https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/s/pCkKIUD95i
Let’s show them how we band together! A united force is strong! We can beat arch! They can’t coordinate but we can! Let’s show them that we can achieve what arch can’t! We stand united! We stand strong! Comment openSuSE mass upvote opensuse comments!
You are very much divided yourself. You spelled openSUSE in three different ways. None of them correct.
Strategic way to get a comment seems to have worked
What exactly is so great about Arch? To me TW rolls just as tumbleweeds are supposed to do, and while rolling around TW offers a truly stable rolling platform. So nay to Arch.
This one tickled me. I’m laughing randomly no matter where I am.
I saw the post last night and added my two cents. It’s all just a bit of silly fun.
That said, while it’s nice to see so many people saying nice things about openSUSE, it’s hardly worth getting worked into a frenzy over, and definitely isn’t worth the brigading and unsporting behavior.
Also, both the basic premise and the tournament bracket system are flawed. Different distributions are better for different users. That’s why they exist. Arch is a great distribution for enthusiasts.
Still, it’s generating a lot of positive interest in openSUSE, which is always good.
Linking to an external forum and exhorting users here to vote a certain way is poor form… 
Seriously, none of these types of “competitions” are anything other than ways to drive clicks. They’re completely meaningless beyond being just a bit of fun.
I agree with you there. This is just to have some harmless fun
Let me say this:
I humbly disagree a bit.
Yes, the “competition” is just for the fun of it, but I never imagined openSUSE to win; let alone with a 91% majority!
It still baffles me, that it won against Debian before winning against Arch.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the win was justified, but I just never grasped the popularity of our community.
I remember a post a while back, that was about how we could improve the visibility and appeal of openSUSE, but it seems as if we already had quite the following.
This to me is meaningful in and of itself, because it is very hard to gauge reputation on the internet, as the loudest voices aren’t always the majority.
This competition has really put the Linux landscape into perspective (so to say), and judging by the comments on Reddit I am not alone with this feeling.
That being said, I don’t condone OP for trying to manipulate the vote with tribalism 
(no offense).
Sure, we can disagree on “visibility”, I suppose. I’d be hard pressed to say that people don’t know about SUSE and openSUSE, though.
That’s how these things are entirely designed to work. It’s like “industry awards” where the nominees ask and beg their professional networks to vote for them. The point is to drive traffic to the “vote”, not to have a high-security “vote” where only the true fans vote.
It’s like the old web page “hit counters”. Or going to Distrowatch and deciding that the Distrowatch page that’s the most popular is also indicating the distribution the page is about has that popularity rank (in spite of the fact that Distrowatch explicitly says that it’s not about “distribution popularity”).
Ok, I get that the creator gets tons of likes.
But with your logic, wouldn’t the majority of users just vote for the (seemingly) most popular distros? (i.e. debian / arch)
Instead, they overwhelmingly and surprisingly (to a lot of people) voted for the (seemingly) less popular distro.
And I doubt most users are “in on it” being a like-farm.
Also, this analogy doesn’t really make sense in this context, because the hit counters you are talking about raise a website’s visibility in search engines, but Reddit is already at the top and I doubt that the guy who started this competition works for Reddit or even the Subreddit.
I think some of us are seeing this whole thing with a lot of prejudice, but I would encourage those to see the bright side of it: openSUSE is apparently very popular and gained a lot of visibility, which (like I said previously) has already been a talking point here.
For example:
I, for one, only knew about openSUSE because we used it (or SLES, can’t remember) in school, and after closing my Windows life for good, I had to comb through a lot of mediocre distros before finding my way back to openSUSE.
I would have been very happy, if I knew (or rather remembered) that openSUSE even existed back then.
You have to remember, that people are flooding towards Linux nowadays, and that they aren’t engrained enough, like you and me, to know that openSUSE is very good and reasonably popular.
I don’t want to turn this into a long chain of arguments, because I agree with you often, and I think everyone can have their own opinion, but it seems like you are a bit too “black pilled” on this matter.
It’s driven explicitly by people who are fans of a particular thing (whatever the ‘vote’ is for) encouraging others to vote for it. Of course there are going to be some votes for the less popular options, that’s what makes it feel legitimate.
The analogy isn’t to do with page popularity. The analogy is to do with the fact that the numbers are easily manipulated to make it look like exactly what you want.
Look, I’m not saying it’s not a fun thing. I’m just saying it is what it is - not a serious “vote” about popularity or anything like that. It’s driving a behavior in a certain segment of the userbase.
I’m also not saying that it’s bad to be proud of running a particular Linux distribution. I’ve run openSUSE and its predecessors exclusively for 23 years now. I run Tumbleweed as my main daily driver, and I never have serious issues with it (the odd issue comes up now and again, and people in the forums have been incredibly helpful in resolving the issues - it’s one of the reasons I admin here, because the community is one of the best I’ve ever been a member of.)
But pretending that there’s any meaning behind a popularity vote that isn’t a reliable and valid measure of what it’s supposed to be measuring (and my profession has to do with measuring validity and reliability of surveys and other such things) just isn’t accurate. It’s a fun thing, and that’s not a bad thing. But it is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.
Cooperation would be better than competition, imho.
If three distributions could create a common build system then implementing third party banking, identity, or similar applications could be simpler, even for other distributions (derivates, etc).
Basically… What I’m suggesting is something like OBS, but common to at least three distributions with different package management tools.
My suggestions would be Arch, Debian and openSUSE.
OBS can be used to build packages for multiple distributions, and is used in that way.
This is one of the things that a lot of people get confused about - openSUSE isn’t a distribution. It’s a collection of open source projects, with a few distributions as subprojects.
OBS is an openSUSE project, just like OpenQA is. But its usage isn’t limited to SUSE or openSUSE distributions:
As you can see, Arch, Debian, and various openSUSE distributions are available, as well as many others.
There is a difference between a technical solution and an official cooperation.
Certainly, but there’s also no need to reinvent the wheel when it’s already there.
One wheel isn’t enough for a wagon.
The current paradigm is competition. Each Linux distribution tries to leave the others in the dust. That paradigm works well to keep distributions from cooperating. The splintered result is good news for the commercial makers of other operating systems.
But it is hard or even impossible to change something. It is better to build something that makes the current situation obsolete.
