What is OMA doing to attract new developers, users and contributors? And, if there are no plans, what OMA would have to do to attract new people?
Why would a user choose OMLx over Mageia, Ubuntu or Fedora?
What makes OMLx different and worth using?
What is the point of developing OpenMandriva Lx after all?
And most importantly: How will OMA answer these questions to users?
These questions are important in defining the future of the distro and the message OpenMandriva Association wants to show to its users. OMA needs an objective, and, if thereâs already one, itâs important to let people know it.
Seriously, I really donât know the answers, thatâs why Iâm asking and why I think OMA is having a miscommunication with the community (ok, ok, now Iâm pretending Iâm the center of the world⌠I donât represent every user but⌠whatever)
Imo, those questions are fully legitimate and the answers are not so easy to give.
OMLx simply works. What else ? Basically, I think this is essentially a matter of taste.
Itâs like a boat race: there is no vital need to participate but we run and perhaps we win though is not the most likely.
Furthermore, we support arm architecture. Wouldnât be fun to have, like the wandboard, a raspberry pi running under a system we are used to, some day ?
Now OMA needs to find a way to spread OMLxâs existence to more people. Maybe doing some âsafe innovative thingsâ to attract more attention of news and review sites? Like when OMLx switched to Clang or when the versioning scheme was changed? What about switching to Wayland, adding support to Flatpak (I still think itâs a good idea ), rewrite OMCC, make a semi-rolling release distroâŚ?
To adhere to âOur roots are in Mandrake and its traditionsâ one would think we need to be rewriting the drakx tools, omcc, and the other tools that made Mandrake/Mandriva unique. Without these there really isnât much, if any, reason to prefer OpenMandriva to any other KDE/Linux distro. There is to my knowledge no discussion of doing this. Recently I spend some time wondering why Iâm still here. I donât believe there are any developers on board interested in continuing with these tools. Hope Iâm wrong.
Also as of Lx 3.0 some people (and reviewers) are complaining that we are losing our ânewbie friendlinessâ which was the other hallmark of Mandrake/Mandriva. Actually it was the ability to be both ânewbie friendlyâ and powerful enough for the most sophisticated users.
Most users wonât know what compiler is used. I canât tell any difference Clang makes in using my desktop. Neither it nor Wayland have attracted any new developers.
Also itâs difficult to be a âmajorâ distribution when support for Nvidia hardware is so poor.
So I donât see how OpenMandriva is going to attract new users and developers when instead of being unique we are abandoning that which historically made the distro unique.
As demonstration of the above does OpenMandriva have more or less developers and users now as opposed to when 2014 was being developed and released? The answer to that question speaks reams about the direction of the distro.
One of the strong point of Mandrake -> Mandriva is the ease to use or ânewbie friendlinessâ. And this is mainly due to the tools in OMCC and availability of drivers.
But you canât attract and retain new users if you donât have an efficient âbug solvingâ.
Nowadays OMCC is fading, some of its tools is migrated in KDE control center and not always they works well (for example proxy settings).
Bug solving is very slow and it happens that users have to wait long time for the solution.
Sometime old bugs reappears, this means organization donât works well.
Not sure exactly what efficient âbug solvingâ means. There arenât enough people solving bugs so it tends to take a long time and some never seem to get solved. Currently the distro doesnât have enough people for a lot of things. Being developer focused rather than user/community focused hasnât worked well IMHO.
I guess (and I donât know much to say more) having an in house tool for administration is safer than counting on a thirdparty one. Not to mention users may prefer other environments than KDE and would be happy not to have KDEâs burden to be able to manage the system.
[quote=âben79, post:8, topic:837â]
Not sure exactly what efficient âbug solvingâ means
[/quote]Fast confirmation and, if possible, quite fast solution.
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[quote=âben79, post:8, topic:837â]
some never seem to get solved
[/quote]or even checked (confirmed)
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[quote=âben79, post:8, topic:837â]
Being developer focused rather than user/community focused hasnât worked well IMHO
[/quote]Totally agree. Mandriva is up to date but not well working in quite a lot aspects.
As I already said it seems a playground for developers rather than a solid distribution user-oriented.
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[quote=âadelson.oliveira, post:9, topic:837â]
I guess (and I donât know much to say more) having an in house tool for administration is safer than counting on a thirdparty one[/quote]And sure more easy to use.
Of course there are exceptions: network manager works well and probably it make no sense to keep network connection management in OMCC. But this is not true for proxy manager.
I think weâre going in circles⌠A strategy is needed in order to bring more users to OMLx. Does OMA have one? OMA needs to discuss a strategy internally or with the community, itâs important, otherwise OMLx will be a niche distro forever.
What about asking users explicitly to âspread the wordâ? Or a simple and short promotional video on Youtube? Or contests (like the wallpaper contest we had some time ago) to increase user interaction and create a bigger community? What if OMA focus on social media to advert OMLx? (creating memes is a great way to get attention )
I am new here, but I used Mandriva for a long time. I also think a strategy for bringing more users/developers to OMLx is needed.
I also do think, that the current release (Lx 3.0), which is provided on the home page, is not in a stable state. I canât even install it, because Calamares crashes. Also, I saw some problems with systems not booting after installing Nvidia drivers. I know the lack of resources is a problem, so more developers are needed.
But I think, we do not get more people to use OMLx when it is in an alpha/beta state. Maybe it is an idea to provide OMLx 2014.2 (Maybe release a respin 2014.3) on the homepage as main download, until there is a stable ISO, with stable KDE 5.8 and bugs solved? 2014.2 was more stable/finished in my opinion.
I know the lack of developers is a problem, and I appreciate what you are doing, but I think this may be a solution for the foreseeable future.
I never did a respin, and I don´t have any idea how to do it. But I want to help where I can, and learn how to do it. But what does everyone think of a respin, and provide it as the main release until 3.x is stable enough? (I haven´t tried 3.01 yet).
Developers could better help you with how to do a respin. They can be contacted on the OpenMandriva Cooker mailing list here or Freenode on IRC channel #openmandriva-cooker. More info here.
FWIW: 3.01 is a respin.
Edit: We certainly would appreciate any help you can bring to the Association and to the Distro.
Edit some more: The person who did the respin and usually does our .iso builds is Tomasz PaweĹ Gajc aka: TPG.
Thanks. I know 3.01 is a respin, but I was not able to install it. (Mentioned it in the 3.01 post). If 3.01 is finished, do you think it will be the same quality/stability as 2014.2? If not, I think it is a good idea to do a 2014.3 respin and I will do my best to learn it.
Maybe it will be a good idea then, to do the 2014.3 respin and keep 3.x under development until it matches the 2014.x quality. I think the Nvidia problem with xorg.conf can be solved if we put a Nvidia driver installer (.run file) in om-welcome. Users are able to install drivers just like they install Filezilla from om-welcome, but the Nvidia script will generate a new xorg.conf with the nvidia-xconfig command.
Just an idea, if we are not able to solve this problem in XFdrake.
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