openSUSE Needs to Rebel
Over the course of a few years, and after openSUSE was launched, the relationship of openSUSE internally has been one of constant rediscovery and also lethargy. openSUSE heaveily relies on the power of the community and their votes on certain issues, features, etc. Simply put, openSUSE is democratic.
In a sense, this means that openSUSE has developed a system that slows down the process of innovation and has become an acolyte of other Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora, on the one hand, has the fairly advanced support from the Red Hat giant. A company that has enough capacity to make changes which are matured enough and set examples for other distributions to follow. Then Ubuntu has Mark Shuttleworth. A character with a strong personality and defying attitude to break the routine of being a "common" Linux distribution.
In turn openSUSE "had" Novell. A company which had slowed down its business quite a bit in the last years and has not recently been bought out by a company related to Microsoft. Consequently, openSUSE was born dead like a mummy. The problem was that the reliance on Novell to help openSUSE was great and Novell as a company never delivered as did Red Hat to Fedora. Also, openSUSE never had strong personalities to drive its distro development as does Ubuntu. Too fearful to change radically, openSUSE followed in the steps of its godfather Novell and lost personality, for everything was handled and voted on by the community.
Now, openSUSE still is in the middle of a good discussion that will, possibly, bring out a statement that will drive openSUSE's focus into better things. The problem is, however, that while openSUSE keep trying to define itself, input from everywhere is also being given. As democratic as openSUSE is, they let these people take the stand and opine, sometimes very uselessly about something that maybe they will forget. Timing is eating openSUSE alive, for while they are trying to find out "who" they are other distros are obviously ahead in the distro battle. Think of Ubuntu's change from X to Wayland, or their drastic change to a more netbook interface. What did the Ubuntu community do when these changes were announced? nothing! Did they leave Ubuntu is disgust for this authoritarian intervention on the part of Shuttleworth? no!
If openSUSE was trying to do similar things, they would be fearful that the community would get upset by these decisions and not do anything at all. Even in my own blog I get this comments all the time. Why are you trying to change the desktop? it is good as it is right now. They say. Or, those things that you propose are already doable in other ways, use a different software. The list goes on and on, why? because openSUSE does not have representatives strong enough that drive its development. I do not mean to diminish the efforts of those people who are currently trying to work with openSUSE. My idea is that they are still not a strong presence on anything really. My perception is that current community leaders are really trying to keep harmony and peace within the community rather than producing drastic change.
To all of them I say, wake up! Stand up and change. You cannot expect to get different results if you keep applying the same methods. In my mind, drastic change, strong intervention and a marked personality could potentially change it all. Forget about us, the bureaucracy of openSUSE for a moment. Decide for once to be the best and openSUSE will certainly see the light.
My contribution is on the desktop. To change openSUSE's visible image to make it recognizable and visually powerful, but I am sure that make up is not all. We need a stronger general image. A reliable Linux distribution, a strong development group, greater device compatibility, ease of use, discoverability, marketing, etc. These things will change openSUSE's course forever if we just stop looking at the people we might upset by changing and just change openSUSE right away.
That is why I call my blog openSUSE REVOLUTION, for I believe that a revolutionary intervention is critically needed at openSUSE. Start from scratch, not being afraid of building something out of the ashes. It is time.
In the meantime, I will keep on conceptualizing openSUSE's future desktop.
Thanks for the visits you all.
Anditosan.
In a sense, this means that openSUSE has developed a system that slows down the process of innovation and has become an acolyte of other Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora, on the one hand, has the fairly advanced support from the Red Hat giant. A company that has enough capacity to make changes which are matured enough and set examples for other distributions to follow. Then Ubuntu has Mark Shuttleworth. A character with a strong personality and defying attitude to break the routine of being a "common" Linux distribution.
In turn openSUSE "had" Novell. A company which had slowed down its business quite a bit in the last years and has not recently been bought out by a company related to Microsoft. Consequently, openSUSE was born dead like a mummy. The problem was that the reliance on Novell to help openSUSE was great and Novell as a company never delivered as did Red Hat to Fedora. Also, openSUSE never had strong personalities to drive its distro development as does Ubuntu. Too fearful to change radically, openSUSE followed in the steps of its godfather Novell and lost personality, for everything was handled and voted on by the community.
Now, openSUSE still is in the middle of a good discussion that will, possibly, bring out a statement that will drive openSUSE's focus into better things. The problem is, however, that while openSUSE keep trying to define itself, input from everywhere is also being given. As democratic as openSUSE is, they let these people take the stand and opine, sometimes very uselessly about something that maybe they will forget. Timing is eating openSUSE alive, for while they are trying to find out "who" they are other distros are obviously ahead in the distro battle. Think of Ubuntu's change from X to Wayland, or their drastic change to a more netbook interface. What did the Ubuntu community do when these changes were announced? nothing! Did they leave Ubuntu is disgust for this authoritarian intervention on the part of Shuttleworth? no!
If openSUSE was trying to do similar things, they would be fearful that the community would get upset by these decisions and not do anything at all. Even in my own blog I get this comments all the time. Why are you trying to change the desktop? it is good as it is right now. They say. Or, those things that you propose are already doable in other ways, use a different software. The list goes on and on, why? because openSUSE does not have representatives strong enough that drive its development. I do not mean to diminish the efforts of those people who are currently trying to work with openSUSE. My idea is that they are still not a strong presence on anything really. My perception is that current community leaders are really trying to keep harmony and peace within the community rather than producing drastic change.
To all of them I say, wake up! Stand up and change. You cannot expect to get different results if you keep applying the same methods. In my mind, drastic change, strong intervention and a marked personality could potentially change it all. Forget about us, the bureaucracy of openSUSE for a moment. Decide for once to be the best and openSUSE will certainly see the light.
My contribution is on the desktop. To change openSUSE's visible image to make it recognizable and visually powerful, but I am sure that make up is not all. We need a stronger general image. A reliable Linux distribution, a strong development group, greater device compatibility, ease of use, discoverability, marketing, etc. These things will change openSUSE's course forever if we just stop looking at the people we might upset by changing and just change openSUSE right away.
That is why I call my blog openSUSE REVOLUTION, for I believe that a revolutionary intervention is critically needed at openSUSE. Start from scratch, not being afraid of building something out of the ashes. It is time.
In the meantime, I will keep on conceptualizing openSUSE's future desktop.
Thanks for the visits you all.
Anditosan.
Written by Anditosan
9 comments:
There are differences between creating a distro for home users and machines that run critical large-scale systems. So, change is not very easy to make in core pieces.
Regarding, netbook interfaces, GNOME team has a seperate GNOME 3 Technologypreview since 11.3 with GNOME-shell. And NO, we don't intend to ship Unity by default just because it is perceived by some Ubuntu fanboys to be netbook friendly. You should know better about what KDE is doing.
It is easy to point fingers and call us lethargical, but it is wrong imnsho. Nobody stopped you from being the change that you wanted to see.
If you want to cause a real revolution, you should blog. But blog alone is not sufficient. You should spend more time in project mailing list, help in packaging and get yourself to be the part of the GNOME/KDE etc. core teams and make decisions. (Want to see X go away, spin a kiwi image and prove that the alternatives are better and raise it in factory, not in your blog with a "we need to move out of X")
Sorry for the tone of this comment, but the word Lethargical deserves this tone.
It would really help if you could explain what your objectives are. I mean, why do you think that top-down is better than a democratic system? Why do you believe that we were too "fearful" ?
Maybe you're not as well aware of the history and the things that changed inside, but there have been quite a bit of (r)evolutionary changes inside the project, specifically on how we've gone from a very closed organization to a project that has opened up and where everyone can participate, have influence, and work towards having the merit of taking decisions.
Furthermore, the existence of a "distro battle" is just one point of view. Why a battle? What are your objectives, what is important to you? Market share? The amount of users? Having open and democratic ways of doing things? Being unbureaucratic? There are many other goals and visions of what the project and the distribution should be like, and yours is just one of them.
Also, I believe that your understanding of those other distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) is a bit too much "the grass is always greener on the other side". If you believe that everything is perfect there and that everyone is happy with the way it is driven, think again, I can tell you that it is not the case.
Nevertheless, and to close the loop, I'd love to hear about what you think are the most important objectives for the project. And what it should become.
Thank you for your comments. I must say though that I do regard your perspective as valid. but understand me.
I am not a programmer, I can't code, neither can I design very well. What is a normal guy like me to do? Sit and watch openSUSE lag behind the rest. No, I cannot.
My language is strong given what I perceive. I have followed conversations from KDE, openSUSE and others and I have not see the vitality that I see in Fedora or Ubuntu. I have noticed for example, their IRC channel. Ubuntu's is always on, while I have spent hours before anyone from openSUSE decides to be kind enough to answer simple newbie questions like mine.
When I talk about "battle" I mostly mean, delivery more than the amount of people that use openSUSE. Ubuntu, for example recognised all of the herdware features that I have on my laptop. The same test was done with openSUSE, and it was not the same story.
I am probably saying too much, but openSUSE deserve stronger intervention. We could discuss this further through email I guess.
anditosan1000@gmail.com
I used (to take the example) Ubuntu for several years - mostly Kubuntu - and i can confirm, that it is an advanced distribution.
But why did i switch to openSUSE?
Because even if i like the newest and the best in software used to run my workstation, i cannot afford to have bugs or instability interfere with my work-flow. And unfortunately that is (some times) the case with the in your post mentioned distributions.
Do not get me wrong, i am for innovation on Linux and its desktop environments, but for my professional use i prefer to wait a little longer for the 'cool stuff', and when it comes out, that it will work without problems on the distribution i use.
Then of course, i do not want to wait too long either (ex: Debian stable, Red Hat Linux, etc).
I chose openSUSE, because it is still advanced enough (i'm using the KDE SC 4.5 on 11.3, that is what i wanted), but it does not have the problems i encountered with Kubuntu 10.10 (sluggish, ugly, slow).
Sooner or later, after other distributions cleaned the way for new software, it will be integrated in openSUSE (in one way or another, thanks to OBS and SuseStudio).
Hi
I understand that you cannot code but you can write really well, why not just a couple of articles saying the nice things about openSUSE.
Now lets see
UBUNTU SOFTWARE CENTRE - We have it. Have a look at RPM Groups and patterns just people dont know
YaST - One of the best GUI Config tools
1-Click Install - No other distro has it
KDE Simply ROCKs we are on one of the best
Smeegol for netbooks
OBS did anyone think of cross border colaboration
Just that we do not speak a lot and so we are not popular. We have our own share of interesting technologies and stuff just that we are unable to publicise it well enough.
Agreed! Those are ince things about openSUSE. Are they the ones that stand out when you hear about it from other people?
I can write about the good about openSUSE, however, that would simply add to the idea that things are fine as they are. No changes needed.
Let's collaborate in designing the future of openSUSE. I am a good brainstormer.
Hi Andy
I fully support your notion.
Even i was a follower of SuSE and now openSUSE since long time.
I accept that openSUSE needs to push some "User-level" bold changes, having OBS, openFATE, 1-click installation, YaST are not user-level features of openSUSE.
KDE4 or opensuse may allow lot of customizebility that makes the desktop cool or revolutionary.
But openSUSE should make such a different and innovative use-level configuration change as the default, then only openSUSE would get a positive identity and popularity.
But there is a catch in this suggestion, such a drastic and innovative change should only be taken place after massive in-house, controlled testing.
@Sankar we or at least i didn't requesting openSUSE project to replace it's file system from ext3 to xfs btrfs or replace the X.org to wayland or replace the GNU/Linux kernel to FreeBSD altogether and they are not user-level features either.
We should not forget some of the user-level features that are pioneered by openSUSE such as
Desktop Search, openGL eye-candy.
New Gnome Computer Menu, Banshee (slick) Media player etc etc.
Things went well in Gnome Team, not much in KDE.
All the linux distributions still have lot of room to innovate in Panel/Taskbar, Notification Area, Social Network Integration, Cloud hosting and syncing, and last but not least, Side bar and making the user user to rely less on Yast to make things work.
My whole comment is my own opinion and i am open for feedback and corrections.
I see it as an advantage for openSUSE that it is bottom-up instead of top-down. Top-down does NOT lead to innovation, look at Microsoft versus Free Software or GNOME vs KDE. Anyone is free to innovate in openSUSE - and there IS innovation in the openSUSE world like the build service and suse Studio.
When others need big companies and 'one man bands' to play the tune like the Shepard so that they can dance their way. The people-users of openSUSE give importance to each other, count personalities and give the space for anyone to be an innovator. There are things to be done but openSUSE make it it's way. It's not their way or no way. It's power to the people. So I thing that openSUSE does not needs to Rebel since we are rebellions by nature and by structure as we have different structure than all the others you mentioned.
What you see as a weakness I see as the strongest feature.
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