Lørdag den 31. juli 2010 00:56:54 skrev Stephan Kleine:

On Friday July 30 2010 19:31:58 Pavol Rusnak wrote:

...

openSUSE should strive to be the productive distribution for powerusers on modern PCs (workstation, laptop, netbook, server) and having a healthy balance of innovation and stability.

While I like that from the sound of it, besides the "Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie" part, how is it any different from what we currently try to do?

I'm the author of the proposal, so let me answer that. It is intentionally quite close to what I consider the status quo. Building on the current community and strengths of openSUSE as I see it, and trying to avoid alienating existing users and contributors too much, with a radically new strategy/goal/mission. But nevertheless it does change things. Currently openSUSE suffers from an identity crisis being considered n00b distro, expert distro and testbed/Fedora all at the same time. And not only outsiders have a hard time pinpointing what openSUSE is - our own contributors equally have these varying and conflcting ideas about what openSUSE is/should try to be. So basically what the strategy proposal tries to do is to take _one_ of openSUSE's current multiple identities - the one that is working the best for us - and make that one the future strategy. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Saturday 2010-07-31 00:56, Stephan Kleine wrote:

On Friday July 30 2010 19:31:58 Pavol Rusnak wrote:

...

=== As project, we will not focus on the following anymore ===

* Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie * Going out of our way to support old hardware and non-mainstream architectures * Supporting form-factors that are not workstation, laptop, server or netbook

---8<------8<------8<------8<------8<------8<---

While I like that from the sound of it, besides the "Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie" part, how is it any different from what we currently try to do?

openSUSE currently optimizes for Uncle Jack, not Aunt Tillie. That means we won't be spending hours on creating the most beautiful UI for proprietary installers. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 30 July 2010 19:46:44 Stephan Kleine wrote: ...

On a 2nd note: Is there some place where those "proposals" are listed?

http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Strategy http://en.opensuse.org/Category:Strategy -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Lørdag den 31. juli 2010 19:30:21 skrev Gerald Pfeifer:

On Fri, 30 Jul 2010, Pavol Rusnak wrote:

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We cannot compete with Ubuntu for the übernoob segment, and we shouldn't compete with Fedora on being experimental bleeding edge - instead we should pick the middle ground.

I don't think this is a fair characterization of Fedora. In my experience Fedora has been rather solid -- at the edge of things in terms of versions and not shy of version updates even after a release, but it's not feeling more experimental than openSUSE, rather more progressive.

I think that says more about deteriorating quality of openSUSE in recent years, than it does about Fedora being reliable. Or you must be either very lucky, or have very thick skin ;-)

...

This strategy would be nicely in line with SLE

Is this a benefit, a disadvantage, or neutral?

This should be a benefit. It should allow SLE development to complement the openSUSE strategy better/more - instead of being "wasted" or perhaps even counter-productive to the openSUSE strategy.

...

and what (open)SUSE has historically been

Is this a benefit, a disadvantage, or neutral?

That's a benefit. Most of our active contributors (and users) have been around for a long time, and it's better to keep existing contributors than to try and find new ones to replace them. And while I'm sure most contributors are pleased with what has happened to openSUSE on the _project_ side in recent years, I think a lot of people are longing back to the good old days in terms of the _distro_.

...

* Making sure as much as possible just works out of the box * Having good and sane defaults so the user can do what ''he'' wants to do * Focus on providing tools for being productive/creative (IDEs, editors, authoring tools, graphics manipulation, office productivity, etc.) * Providing admin tools that are powerful yet (reasonably) easy

Hard to disagree with any of these. :-) The first, second, and mostly fourth, specifically, really would be the same across all serious scenarios, wouldn't they?

Dunno. E.g. 1+2 may not be essential if you pursue a "reference platform" strategy or a "openSUSE for developers" strategy. No. 4 is not particularly important if you'd follow a Ubuntu'esque strategy. Powerful admin tools are certainly not a priority for them - when they do develop admin tools they're usually dumbed down versions of existing tools - like their AppStore thing. Similarly if we were to pursue a "#1 KDE distro" strategy, powerful admin tools might not be a very high priority either. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Sunday 2010-08-01 13:12, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Saturday 31 July 2010 19:30:21 Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

On Fri, 30 Jul 2010, Pavol Rusnak wrote:

...

We cannot compete with Ubuntu for the übernoob segment, and we shouldn't compete with Fedora on being experimental bleeding edge - instead we should pick the middle ground.

I don't think this is a fair characterization of Fedora. In my experience Fedora has been rather solid --

http://lwn.net/Articles/257564/

One reason why Fedora is more up to date is of course it's shorter release cycle. If you want Fedora timelyness, you'd have to:

I think openSUSE is doing fine atm. There is a bit of "sloppyness" "here and there" sometimes ("still using" rpm 4.4 in openSUSE 11.1 and coreutils 7.1 in openSUSE 11.3), but OTOH, there is rpm 4.8 and gcc 4.5 in 11.3.

- shorten the release cycle OR make openSUSE a rolling-release distro (horrible from a Q&A pov but fine with me, I used to use Arch)

- push the latest packages in each release, eg relax the freeze rules and shorten the freeze

Seems relaxed enough to me. (iptables 1.4.8 went in due to Linux 2.6.34.) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Søndag den 1. august 2010 11:58:53 skrev Otso:

On 30/07/2010, Pavol Rusnak wrote:

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We cannot compete with Ubuntu for the übernoob segment, and we shouldn't compete with Fedora on being experimental bleeding edge - instead we should pick the middle ground.

Claim that we can't compete with Ubuntu on user friendliness is plain absurd.

Nevertheless that is my claim, the reasons for it are mainly that: * openSUSE engineers are just not very good at making things that are intuitive, simple and non-scary for Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie, even when they try they usually fail, I guess they just don't have the right mindset for it or something. * The level of commitment that would be needed from Novell to compete with Ubuntu in terms of marketing and creating a polished, simplyfied product, is simply not there. Therefore we need to find a niche where we are actually competitive, instead of just being a failed, second-rate Ubuntu - which is how a lot of people currently perceive openSUSE

...

The main purpose of the strategy in my opinion is to help developers, contributors and marketers all pull in same direction, and to clarify for users what openSUSE tries to be and do.

Your "strategy" is brittle. Labeling oSuse as "distro for powerusers" brings automatical association with Gentoo and Arch, at least in my mind. I wouldn't want to try anything like that.

There's nothing productive or professional about Arch and Gentoo though ;-) Maybe "productive" and "professional" should be emphasized more in this strategy, and perhaps "poweruser" should be replaced with the less excluding "powerful", to avoid this confusion - but still communicate that people shouldn't expect something uber-simple with zero learning curve. I think if we succeeded in branding openSUSE as "the powerful, professional, produtive linux for home users", then there'd suddenly be a bit of a "cool- factor" to using openSUSE, and n00bs would try it anyway - only they would have more realistic expectations about the simplicity, and would probably be happier with it. Also, many (most?) people have a poweruser among their friends or family to help them with distro selection, installation, setup etc. So if we capture the powerusers, it's a good platform to gain grounds with less advanced users.

...

=== As project, we will not focus on the following anymore ===

1 * Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie

1. What's wrong with being user-friendly again? It's not like it stops the "powerusers" from doing what they want, on contrary, it's a stepping stone if done right. Having easily editable /etc/* configs simultaneously with nice UI with nice how-to's isn't exactly a miracle to perform.

There's nothing wrong with it, we are just not very good at it, and we should accept that, and create a strategy/identity which matches the things we're actually really good at - which is making powerful, professional stuff. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Monday 02 August 2010 12:28:32 Cornelius Schumacher wrote:

[...] What would be the place of this infrastructure, community, etc. in this strategy?

Note that all proposals include the Community statement that we made initially, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

Le 06/08/2010 09:00, Martin Schlander a écrit :

Fredag den 30. juli 2010 19:31:58 skrev Pavol Rusnak:

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== openSUSE - For the productive poweruser ==

after rereading all the strategy, I think what is wrong in yours is.. the name :-). This was said already, but I don't remember a good proposal (I didn't reread all the mailing list, I may have missed something). I fear than for many people, the "power user" is somebody else. Better should be "curious user" "freemind user", "active user", I mean any user that don't use his computer in the stock configuration (as opposit of what my sister do, who don't know what is a program or an application!), but also anybody that have a friend or relative that can do this for him. may be simply "productive user" (without power) is enough.

...

who will do the work?

As this strategy deliberately tries to be quite close to the current reality of things, the strategy shouldn't require much extra work - if any.

if I understood well this strategy, it's very near from what we do if not identical

* Differentiation from Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu.

may be a more clear goal (isn't it the goal of the present discussion?), because I don't think *any* linux distro can be used by anybody. Notice that this problem is mainly because no linux distribution is installed in the computer by the vendor. Because most linux distro pre-installed should be easier to use than windows (IMHO)

And I personally believe there's a big _craving_ out there, for a gratis, home-user distro that actually tries to be productive and professional. I see a lot of experienced, highly technical Linux people switching to OSX in the last couple of years - and I think a big part of the reason for that is that they don't find any other productive (desktop) Unix.

I really don't think that opensource programmers can cope with the Apple philosophy! And the future of Apple is Istore, not Mac, and closed applications (tighly closed)

...

what may openSUSE lose because of it?

We might lose some of our Joe Sixpack type users. I don't think we have too many of those to begin with

seeing the Linux % in the market, none. At least linux users *try* to become a power user :-) , and since this strategy is pretty close to the

status quo, I don't think that many existing users would be lost.

exactly

We might lose some of the contributors whose motivation is spreading Linux to as many people as possible and competing with Ubuntu for marketshare.

I really never seen what ubuntu have that we don't. Except if they are breaking the Debian licence. And I tryed to become an Ubuntu user, liking they LTS system. I never could :-(

We also might lose people who are all about exciting bleeding edge and unstable things.

do we need to have the very last kde or gnome? I beg we should drop this or leave it to studio. Bleeding edge people can use factory :-). But we shouldn't leave behind too many old hardware, many power users are not money rich :-( so it looks like your proposal can be merged with the status quo one :-) that said, if this proposal is finally retained (may be after some merge with others, not only the satus quo), wil will have to add some "perspective to the future" For example, I hope than some device will compete against the completely closed Ipad. We should have some manpower dedicated at lurking on the subject to be ready to go if ever openSUSE on a tablet could run. Same for openSUSE on a phone. this market will largely overhelm the current pc market soon or later, making all the PC obsolete jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://pizzanetti.fr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

Le 06/08/2010 11:59, Cornelius Schumacher a écrit :

I think the "productive poweruser" is pretty similar to the "technical user" I proposed as a target in the platform strategy. The criteria I offered was "everybody who ever bought a computer magazine",

this mean much more than technical user!! that said I agree. "everybody who ever bought a computer magazine" is a good goal/target jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://pizzanetti.fr -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 2010-08-06 12:35, jdd wrote:

Le 06/08/2010 11:59, Cornelius Schumacher a écrit :

...

I think the "productive poweruser" is pretty similar to the "technical user" I proposed as a target in the platform strategy. The criteria I offered was "everybody who ever bought a computer magazine",

this mean much more than technical user!!

that said I agree. "everybody who ever bought a computer magazine" is a good goal/target

Well.. let's hope that your definition of computer magazine does not include computer "tabloids" ("65536 tips on how to make Windows faster!!111") -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

...

I fear than for many people, the "power user" is somebody else. Better should be "curious user" "freemind user", "active user", I mean any user that don't use his computer in the stock configuration (as opposit of what my sister do, who don't know what is a program or an application!), but also anybody that have a friend or relative that can do this for him. may be simply "productive user" (without power) is enough.

I think the "productive poweruser" is pretty similar to the "technical user" I proposed as a target in the platform strategy. The criteria I offered was "everybody who ever bought a computer magazine", so people who like to understand how something works, who make heavy use of their systems, probably tweak it to some degree, but of course still need a good range of standard applications for handling everyday tasks.

I'd identify them as people who like to use computers to do stuff, and have taken the trouble to learn a bit about their tool of choice. The distribution platform strategy shares the benefit of this strategy in that it's about what the software can be used for rather than what it's made of. The cloud computing strategy could be fit into this mould if it were about presenting a coherent computing platform across a wide variety of hardware architectures including cloud (distributed, cluster and virtual servers), mobile, desktop, laptop, thin client etc etc. It would then have sense from my perspective (I would know I could load openSUSE on any platform and immediately be productive on it, and I could develop software and transport it from one architecture to another (relatively) painlessly. It's all about what you can do with it rather than what it's made of. David -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 06 August 2010 10:56:58 Martin Schlander wrote:

Fredag den 6. august 2010 09:00:12 skrev Martin Schlander:

...

Fredag den 30. juli 2010 19:31:58 skrev Pavol Rusnak:

...

== openSUSE - For the productive poweruser ==

=== Statement ===

openSUSE should strive to be the productive distribution for powerusers on modern PCs (workstation, laptop, netbook, server) and having a healthy balance of innovation and stability.

Lubos asked that strategies should answer the following three basic questions, so I'll try to do that for the proposal I put forward. And add them to the wiki page too.

...

who will do the work?

As this strategy deliberately tries to be quite close to the current reality of things, the strategy shouldn't require much extra work - if any.

Instead it would hopefully mean a bit less work in some areas, as it tones down the efforts made on Joe Sixpack and exciting new bleeding edge technologies somewhat.

By being fairly in sync with the goals for SLE (I presume), it should also mean that this strategy would benefit directly from the work done for SLE.

...

what will openSUSE actually gain from it?

* A clear direction and identity (but that is/should be true for any strategy) * There would suddenly be a bit of "cool-factor" to using and contributing to openSUSE * Differentiation from Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu.

And I personally believe there's a big _craving_ out there, for a gratis, home-user distro that actually tries to be productive and professional. I see a lot of experienced, highly technical Linux people switching to OSX in the last couple of years - and I think a big part of the reason for that is that they don't find any other productive (desktop) Unix.

...

what may openSUSE lose because of it?

We might lose some of our Joe Sixpack type users. I don't think we have too many of those to begin with, and since this strategy is pretty close to the status quo, I don't think that many existing users would be lost.

We might lose some of the contributors whose motivation is spreading Linux to as many people as possible and competing with Ubuntu for marketshare. Maybe I should clarify that I'm personally one of these (e.g. I'm the author of opensuse-guide.org and a translator). And I've strived for openSUSE world domination for several years now, and all the while the task has only gotten more and more futile, because of how the distro/project has developed - while competition from other distros has increased in the same period.

So I think these contributors would soon be lost anyway. And I don't think that very many of our big, core contributors care about Joe Sixpack, marketshare, world domination and such things anyway.

We also might lose people who are all about exciting bleeding edge and unstable things. But I don't think we have that many of those, and the OBS should allow them to go wild and break their systems as much as they like. So losses in this area should be limited too.

I forgot to answer one of Lubos' questions:

...

what will openSUSE look like in 2 years?

My vision of it is this:

* "Powerful, productive and professional" will be the keywords everybody in the community has on their minds while developing and promoting openSUSE.

* openSUSE will be the preferred distro for moderately technical and highly technical users who want to get things done with Linux. And this is "generally accepted knowledge".

* openSUSE will not be considered a competitor for Ubuntu in the newbie segment.

... but it would go more for the corporate desktop. After all, if you sit behind a computer all day, a dumbed-down system which requires you to do twice as much work to get anything done, just to not have to present you with a 5th button in the interface is NOT what you are looking for. IOW this proposal doesn't just target system admins and computer-savy people but ANYONE who has to work behind a computer all day. If you work in the administrative part of a big company, this is for you. If you're you'r own boss, this is for you (eg you need apps like the KDE Financial apps to be good so you can handle your invoices & finances). Right?

* openSUSE will not be considered a competitor for Fedora in terms of innovation and bleeding edge.

And finally...

* The SUSE Linux Enterprise business is booming because a lot more sysadmins and developers have started using openSUSE at home, which lead to them buying enterprise subscribtions in their workplace. And even the most daft Novell execs realize that investment and growth in the consumer Linux space ho is a crucial part of growing the enterprise Linux business.

Moreover, it's focus on professionals in general (backoffices at companies, individual entrepreneurs, SOHO) makes it a great fit to what Novell tries to do with SLED. Imho a compelling strategy for sure. It gives a clear message so it is easy to market, fits with our current contributor- and userbase and aligns with our main sponsor.

Fredag den 6. august 2010 11:53:32 skrev Carlos E. R.:

On 2010-08-06 09:00, Martin Schlander wrote:

...

Fredag den 30. juli 2010 19:31:58 skrev Pavol Rusnak:

...

what may openSUSE lose because of it?

We lose powerusers of the admin type or do-my-work types, because the life cycle has been lowered to 18 months instead of 24.

Where do they go? Fedora and Mandriva have shorter life-time (12-13 months). Normal Ubuntu has the same (18 months). So that leaves them with Debian Stable (30+ months), Ubuntu LTS (36 months on desktops), and various rolling release distros. Neither of which should be very appealing - at least not on desktops.

You have to wait about 3 months after release for the distro version to be good enough. Install, use for a year, then you have only 3 months to decide to upgrade.

At least some of that should be helped by this strategy, as it should lead to slightly more conservative choices in development.

I know of a few admin types, also good *contributors*, that have left the distro for other grounds precisely because of the short life (a poweruser probably knows several distros and has the knowledge to get going on another distro). So we lose contributors. It has already happened.

What has already happened is basically off-topic . The strategy starts from _now_ and looks ahead from here. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org

On Friday 06 August 2010 14:47:07 Carlos E. R. wrote:

On 2010-08-06 12:48, Martin Schlander wrote:

...

Fredag den 6. august 2010 11:53:32 skrev Carlos E. R.:

...

On 2010-08-06 09:00, Martin Schlander wrote:

...

Fredag den 30. juli 2010 19:31:58 skrev Pavol Rusnak:

...

what may openSUSE lose because of it?

We lose powerusers of the admin type or do-my-work types, because the life cycle has been lowered to 18 months instead of 24.

Where do they go?

Fedora and Mandriva have shorter life-time (12-13 months).

Normal Ubuntu has the same (18 months).

So that leaves them with Debian Stable (30+ months), Ubuntu LTS (36 months on desktops), and various rolling release distros. Neither of which should be very appealing - at least not on desktops.

I know of one that said Debian, for the entire shop except a live or virtual with oS to keep track of us. Another is on Ubuntu, with intention to move over to Debian 6 when it is ready,

...

...

You have to wait about 3 months after release for the distro version to be good enough. Install, use for a year, then you have only 3 months to decide to upgrade.

At least some of that should be helped by this strategy, as it should

lead to

...

slightly more conservative choices in development.

I think I'll skip 11.3 myself. Too risky. The video thing is a nightmare at the moment.

...

...

I know of a few admin types, also good *contributors*, that have left the distro for other grounds precisely because of the short life (a poweruser probably knows several distros and has the knowledge to get going on another distro). So we lose contributors. It has already happened.

What has already happened is basically off-topic . The strategy starts from _now_ and looks ahead from here.

If you say so... if people leave because of the current state of things, making me shut up doesn't help.

Agreed. Well, I think that with this strategy there is a lot of opportunity to gain new contributors. Some of those might be interested in creating a long-term version of openSUSE. And if you can spare the $$$ there is always SLED, of course...