Awesome Billy! I've been thinking about this a good bit recently too. A month or so back I sent an email to the Project list (http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2009-03/msg00077.html) about original contributions back into the Project. From the responses in that list and other discussions going on in the Project, I'll have to say the biggest detraction to us who want to increase innovation is that most of the people involved in the project want to work toward making openSUSE much more stable than it currently is. I can't disagree with their goals, but I can say that I believe that there is room for both. I recently used Ubuntu 9.04 beta and I have to say it offers a few nice features we don't have, like the ability to switch users, change Pidgin visibility, and shut down or sleep the computer from the same menu. Not saying that I want that feature necessarily, but it is some innovation on the desktop. Most of the stuff you mentioned, such as SLAB, Compiz, etc. were developed at Novell for SLED 10, although it was, of course, open source. (KickOff was developed for KDE on openSUSE 10.2, so that's a great exception). Luckily, we have great tools at our discretion, particularly openFATE, to propose, design, and develop new features and updates to the OS. I've already got a few feature requests in, which basically just request a few extra packages to add some functionality to the desktop (such as Facebook chat to Pidgin, including Gwibber for microblogging). Of course what we need even more of is developers. We can propose ideas until the lizards come home, we need people who can take those ideas and run with it. Unfortunately, I'm not a developer (the only language I know is English, and that's debatable depending on who you talk to ;-) ), so hopefully we can get some more devs in the project. Anyway, I love that more people are starting to want to see new developments on the user side here at openSUSE. Let's make this rock! -- Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy openSUSE Member www.twitter.com/KevinDupuy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org

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On 03/31/2009 at 10:23 PM, wrote:

Hello, I have been an openSUSE user since 10.0. What made me so excited about the project was the unique desktop innovation that the was happening on the platform. Features like the slab, kickoff and compiz made suse feel years ahead of other distros. But now, three years later it seems as though very little change has taken place. It had gotten to the point that I spent the past 6 months on Windows 7, which, unlike openSUSE is making significant UX advances. Yesterday I switched back, and I have decided to dedicate myself to making openSUSE one of the best distros (UX wise). Over the coming months I plan to go through a large portion of the suse (gnome and maybe kde as well) desktop and provide feedback (including mockups, pictures, etc.) on how it can be improved. It seems other distros are becoming stagnent too, this is openSUSE's chance to take the lead in innovation.

Hi Billy, I wonder which issues will be in your focus. Do you want to look onto single dialogs or the complete workflow or both? Do you want to provide a cool experience or do you want to take things like "consistency" into account? BTW: I like the suggestion to store ideas in openFATE. Greetings, Sigi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org