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● 11.23.11

●● SUSE Became a Niche Product/Market

Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell at 10:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Summary: OpenSUSE numbers, some other SUSE news, and a few words about the status of the product

IT HAS been just over a week since OpenSUSE celebrated a new release, which was mostly covered by FOSS writers, e.g. [1, 2] (one needs to know authors’ names). The corporate press seems to pay attention only to Ubuntu releases. Some people upgrade their desktops and servers, so download numbers may not mean all that much (e.g. regarding growth). OpenSUSE did publish numbers:

=> celebrated | new release | ↺ 1 | ↺ 2 | ↺ upgrade their desktops and servers | ↺ did publish numbers

Our download redirector counted for the first 24 hours the download of 93761 media, the distribution over the various types is: * NonOss Addon CD BiArch: 1452 * 32-bit x86: 48075 (total) o Net: 2489 o DVD: 31840 o GNOME-LiveCD: 7392 o KDE-LiveCD: 5561 o Addon-Lang: 793 * 64-bit x86-64: 44234 (total) o Net: 2444 o DVD: 32927 o GNOME-LiveCD: 4031 o KDE-LiveCD: 4378 o Addon-Lang: 454

This is not particularly impressive, but there will always be someone begging to differ. Many downloads are for server setups or testing. In production environments CentOS is a lot more commonplace. Apart from the release there is almost no news. The release itself was mostly mentioned by SUSE sites like this or that, or even the official blog that speaks of Google funding (moving on to other topics):

=> ↺ are for server setups | ↺ almost no news | ↺ this | ↺ that | ↺ official blog

Googles Code-in is a program aimed at pre-university students between the age of 13 and 17. It starts on the 21. November, 2011. For this program we provide a list of tasks that are both fun and challenging for the students. Students who work on these tasks get a designated mentor assigned who will guide and help them. The tasks students can pick vary from writing or re-factoring code to doing marketing for the project. Simply everything a FOSS project has to do. Students can of course select tasks according to their interests.

It would be wiser to help distributions that do not serve Microsoft’s agenda.

There is some packaging news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and few reviews of the distribution. There are far fewer reviews than articles that just mention the release. In fact, we found less than a handful proper reviews. Not impressive at all…

=> ↺ 1 | ↺ 2 | ↺ 3 | ↺ 4 | ↺ 5 | ↺ 6 | ↺ 7 | ↺ 8

Andrew Wafaa is running for the OpenSUSE Board as a non-employee, of which there are several who are enthusiastic to just spread OpenSUSE of all distributions (as misguided as that can be). There are also some HOWTOs out there [1, 2, 3] and an installation video for the new release. Banshee makes its appearance again in SUSE-affiliated blogs and Balsam does too. The SUSE blogs are by far the most dominant sources of news because OpenSUSE is hardly mentioned outside them. Novell’s PR is pretty much defunct and once in a matter of weeks we found them speaking about Vibe; well, they said they had axed it, but recently they mentioned it again. Novell just cannot seem to make up its mind. Given that the head of PR lost his job, it must be chaotic there.

=> ↺ running for the OpenSUSE Board | ↺ several who are enthusiastic to just spread OpenSUSE of all distributions | ↺ 1 | ↺ 2 | ↺ 3 | ↺ for the new release | ↺ makes its appearance again | Balsam | ↺ does too | ↺ SUSE blogs | ↺ recently they mentioned it again

The bottom line is, SUSE or OpenSUSE are not dominant. They were quite dominant before the Microsoft deal, which turned them into “niche” — a distribution for those wishing to pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux although they needn’t. █

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