Be proud of yourself, Geekos!

Right now I'm enjoying the post-release stress. Going back and catching up with what was delayed due to the release being priority and all... And enjoying huge discussions on Identi.ca like this one ;-)

Me proud of the Geeko!

The article which went out on Friday made me very proud - openSUSE 11.4 made a splash. The title is really correct - we're gathering info on reviews etc on this page but it is extremely incomplete - there are so many reviews, articles, tweets, dents, facebook comments, video's on youtube - it is really great! And well over 100.000 downloads in 24 hours, almost twice what we did for 11.3 - awesome. openSUSE has its momentum back, that's clear. We already wrote that in this "end of 2010" article, and the subsequent Bretzn and Appstore sprints, the marketing sprint and all the cool stuff that is going on makes me quite certain about this: the openSUSE conference 2010 was a real turning point for openSUSE. The Geeko's back in the game!

Did we leave?

The question that might come up is - did the Geeko ever leave? I had a look at some statistics on our user base. openSUSE has 7-8 million users, that's significant! And, interestingly enough, between 30-50% more than Fedora. Ubuntu has no statistics online but once made some noise about numbers - talking somewhere between 6 and 8.

So be a proud Geeko!

Now all these numbers have some uncertainty associated with them, nothing is sure. Yet the numbers of Fedora and openSUSE at least are measured in the same way, so likely you can at least compare them roughly. And I bet Ubuntu has similar statisics on which they based their number - with the usual exaggeration. So even though the numbers aren't entirely clear, it is interesting to see openSUSE ain't exactly insignificant as many seem to believe... Not only do we have amazing technology like OBS and Studio but we also have a HUGE user base whom we serve with a pretty awesome distro! So, Geeko's, in the communication and marketing department - maybe openSUSE is not well known for that. But we're a leading distro when it comes to what matters - users and technology. Be proud!

YESSS, it is out!!!

Friends! It is out!. That means that after 8 months of hard work, you can finally...

• Learn what is new.
• Download it.
• Modify and Test drive it.
• Upgrade it!

Or, if you're tired of all the work on openSUSE 11.4 - sit back, relax and watch the news flow on twitter, identi.ca, Facebook and all those other social media outlets. And be sure to join in the chatter! Our hashtag is #opensuse as usual and help in getting the word out is appreciated!

Play with Plasma Desktop and Netbook 4.6.1, GNOME 3 SHell preview, XFCDE 4.8 (which is a very good release, btw, working on an article about it) and for those with older hardware the cool LXDE.

I was enjoying some of the goodies already - running the KDE apps 4.6 on my laptop (Kate is awesome and I love the better performance+stability of Plasma&Kwin) and GNOME Shell at home. But now the whole thing, awesomeness :D

Congratulations and mucho huggggz to everyone involved in 11.4!!! I know it is awesome and as soon as I really feel awake and can get my eyes of IRC and twitter for a minute I'll upgrade ;-)

11.4 - almost there

Warning: huge blog ahead. To butcher Mark Twain:

I didn't have time to write a short blog, so I wrote a long one instead.

Excitement. Lack of sleep. More excitement. Many things not finished. Yep, a major release. Despite a crashing laptop (every 30 min it hangs, I'm afraid it is the heath) I'm having fun preparing for the biggest event since I joined the openSUSE community: the release of openSUSE 11.4!

The marketing team had a meeting 2 weeks ago to prepare for 11.4. But we weren't the only ones working hard. And this week, our release dude, Coolo, got sick and AJ had to replace him. Well, the GoldMaster was in time, so AJ, great work. And Coolo: if a doctor tells you to stop working it probably makes sense to listen.

New features

11.4 will be exciting. I mean really, really exciting! There is a huge number of new features and improvements. I just finished an 11.4 feature overview presentation. It's not perfectly complete (how could it be with so much new stuff?) but a good start if you want to have a launch party. Speaking of, if you're Dutch, there will be a Launch Party in NL!

Anyone who wants to visit or organize a launch party, there is still time. Go to the Launch Party Wiki Page and see if there is something close by. If not, organize it! Seriously, it's not hard: just put a page up there, point to a cafe where you can get beer & coke and you're already pretty far. Sure, you can do fancy presentations in a conference room, but isn't beer what brings people together? And isn't a party nothing without a well-equipped bar?

Posters - but where is the source?

By the way, there is a bunch of awesome-looking Launch Party Posters on the Launch Party Wiki Page, where are the sources? I bet you can ask in the #opensuse-marketing channel on Freenode for them but having them up there is easier, ladies and gents!

I want the sources because I'd love to have a release party here, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Anyone else close by? Any suggestions for a decent pub? Please mail me at my first name on opensuse.org! KDE and GNOME, XFCE & LXDE fans - you're all welcome, we're YOUR best distribution after all!

Shout out

As I said, I'm pretty tired, so I surely will skip people in this list but I just HAVE to thank some people for what they did:
First of all the whole marketing team for their work on the amazing Product Highlights (I keep calling it feature guide, hehe). I shout out to Bruno, Tony and James for their technical knowledge, Izabel for her TIRELESS work in adding all the relevant information and Helen for helping to clean things up and write proper text. Sascha, Holger, Christian, Carlos, Frank, Greg, Chuck, Andres, Andreas, Bryen, Kostas, Dominique, Guido and all others - thank you too, every line of text helped tremendously!!! If you helped out and weren't credited, add your name to the list at the bottom of the Product Highlights. You deserve it, don't be shy! Those not on the marketing team, you'll see the end results when the announcement is live ;-)
Chuck, I have to mention you especially. Your mail on social media made my day. I was worried nothing was being organized - and I didn't have time. You took it on yourself and made a difference. Love you.
rtyler, you're another hero. Your writing for OMGSUSE.com in the last 10 days has been awesome. I know it was exhausting - yet you still helped out reviewing and writing. AWESOME! Oh, and add your name to the list on the Product Highlights!
Manu, manu, manu. You've been all over again. Despite busy with school and other obligations, you worked until deep in the night. Feature guide, website, social media, everywhere. You deserve a thousand hugs!
The work our Tiger Bruno has been doing, working with Chuck, Carlos and Javier - invaluable. Thanks to you guys we'll have an amazing openSUSE 11.4 poster shipped with the next Linux Magazine!!! And Bruno, give a hug to your girlfriend for organizing our Virtual Launch Party on Second Life!!!
And just now Rajko and Sebiastian: when I asked an hour ago (almost desperate) for people to help fill the screenshot section on the wiki, you jumped up and started to work. IRC lit up like a lightbulb: "I'm editing, wait a sec..." "where are those GNOME shots?" and in mere minutes - AWESOMENESS! Thanks a lot, you made my night :D

A full round of hugs and Doritos (sorry sshaw)!

flash 10.2

Anyone who has updated to the latest Adobe Flash, you can fix video's (which are now pink on sites like Youtube) like this:

Step 1. Right click on a flash content (I went to this flash site http://moodstream.gettyimages.... and simply right clicked on the page)
Step 2. Choose the entry "Settings..."
Step 3. Unclick entry "Enable hardware acceleration"
Step 4. Click "Close"

And done :D

Enjoy non-pink video's again!

why oh why

The issue is probably caused by the crappy video driver situation on Linux... Or just crappy engineering on Adobe's side, something we've gotten used to by now, haven't we?

Let's hope HTML5 will help us get rid of Flash once and for all. And let's hope we've learned our lesson and don't jump from one hole into another by adopting a non-open codec like x264 instead of WebM or Ogg or something else really open. Yes, of course open includes being royalty-free - how can you call anything 'open' or 'a standard' if there are limits on who can implement it?

Aaah well, live ain't perfect. So relax, enjoy your weekend and if you live in Brazil - Carnaval on Monday and Tuesday!

criticism towards GNOME Shell

Reading all the controversy around the decision by the GNOME Shell designers to remove the minimize and maximize buttons from GNOME shell reminds me quite a bit of the discussions around Plasma. Especially for stuff like the brilliant yet controversial Folderview widget.

criticism

It also makes me wonder if those complaining have ever tried GNOME Shell... As is adequately explained in this rationale, minimizing simply has no place in the concepts behind GNOME Shell. Period. And if you've tried GNOME Shell you would realize that.

GNOME Shell in openSUSE 11.4

Yes, Shell takes getting used to, it does enforce certain habits. If you want to customize your environment for maximum 'getting-work-done' then maybe GNOME Shell is (currently) not for you. But that's the crowd KDE has always appeased to anyway. There is after all a trade-off between efficiency and ease of use (or rather, discoverability) - it is why most seasoned sysadmins use a command line.

Newbies!

But the power of GNOME Shell lies somewhere else. Put a newbie in front of it. Observe - in 5 minutes they've figured out how to use it, really. It is very simple and intuitive. I find that very impressive. Especially on a touch screen, it all makes a lot of sense. And it also works on very small screens. And yes, you'll see, the minimize button DOES NOT make sense in GNOME Shell. Really.

If you want to criticize GNOME Shell, talk about technology. I would've advocated to not build a new tech platform but build Shell on something like Plasma which is designed to make interfaces like GNOME Shell, or do like Ubuntu did with Unity 2D). But I kind'a get why they didn't, it's software 'from the other camp'. A more harmful thing is that they didn't get involved with the fd.o systray/notification rework done by KDE and Ubuntu, I see it as a big miss for GNOME Shell, and I'll consider it narrow-minded until I see or hear a good rationale somewhere ;-)

Plasma 4.6 and KDE Apps in openSUSE 11.4

But don't balk at the design until you've tried it with your grandmother... And in the end, Shell is innovative and new and will need maturing. I always have a soft spot for innovative and new things, it's why I like Plasma despite the issues it still has. So I do look forward to the final release of GNOME 3 and I'm happy that we (openSUSE/Novell) decided to press GNOME 3/Shell LiveDVDs as soon as the release of GNOME 3 is out. Yes, we'll also make KDE ones, 4.6 on openSUSE 11.4 really rocks and deserves it ;-)

openSUSE Marketing Meeting in Los Angeles

Finally, after well over a week of telling myself I should blog I have found some time. Sleep is overrated and I can't actually get any while flying anyway so let me tell you why I had to blog.

Marketing Meeting and SCALE

Last week the openSUSE Marketing team had their first dedicated marketing meeting in Los Angeles. This was followed by the whole bunch attending SCALE. SCALE is probably the most prominent Free Software conference in the USA and we made a big splash there so that was really cool!

At the meeting we had lots of fun of course. We had an incredible team from all over the world - Australia (Helen), Greece (Kostas), Swiss (Bruno), Brazil (Izabel and Carlos), USA (Chuck, Tony and Bryen) and myself (a Dutchie). Stephen and Tyler (from OMGSUSE fame) joined us for SCALE. And I should mention that Alan Clark was there as well for the full week. Unfortunately, some we hoped would be there could not make it - including James, who was ill, and Manu Gupta from India who had Exams interfere with his trip. Luckily both of them as well as others joined us via IRC.

Hard at work at oS Marketing Meeting LA

Results

So what has the team been up to? First of all, getting to know each other. Most of us never ever met in real life. And we've got a great team, really cool! During the week we worked, initially quite organized (we set up an agenda, split in teams and worked on the tasks) later on in a more 'organic' fashion with constantly changing teams and tasks. We did a variety of things - work on marketing materials, preparation of the 11.4 release, GSOC (thanks, Izabel & Kostas), a bit for the openSUSE Conference and some writing. And as usual we didn't get 10% done of what we wanted to do - yet I'm very happy with the results. For our 11.4 release we'll have a lovely Feature Guide, showing our users what's new in this release. Based on the Feature guide you can expect some articles to be released before and after the release, as well as other marketing materials. We've prepared a bunch of presentations on a variety of subjects (Tony, thanks for your work on Tumbleweed!) and improved some wiki pages with information for our ambassadors (Kostas!!!!). And a series of posters was made - a really *awesome* series of posters! Clearly, putting Carlos & Helen in one room leads to some cool stuff!

Having fun at oS Marketing Meeting LA

And we learned a lot from each other - especially Bruno and Tony who were the more technical among us were answering questions a lot of the time. During the evenings - well, we usually kept working, but we also had a few beers and cigarettes outside the conference room. Usually people stayed around until 2-3, I usually went to bed early 'cuz I had to open it up which I did around 8. Food we got from a supermarket (Novell paid) so we always had fresh sandwiches with lots of stuff to put on them. That was really good - the first day we had lunch at Denny's but nobody really liked that much so the other three days we just made our own food...

Having food at oS Marketing Meeting LA

Friday we enjoyed a day off - at least, most of the day. A bunch of us went 'tourist' and saw the Hollywood sign, the famous stars and of course LA traffic, traffic and traffic...

Being tourists at oS Marketing Meeting LA

And now...

Now I have some more pics to upload and some people to kick about the reports they have to write. And I have to thank Bryen again and again for the organization of this meeting, as well as Novell for paying for it! SCALE deserves a blog of its own, which I'll do tomorrow or Saturday.

LibreOffice and openSUSE 11.4

Happy to see LibreOffice going strong... This article analyzes the contributions to LibreOffice. Some impressive numbers - 133 new contributors already!!! Even Canonical has send in a patch to fix something... Meanwhile Michael Meeks' team (Novell) is leading the 'corporate contributors' pack. And yes, openSUSE will be the first major linux distribution to ship LibreOffice - and it'll be good, thanks to that involvement in LibreOffice development.

Sean Michael Kerner mentions this fact and our upcoming release in his blog on internetnews.com where he also quotes our AJ on several infrastructural improvements. We do need to educate him and explain openSUSE isn't exclusively a Novell product - with so many volunteers involved and the work going on to set up a Foundation you simply can't claim that anymore... We're leading the pack in that area as well and we need to be vocal about that!

PS will blog on the Marketing Meeting we had last week soonish, need to catch up to some urgent things first... Especially sleep!