On 30/07/2010, Pavol Rusnak
Hi all!
Okay, you know the drill. This one is the "openSUSE - For the productive poweruser".
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== 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.
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. oSuse has hardware detection on par with it and installing codecs & drivers isn't much more of a hassle. With a bit tuning, could be better. It's just that defaults and available easy-to-understand multilingual documentation are much worse on oSuse. If those problems were fixed, it'd be golden.
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.
NOTE: In my mind you don't have to be a kernel hacker or a guru sysadmin to be a poweruser, in my estimation powerusers cover: * ~10% of all PC users * ~50% of all Linux users * ~75% of existing openSUSE users * ~100% of existing openSUSE contributors
Maybe, but does a person that can easily maintain his/her computer identify him/herself as a "poweruser"? If someone would come and tell me to install some awesome productive poweruser distro, I'd say thank you but no thanks. See above.
== Activities ==
==== We need to be excellent in the following ====
1 * Making sure as much as possible just works out of the box 2 * Having good and sane defaults so the user can do what ''he'' wants to do 3 * Focus on providing tools for being productive/creative (IDEs, editors, authoring tools, graphics manipulation, office productivity, etc.) 4 * Providing admin tools that are powerful yet (reasonably) easy
1. Definitely. This isn't year 2000 anymore. Oh wait, back then even Mandrake managed to pull that one out. It should be bare minimum requirement for every distro. 2. THIS. This is the main problem with oSuse! Not only defaults, but the overall look and feel of the whole KDE desktop with out-of-box FOSS drivers which can't composite and provide graphical glitches, has confusing theming and generally is not very welcoming. 3. This is already well covered. 4. We have Yast.
=== As project, we will not focus on the following anymore ===
1 * Dumbing things down for Aunt Tillie 2 * Going out of our way to support old hardware and non-mainstream architectures 3 * Supporting form-factors that are not workstation, laptop, server or netbook
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. 2. yes 3. yes Certainly, the current motto(?) "Have a lot of fun" is terribly camp, but "Linux for productive powerusers" is easily even worse. Why not just keep it simple, easy to remember and look cool again? Consider these: "Power to the users" "Powering users" "System for you." "System to use." Cheesy for me but hey, look at Apple and their revolting abuse of term "magical", it works. Again, I can't stress enough how important it's to communicate with localization teams on how'd that sound in their language. Take it easy, Otso -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org