Hi all,
I’m not really a developer nor a significant contributor to openSUSE, and get enough emails already, so I’m not part of the openSUSE mailinglist where input was recommended. But from the standpoint of a longtime hobbyist, I noticed his proposed release structure had some merits, but some serious drawbacks.
While sharing code with SLE saves both openSUSE on time and effort by creating room for more collaboration with a common code base, and creates the dreamy hyper-stable and yet also an awesome SUSEish distro that you can have a lot of fun with, it creates a gap for a certain set of users.
Tumbleweed, while pretty stable, does involve a lot of updating that will be hard for those on metered connections and can sometimes break things. It is indeed great for people who want the latest and greatest, but isn’t quite up to par yet for production systems. And VirtualBox guest additions are dicey at best with the constant kernel refreshes.
If the only alternative to Tumbleweed is Brown’s proposed SLE base and openSUSE mix, the only production quality option will be stale by 3 years, more of a museum than Debian is most of the time. For an enthusiast distro by many standards, this would turn off users who want something a little new and fun yet appropriate for daily use.
A nice compromise solution would be to have an LTS/Evergreen-like openSUSE release and a SLE release at the same time and with a shared codebase, and share patches and develop the foundation together. In between the LTSs there could be snapshots of Tumbleweed every 8 or 12 months with a little of TLC and debugging then receive support for like 18 months or 2 years like the current release system to continue to provide the nice middle of the road distribution that openSUSE is today.
Having a distro between the Debians and CentOSes and the Fedora/Archs is more of an asset than a liability for much of who uses openSUSE, and having more diverse options that use potential cooperation with SUSE and yet satisfy those who like to tumble, those who like to stay on a stable distro for a while, and those who are in between like me and many others would be a quite ideal and efficient situation.
Please let me know what you think and if it is mailinglist worthy.
- Poweruser of openSUSE for 7 years, tech-pundit wannabe, Linux enthusiast and news follower, and polymath in other areas beyond computing.