quite some pages, where the latest
tested version for a documentation is 42.3 or even older. This makes a bad impression. Huch, is openSUSE still alive?! And provide some good entry points to relevant information for newcomers. There are so many portals! Where should I start?
You are free to improve anything on the Wiki :D
Thank you Vincent for reviving the marketing team and all others participating in this effort! openSUSE is great and deserves a good visibility.
[1] https://github.com/openSUSE/news-o-o [2] https://github.com/openSUSE/software-o-o/pull/667
LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world