On 16/01/2019 16:45, Bjoern Voigt wrote:
Unfortunately. I trained Linux newbies over several years. In Germany it was clear, that we take SUSE Linux and later openSUSE. Most of the people in my courses also started using SUSE at home or at work. SUSE lost many of such users.
I agree. I was a SUSE Pro user for many years myself and it worries me to see how much mindshare it has lost. One big thing is seldom discussed. It upset a *lot* of FOSS people when SUSE signed a patent-sharing deal with Microsoft. This allowed it to continue using the very Windows-like KDE desktop without fear of litigation. And yet, the enterprise editions now only ship with GNOME 3. I would submit that the top 4 distros, in terms of mindshare, are: * the Red Hat family (inc Fedora, CentOS etc.) -- defaults to GNOME * the Ubuntu family - defaults to GNOME * Debian - defaults to GNOME * SLE (defaults to GNOME with a bolted-on taskbar-type switcher) and openSUSE (defaults to KDE) As there are no other premiere-league distros that offer KDE as a first-class citizen, only as a non-default alternative, I feel that it could be a marketing point for the SUSE family. If SUSE lost mindshare by making a deal to keep shipping a Windows-like desktop, why doesn't it ship the premiere Windows-like desktop for all editions, by default? I am not sure what else to suggest, though. Previous times that I have brought this issue up, the feedback has been very negative. If I were to highlight some things that have occurred to me: * YaST is _the_ highlight. In the 1990s, other distros had comparable tools. Now, nothing else does. This should be the #1 selling point, IMHO. * A tested, integrated rolling-release distro is another. * Offering desktops no other distro does. GNUstep would be my first choice, since ROX-desktop is based on Python 2, and that is approaching EOL. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org