really great that 11.2 will include 4.3

like every novell survey show… the majority of opensuse user’s use kde… so missing gnome is not so bad

Sounds like a good idea to release shortly after KDE releases. openUSUSE 11.1 will miss KDE 4.2 by a month or so.

I totally agree with the eight-nine months release cycle and i´m glad to see it back. A six months release cycle is short for making stable distro. And i´m pleased to see you decided to include KDE4.3.
It´s a reasonable compromised solution.

I Agree, 8 months is a good release cycle. The Planners got it right for 11.2, waiting for the latest KDE and OpenOffice will keep making openSUSE the No#1 distro out there. Look forward to helping with the Alpha and Beta testing.

That’s a very good plan IMHO.
I think that releasing later and including a stable KDE 4.3 release is better than release a potentially buggy 4.3.0 or even a 4.2.something with many backports.
And aseigo will be very happy if there are no backports at all

I’m always disappointed to see a focus on one desktop system vs another (KDE vs Gnome) in openSUSE conversations.

The fact that I use Gnome is really quite irrelevant to anyone else, it just happens to be well done in openSUSE and so that’s the distribution I use day to day. I also use a console openSUSE as a server.

If the initiative is to line up with a KDE schedule, then might one conclude that KDE is going to be the future focus ahead of any other?

If I’m not mistaken, the discussion around KDE 3 vs KDE 4 also included some pretty clear statements about KDE/Gnome equal treatment thus no need for that now?

The question is about logistics and a practical/pragmatic solution. Mid-september is just clear of the summer slow period in the press, and a release with a solid KDE 4.3 is bound to get great publicity well ahead of Ubuntu’s release. It is more likely that OpenSuse will become the natural comparison when the press kicks off the Ubuntu season. OpenSuse 11.2 will have 1-2 months of bugfixing onboard and will become REALLY hard to beat. Ubuntu will be measured against OpenSuse - not the other way around.

In general, it’s my opinion that a 6 month releasecycle is a bit short - my impression is that bugfixing suffers. I would have preferred annual releases, but then again - that would reduce Linux’ momentum significantly. 9 months is fine with me.

One issue that is a bit off-topic yet relevant. Graphic drivers are evolving quite a bit in 9 months and it would have been a good thing to make updated drivers available as they comes along. I manage anyway, but for new users and for convenience it would be nice. It will be more important with a 9 month cycle.

I’m using 11.1 RC with KDE 4.2 beta 1 at the moment - and it runs really really well..

I’m a KDE user, however I cannot deny that the GNOME user base in openSUSE has grown and it can’t be overlooked. I don’t know exactly why, but the KDE team refused to offer an upgrade to kde 4.1 in openSUSE 11.0. I must admit that there were significant changes between KDE 4.0.4 and KDE 4.1.0. However GNOME development is more conservative and AFAIK there aren’t major changes between every GNOME release. So I was wondering, is it posible to offer GNOME users an upgrade from v. 2.26 to v. 2.28? that way they wouldn’t miss the latest and greatest.
Other than that, the release schedule seems fine to me.

Please do not miss Gnome release. That forces more people to use Ubuntu…

I think that 9 months for next release cycle is really better for openSUSE. 11.2 will include brand new stable KDE 4.3 and miss a “3.0 preparation” GNOME 2.28 (which will be released in September too), so another 9 months later it will include not fresh but stable KDE 4.4 and GNOME 3.0
Syncing with both KDE and GNOME is now impossible as they have a 6 months cycle and 3 months difference between releases of each other (KDE goes in January and July, GNOME - in March and September). With current situation in KDE development newest release of KDE is really more important at least for the next release os openSUSE, so go for 9 months till 11.2

Well, I would appreciate personnally that the release could happen during august… or the public release really at the very first days of september.

I explain why: I work for a university where we distribute laptops to our students with both windows and linux. This year we gave a try with opensuse, and I think it’s really a good distribution, but if 11.2 is released on mid september, we will really have problems to ship it with the laptops… that would be sad to stay with 11.1 (which looks good too .. but hey, 11.2 will be better, no ? ;))

Anyway I agree with the fact that 9-month cycle is a good choice in general (I’m just, personnally in trouble)…

Unofficial Release Style Forum Poll

It would be useful if you took a minute to vote, so parts of the discussion had some numbers, rather than pure speculation and opinion about real user wishes.

http://forums.opensuse.org/surveys-polls/402364-release-style-preferences-wth-poll.html

Poll : What Release Model Would You Like Best? ( This poll will close on 29-Jan-2009 at 17:20 )

Current One - 3 Releases in 2 Years, Some Upgrades via Build Service
Rolling Release - “stable”, “current” and “factory” well tested upgrade for stable
6 Monthly Release following KDE & GNOME
Annual Release with more time for Development & Testing
Other (please explain your preference)

I think this is a very positive move. The six-month cycle was too short and unnecessary. If I want to use an undercooked, buggy distribution that gets updated every six months, then I can change to Kubuntu or Mandriva. The 11.1 development suffered from having too many new features introduced too late in the the release cycle.

If there is just one thing I’d like to see Opensuse take from Ubuntu, it’s not the six month release cycle, but their rather excellent distribution upgrade system within synaptic, but taken to the next level. I’d love to be able to upgrade from 11.1 to 11.2 without having to manually enable new repositories and re-install things like multimedia codecs.

I like the proposed development cycle of 8-9 months, I would prefer a stable release to a bleeding edge unstable release.
I use KDE and GNOME- As I see it KDE4 still needs work and KDE 4.3 in 11.2 sounds great. gnome as of now is very stable and usable, I donno what extras are expected in 2.8 that won’t be in 2.6.
So to me the release date seems to be fair.
I dont want opensuse to compete with Ubuntu and the lot, both are different distros targeted at different users.( I personally have both Ubuntu 8.10 for my family and Opensuse 11.1 for me installed in my system) So a release cycle targeted at Ubuntu makes no sense.

The focus on KDE4 is good for 11.2 as it is here that work needs to be done(few apps crashing on my 11.1 KDE4.1), gnome seems good in 11.1 and would be even better in 11.2. I hope there is no Gnome vs KDE war for 11.2 because if we wait for 2.8 a few more months latter kde 4.4 may be out and hence the release may never take place.

I agree with the above comment that puts stability above bleeding edge. I don’t think bleeding edge is a major selling point for openSUSE, although we all appreciate the nice inclusions from newer WM releases.
I was a bit taken aback by the little mishaps that crept into 11.1, and i think a longer brewing time would have smoothed them out.
So yes, longer release cycle, why not?

Actually, i would be all in favor of a longer release cycle: I have opensuse on my users desktops at work. i’d just finished moving them from 10.3 to 11.0 that a new one came out!

Along with Fedora 10, openSUSE 11.1 is the best distro released in ‘08. Simply amazing in so many ways. But count me with others here — I like the 8-9 month release cycle better, giving the dev team more flexibility. In return, the user gains almost a year on a stable system before choosing to upgrade. I’ve been doing 6-month upgrades for 2.5 years now and it’s getting old, as ironic as that sounds. In the meantime, consider adding a ’simple partition’ option to the current install process. sidux has a good model to follow. I was mildly disappointed to see that where my 2nd HD was recognized, it was not automounted. (Not a big deal, but why not give me the option right there?)

After reading what stephan replied to my first proposal, it occured to me that, as someone else pointed out here, GNOME 2.28 will be released sometime in september. If openSUSE 11.2 is released in september too, by the time it reaches the GM status there should be available a GNOME 2.27.x version that is usable and therefore openSUSE could be released with that version of GNOME. When GNOME 2.28 is released it could be offered as an online update, just as done with firefox 3 in openSUSE 11.0.

I chose 3 Releases in 2 Years. The reasons… pretty simple.

1) The situation now is: a really nice release is pushed with nothing revolutionary.

Which is, generally speaking, a good idea.

Which is not, in fact, a good idea is that nothing really new has come up except new bugs. They take a lot of efforts to openSuSE developers and a lot of important hot-fixes are needed.

Why these efforts are not put in something different, something absolutely fresh and worthy re-installing the whole system once again.

I personally have encountered at least 6-7 major and very annoying bugs including network misconfiguration with 11.1 and as a result no Internet connection available. I’ve managed to manually configure it, but a newbie would simply not (I filed up the most part of the bugs in 11.1beta5, half of them - still present).

2) The operation system will still be in good shape and relatively up-to-date.

3) zak89’s opinion is absolutely…
“If releases are stretched out too far (like Debian)… but neither my graphics card, wireless or wired networking devices are supported by the Etch kernel.”….. The Pure Truth.

Catching ip with KDE4 releases is a great thing! Right now, the KDE release dates a only missed by a few days which causes that openSUSE always comes with a nearly outdated KDE version.

Agreed that early adopters like me can stick to the excellent KDE Factory repositories (Kudos, Beineri!) but in the nearer past, openSUSE was hailed for its great KDE integration by all Linux related publications, which has drawn much attention to openSUSE. It would be a pity to give this up by letting other Distros get ahead of openSUSE in terms of latest KDE versions.

I have really liked to always have something for Xmas (because that’s when people have the most time and fun), and moving away from the 6 month cycle would kinda break that — unless you are willing to go for a 12 month cycle which I think would be pretty long.
Neutral vote on my side.

I believe we should go for slower release cycles, mostly for the already mentioned reasons. OpenSUSE 11 seemed very unstable and buggy to me, I even thought about downgrading it back to 10.3 after a few days. With a 8-9 month( or more) cycle, there would be much more time for testing and bugfixing which would allow to release a truly usable and stable system.
Furthermore I think we should consider integrating more and better online-update possibillities. Most people find it much more convenient to keep there OS up-to-date by downloading and installing updates compared to the installation of a new version of the distribution, so in my opinion we should work more and more in that direction. On a long-term basis this would certainly work well to gain more (casual) users, if we keep the prosses simple and effective. The problem with Gnome 2.28 could also be easily solved that way, and the development of OpenSUSE would overall become much more flexible and independent.

Greetings from Austria

I vote for the nine month release cycle.
I think OpenSuSE 11.1 is buggy. It can’t even install my graphic drivers without problems (i have never had this problem with previous distros). Also Desktop Efects don’t work correctly (another problem i didn’t). My wireless don’t work (another one i had never experienced before)… You get the point…
So i certainly vote for the longer release cycles.
Also i think SuSE should be a smaller distro, its getting bigger and slower, and the reason i like Linux better than windows is because its smaller and faster, but its changing.
I think that the release schedule sould be planned as needed to deliver an as faster, as smaller and as stable SuSE distro as possible, without never exceeding the early realease cicle.

I agree with you. It’s getting slower and slower.

If you compare Win XP and openSuSE 11.1 (Intel x86_64 dual core processor = 4800+, 1 GB RAM), mm you cannot hide the obvious truth…

The good thing is that Vista is far more slower than openSuSE.

Hi

I vote for 9 month release cycle.Stable and robust is better than feature rich but buggy operating system.
Regards
Avdhesh

I vote for the “Annual Release with more time for Development & Testing”

one of the advantages of linux over windows is that you don`t have to format your pc very often, but if you have a 6 months release you will have to do it anyway, so

STABLE STABLE STABLE. People are sick of openSUSE coming out with GREAT reviews, stunning PR, and then they find it riddled with BUGZ!!!! Make it 6,7,8,9,10,11,12 month release cycles. Just stop releasing buggy openSUSE!!!!

In principle I find the 8 month cycle good - the impression from the 11.1 release was that it was rushed and the release candidate was not really tested.

However, many notebook users will be disappointed with the long wait for an actual kernel with the latest drivers.

I would welcome a remastered openSUSE 11.1 with the 2.6.28 kernel (and perhaps ext4 and KDE 4.2.1). This would be really good as interim solution…

If 8 month or more time will make KDE better, I could wait… Also It would good that all updates graphical card, wifi and so on, could get from one repository source (not, like now, I need choose Nvidia or other) And sometimes installing this drivers KDE crashing.
Also I don`t like how to need set network connections (ubuntu 8.10 has better, also win 2000/xp. Windows vista made it worser, but all settings that I need to set is ‘compact’ form.) problems is to understood where I need put DNS servers, where to uncheck DHCP. If we using wifi I need find the same thing, I need to set protection, but how {trying one way, other trying}. If I have an hidden network. It will not work or I need to doo something else?!
Try to make it easy to use, stable (one repository or some where to find all latest (that is tested) updates, drivers, other packages. At this moment I could get red lines, about issure with packages installed (they are old (need to update) or your other program will not work if you update or downgrade {something like that it shows})