Dear all, There's too much fuss around Unity and GNOME at the moment. I have some concerns, and it's somehow easy for me to realize that distributions do have a great role to perform in supporting GNOME: * As a distribution channel for GNOME; * As a source of contributors for GNOME; * Help GNOME in promoting an experience; * Promote the Free Desktop alternative; * etc. 'Unity' comes with some pure sarcasm, and the media is passing on already a very twisted idea about GNOME. On this article from 'The Register' a less technical user can pretty much take the conclusion that GNOME is a solution for obsolete environments. My suggestions to this list so that we can help GNOME from openSUSE, and at the same time, defend our users. Unity is going to become 'hype', Canonical's marketing is on that. Our users will feel tempted to try out 'Unity'. Unity has it's own 3rd party distribution channels. OK, Dell this or Dell that, but small local hardware manufacturers get the message and they are also pushing Ubuntu. So in a way, we can't ignore it, therefore we need to use the ammunition we have available to defend ourselfs. War was brought upon us, either you like or not. From a strategical point of view, our success will be based mainly on 'resources' and the management of those, the very own can be applied to GNOME, and they have their own people to work it out, though we can help if required. A small set of actions that can help us: 1. Do not engage Canonical directly. Take a vertical defense strategy. In an easy way: treat them like you would treat your ex-girlfriend which cheated on you, give them indiference. That's what will hurt them more, specially their hordes of fan boys. If you find this is not the way, consider people's morale and the negative impacts of engaging a full scale war that will bring no benefit to us. 2. Take a stand - By not facing directly Canonical/Ubuntu/Unity, but instead to promote GNOME Shell and GNOME3. I would base all the message in the following points: * Invitation to a whole new user experience; * Invitation to be a part of something, GNOME; * Invitation to be a part of a innovation; * Promote only people, no screenshots, no tech stuff. Drop that mentality, if we are a community, we are people, as such we build our message based on the people, GNOME developers, packagers, and specially USERS!. * Refuse to be shy and brag a lot about how GNOME3 can be the ultimate experience for your desktop (ease of use, reliability, productivity). Means: The traditional digital means we use! Social Networks, Blog spheres, even YOUTUBE! Specially youtube. (I know it's H264, but we have a higher purpose, promote GNOME3). Canonical took a stand, we take a stand, and hopefully next time we take a stand even before Canonical did it. I don't like to use this expression due to it's author, but I would to do so: "while they build their barricades, we charge in!" 3. Beta Phase - Beta Phase is important, we need to schedule one before GNOME3 hits the final release. A couple of points in why you really want to do it: * Because you will be providing your users a preview of gnome-shell. Therefore when it becomes standard, they already tried it and already have an idea of what is coming their way. * Bug Squash parties - Important stuff for you guys. Most users will _NOT_ be able to provide decent bug reports. We need to be pedagogical on this. Anyone willing to write a sort of "Bug Report in 5 steps" that we can use during the beta phase to enrol our users? I'll bring this up on marketing so we can get a 'ninja pack' of merchandise to send to the top bug reporters (based on quality of bug reports and maybe relevance?), this is actually something you guys can decide for us. * Soften the adaptation process and eventually reduce the psychic costs of our users during that process. * Most important, have the opportunity to collect feedback and provide GNOME Project all the information required to easen up the deployment process and promotion of GNOME3 even before it's released, according to our users expectations and problems. 4. Ammunition - As a community and as a Linux distribution if the licences aren't a problem to distribute Unity, openSUSE should consider to place some effort in making Unity available 'AS AN OPTION' to our users. This will remove the need they have to install Ubuntu and check out Unity. We should not place any effort in marketing that, on the contrary, we should market only GNOME and gnome shell. But having it as an alternative will help us defend our position and our users. We can even later on turn such option against Canonical. It would be interesting to have actually a better Unity option than Canonical itself, specially when Canonical has a long history in refusing patches for extended configuration. They will appear also for Unity, if they don't accept it, we can eventually aceppt them ourselves and might even in some cases shift those contributors to our side, thus educate them and try to make them real GNOME contributors. The availability (or not) of Unity by openSUSE is to be faced only as a defensive action to preserve the integrety of our community and avoid our users to try Ubuntu. This has to be properly advertised as such. Those are some thoughts. Sorry for the critical wall of text. I am willing to work on a wiki page and some contents to promote GNOME and if this list believes that Unity can be used to preserve our community (point 4), I can take a number of packages to package, though I will require help here and there. This are personal thoughts, which I believe that can help us in defending our position. I do not favor any strategy that takes a direct hit on Canonical or their users, as they won't be shy in bashing us down. Kindest Regards, nmarques -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+help@opensuse.org