openSUSE can be a widely used operating system when applications of all different needs are made available in openSUSE.
"I needed an alternative because microsoft is planning on making XP obsolete faster than win 98 that means updates etc are vanishing if they havent already.
If you can market the fact that an old OS does not make use of the resources that a new PC has then you got yourself a big portion of computer users who will venture out to give it a try."
Agreed with the above important points mentioned - for the market share of openSUSE. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard releasing this September 2009 will not be supporting PowerPC architecture to focus on Intel architectures - Apple computers sold worldwide from March 2001 till September 2009 (I know it’s not September 2009 yet, but stating it for the purpose of info) had operating system which supported PowerPC architecture, so it is important openSUSE also continues supporting PowerPC architecture for Apple computers.
As noted by another, separate desktop environments.
Also target laptop/notebook and maybe even netbook hardware, also older/limited desktop hardware (not everybody can afford the latest hardware with high-speed multi-core processors, TB disks and multi-GB RAM, especially in the current economic downturn).
From a packaging viewpoint, supporting limited hardware (memory/disk) platforms, both older desktop and portable systems, means reducing mandatory cross-DE dependencies and dependencies which really should be optional. E.g. in 11.1 (w/ updates) some KDE3 packages have dependencies on GNOME libraries and/or KDE4 libraries which eat up disk space and run-time memory. Also, a number of packages have mandatory dependencies on things like avahi, which ought to be at most optional.
New users == people who haven’t used Linux before or not very much. Experienced Linux users == people who have used Linux long enough to know what to expect from a “standard” Linux distro.
Power users == people who use specialized applications, are fairly demanding about applications or their computers, maybe not developers but know a bit about scripting, etc.
I think to properly target third world countries, YaST should support resumable software package downloads. We don’t always have a decent connection here. Why should YaST install per download if we can download them all first and install later? And if possible, a tool to collect all the downloaded packages and create a repository so the next time we setup OpenSUSE we don’t have to download all the packages again.
> YaST should support resumable software package downloads. We don’t always have a decent connection here. Why should YaST install per download if we can download them all first and install later?
This would be an improvement even with reliable connections. Now, YaST checks all packages first, then downloads one, installs it, downloads the next, etc. Sometimes, due to the time it takes to install (especially delta RPMs), a package has already been removed (version updated) by the time YaST gets around to downloading. Rather than having YaST run sequential alternating download/install processes, it would speed up updates to have downloads proceed in one process and installation proceed in another (pausing if necessary to wait for downloads to complete).
However, this would increase the amount of temporary disk space required for systems that are configured to not retain packages after installation.
> And if possible, a tool to collect all the downloaded packages and create a repository so the next time we setup OpenSUSE we don’t have to download all the packages again.
You can do this now; here’s a basic outline: the official opensuse repositories can be (partially or completely, if you have sufficient disk space) mirrored using rsync and connecting to rsync.opensuse.org. Likewise for opensuse community repositories. Many third-party repositories (e.g. packman) can also be accessed via rsync; others can usually be synchronized with wget. Then simply point YaST to the downloaded repository files (instead of the Internet servers) via the Software Repositories applet.
This type of setup is also useful for maintaining multiple machines running the same version of opensuse and using the same architecture; download once and install from the local files rather than download multiple times.
Even so, this doesn’t really have much to do with launch planning, does it? If the product requires redevelopment to support specific situations, you should use the openFATE systemavailable from here, to submit your request for that.
This thread is about the activities needed to launch the next openSUSE release, not changing support provided by the 11.2 release. The Devs are not obliged to come here to the Marketing forum for new requirements.
