On Thursday 05 August 2010 13:36:30 C wrote:
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 13:23, Martin Schlander wrote:
I'm in Denmark :-)
And here Ubuntu (+derivatives like Mint) have at least 60% of the home user linux market, maybe even more. And steadily growing.
And therein lies a question... why? Why is Ubuntu gaining so much at the expense of others like openSUSE? Maybe because it's dead easy to install. I am amazed at how well 10.04 works, and how easy it was to install... openSUSE on the other hand... not so easy. It's not hard, but t's certainly a lot more involved and cryptic than Ubuntu is to install and use... ease of use.. ease of install go a LONG way towards acceptance and uptake.
Outside of our little openSUSE Ivory Tower, I'm seeing the impact of this. Commercial vendors that used to fully support openSUSE are dropping it from their lineup of supported distributions... they support Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora. Inconveniently the RedHard rpms fail due to dependency issues... not because the dependency doesnt' exist, but because openSUSE gives it a slightly different name. I got into a discussion about this with support at a company that recently dropped openSUSE from their lineup. For them it came down to work vs return. They said in the past few years openSUSE went from being a significant portion of their paying customer base to pretty much zero. The way the conversation went, I have a feeling I'm the only openSUSE customer they've got left :-( I'm the only one who complained to support. With essentially zero customers on openSUSE, there was no point in providing an RPM anymore.
Imho the problem is more marketing than quality - but marketing also depends heavily on a clear and consise message. KDE marketing for example got a huge boost from the KDE 4 series: a strong focus on innovation and new things. Now the actual product wasn't that great, initially, but ppl saw the vision and we had literally hundreds and hundreds of new developers join the KDE community, while the GNOME numbers kept the same or even shrunk a bit at that time. openSUSE lacks a clear direction, Ubuntu does not. So Ubuntu has a very clear image - anyone can see what it is about. And it helps them. Meanwhile I also would like to 'protest' against the idea you put forward that commercial parties are dumping SUSE. Novell is far, far, far more successful than Ubuntu at getting OEM deals, for example. The only big deal Ubuntu ever got was Dell (previously Novell) and they only got it because they basically gave it away for free (Novell didn't). And a year later - they lost it, Dell simply stopped shipping linux completely. Meanwhile, MSI, HP and a few other big OEM companies offer SUSE on their systems. The numbers shipped there each mont are probably bigger than what Ubuntu ever did at Dell. So again. Nobody knows this stuff (I know I didn't until a few hours ago, darn) and that's why Ubuntu seems so popular. Reality, while nobody has hard numbers, is most likely different. And I hope now that I'm here the openSUSE marketing team can work more with the Novell marketing team, and get the word out on how populuar our dear Geeko (both openSUSE and SLED) really is!
Anyway... this is beyond the scope of the original discussion.
Yep, and I made it worse, sorry about that... But I wanted to make clear that it ain't that bad and we can reverse it. Having a clear strategy, whatever it turns out to be, will help with that. And as I've kind-of said before, I support a focus on powerusers and developers or the cloud/mobile one. Both bring the opportunity of a clear direction throughout the stack and much potential for improvement and growth. And both are easy to market ;-) Love and hugs, Jos
C.