Switzerland

The same arguments about learning vi/vim/neovim holds for ed. It’s not intuitive, you need to get used to it, you need to learn, etc. People choose not to learn vim for the same reason vim users don’t want to learn ed.

It’s a text editor. It all began with the ed editor, which is very simple and does one thing, it edits files. Then someone extended it into the ex editor. Then someone added a new feature: being able to visually see the file you’re editing, which became vi, the visual editor. Then someone improved that, into vim. What began as an editor where you needed to be fluent in regular expressions but otherwise was simple, is now a very complex editor, moving the functionality of the old UNIX tools into the editor itself.

This reminds me of Rob Pikes paper from the year 2000.
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html

If we want to do something radically different, there’s always gopher and gemini browsers.

It’s more that changes can be made with coordination across the OS, with a shared vision and goal. Linux distros are primarily integration projects, putting together the components from other peoples projects. BSDs are in control of the base OS project as one coherent project.

I see what you mean now. I thought you meant as in upstream/downstream.

Tumbleweed is not a derivative of Leap.

“The discussion continued for quite a while without making much headway.”

I think Debian is interesting, being such a large project of collaboration. I want this democratic, volunteer, non-corporate backed, free project to show that 10000 eyes make bugs shallow. I wish this model produced new ways of doing things, bringing people together in the spirit of creativity and playful productivity.
I’ve used Debian in different ways for around 15 years now, and I really want it to succeed.
Having said that, there is a “but…” looming in the back of my mind. But… it’s difficult to ignore that other distributions are the ones pushing Linux forward. The innovation from Fedora and the distributions still called OpenSuse explore new areas which become the standards.
This is not criticism of Debian, I just wonder if we humans are capable of collaborating freely at that level without some top-down force directing work forward, or if we are bound to being one step behind, always trying to catch up to what others have already done?

Are we actually converting people or is the desktop platform just less popular for other OSs in favor of phones etc?

Debian + Flatpaks has been very reliable to me.

The last time my grub was broken was around 2012 when I ran Arch. After that I have rarely thought about grub at all.

https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian

What about the proposal to just drop the name openSUSE with no replacement? And let each distro just be called Tumbleweed, Leap, Aeon, etc.

Fedora/Redhat is a good example. It could be argued that the Linux distro scene was different 23 years ago, making it harder to be seen today.

The thing I’m pondering is what the openSUSE community actually is. Does it exist as a group, or is it separate projects, each doing their own thing… for who? What is the overlap between people in the various distros, overlap in technology used in packaging and QA etc? Is it meaningful to talk about openSUSE as a distinct community separate from SUSE?

When I hear openSUSE, I think of german engineering and resources from SUSE, with a history of innovating great infrastructure.
With a new name, distanced from the SUSE part, I’ll probably feel more like if this is yet another random derivative created by a small group who might soon lose interest.

I don’t know, that’s a level deeper than I know about, but you could be right.

In that case also add ð. If you say the words “think” and “this” out loud, they use different “th”-sounds. “These” would be “ðese”, and “think” would be “þink”.

In recent turn of events, openSUSE Aeon will probably just be Aeon, and the name openSUSE will disappear everywhere.

What started as openSUSE Micro Desktop is now openSUSE Aeon. It’s still RC2, and RC3 will probably be easier to do a clean install since it will add full disk encryption, but if you want to check it out now it’s reliable and works well.