Hi, (leaving out DW as it's reading coffee grounds, as we say here)
There's nothing to make me want to leave, but if I was looking for a distro, the abundance of obsolete or otherwise not up to date wiki pages make openSUSE look to me like a dying distro.
I'm biased on that one. The wiki is way better that it's reputation but for sure there's much room for improvement. (continued below)
Traffic over the past year or more on the support lists and forums seems to have gone way down.
And in the meantime activity in various chats like Discord, Telegram and Matrix (all being more ore less connected to each other) went up. Furthermore it's attracting new people just wanting to pop in instead of going through the hassle of mailman registration and a flooded inbox. Mailing lists are kinda a blast from the past. Messengers and chat tools have taken over from that. Not that I like it but that's a reality we have to face. People younger than ~20 years are just not used to the legacy tools or may not even know them. Furthermore they might not want have yet another platform to use just to get their toes into the pool.
Only two stepped up to become candidates for two expiring board positions.
I count four persons for two open positions which is okay, I think.
Are we doing better than these observations make openSUSE look?
Yes and no. The things you mention (leaving murky DW figures aside) indeed are a problem. It roots from openSUSE's lack of outreach efforts. Just telling everyone we're "the choice for makers" is a good start but we need to show the world what and that we are making. You might want to scan over my board election notes [1] as I add the following: Positioning openSUSE as the choice for tech savvy people in the front row ("sysadmins, developers and desktop users") delivers quite clear message not only for users but also for people curious to join for non-dev work. That's something wiki, marketing, news etc. departments are suffering from. If we don't start changing that openSUSE of course won't die. But it also won't grow in areas where there's lot of room to grow. Regards, vinz. [1] https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2019_platform_vinzv