Michael was kind enough to write about the openSUSE survey results over on openSUSE News. The survey results are fairly interesting, some of the responses are encouraging, some not so much.

The first thing that caught my eye is the gender response — less than 2% of respondents are women. The gender gap in FOSS has been a known problem for some time, but this is a problem we still need to address.

As for computer skills, only 5% of the respondents said their computer skills were basic. The encouraging part for this response is that nearly 38% of the respondents said that they were “experienced users without technical skills.” So slightly more than 42% of users consider themselves unskilled with computers, but still run openSUSE at least part of the time, which is a good thing. (Though it would be valuable if we could track those users in some way and see if they evaluate their skills differently after using openSUSE for a year — i.e., if they learn more about using computers and become interested in developing computing skills through using openSUSE, or if they are content to remain at their current technical level.)

No surprise here: developers and system admins make up more than 30% of the audience, and students are 25.2% of the audience. Something I see over and over again is that students make up a disproportionate percentage of the open source community. (Also, many open source developers tend to become involved with FOSS in college or late high school.)

Stability tops the list of choice when it comes to criteria for choosing software, followed by security, usability, and hardware support.

Here’s a somewhat contradictory result: about 34% of our respondents said that an OSS license was one of the most important features when choosing software, and about 39% said that multimedia support was a chief concern. I wonder how many people listed both multimedia support and OSS license as one of the most important criteria, seeing as those two criteria often conflict?

KDE3 topped the desktop list with 38.5%, and KDE4 clocked in with 29.8%, and GNOME with 26.9%. Xfce rules a modest 1.1% of users’ desktops. (Unfortunately, the survey didn’t have a “I use KDE, GNOME, and Xfce on different machines” option.)

About 25% of the respondents say that they’re involved in the project in one way or another — bug reporting being the most popular activity with about 13%, and forum participation also making up about 13%. Packaging is at less than 3% — I’d like to see that much higher by the time we do the next survey.

What should we do to improve future releases? A whopping 67.8% response rate for “improve hardware support.” This is, as always, a goal for the project — but it wouldn’t hurt to drop a note to your hardware manufacturers and mention that 1) you use Linux, and 2) you will consider a competitor of theirs in the future if they don’t support Linux.

Many thanks to all who participated. One last question — what should we ask next time we do a survey?

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