Quote:
Originally Posted by br073n
Please forgive me if it seems I open old wounds, or a can of worms. I'm just thinking outloud.
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I think many can relate to what you are saying.
As it is a good idea.. in my opinion what you are expressing is an ideal and a goal in itself.
In this I can't speak for the community, but only give my view.
With the current openSUSE project I think that what you are trying to fit in is a difficult task at the least.
There have been suggestions of creating a release or fork (whatever one wants to call it) that is more suited for ' the simple' end user.
In my view Linux has had a lot of catching up to do to be able to present itself as a full and worthy desktop (vs Windows and OSX). The last four years have been crucial in this goal... and with it I think the pressure and instability on some points followed. The relation openSUSE has to the SLEx products also plays a role.
As I'm quite new to Linux I say this with caution, and again, this is how I'm viewing the developments over the last 5 years, as others will have different views.
The notion that developing should (an can) slow down a bit to bring back the stability and polish is one I share. But to truly make openSUSE the 'fit for all' .. I do think a second version is needed.
I would rather see the ' cutting edge ' version being re-released once the biggest bugs and annoyances have been solved (3 to 6 months) and see a longer support cycle for the re-released version. That could then be the stable base.
In short of what you saying: It's more efficient to to make the application fit the OS rather than having the OS fit the application. Agreed on that!
openSUSE build service is a brilliant tool that I think can be utilized for this. But there is need of more standardization for this to work over a greater scale. I for one would not mind seeing some consolidation of all the serious distros , projects, etc.. bring it back to the holy 10 or something
As another way to approach the solution to your goal:
Have you seen the possibilities of Virtual Applications (VMWare Thinapp / ZenWorks Virtual applications / etc )? I think this is a very promising approach to getting applications working on many different platforms.
Creating a new version of the openSUSE distribution does seem like a good idea. But it calls for more resources and more helping hands to make it to a success.
Another stable alternative for the 'fit all' would be SLED. but then you are steering into the enterprise world... Witch I don't think is bad.. but maybe very different from what you and others would want. Still.. SLED is OSS for the most part!
I'll stop rambling now
