openSUSE transformation step 2. The user oriented distro.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release that was designed with a clear goal, target and metric. It was developed following a clear picture of where to go. Design it was a painful but unavoidable process that challenged an assumption established in many people mindset back in 2012. Latest/greatest and stability were incompatible. Hence, Factory, the rolling release back then, was for hardcore SUSE/openSUSE OS developers only. As rolling distros, there were more popular and better options out there.

This summary might help you to get some background.

Goals are easier to achieve if you have a good reference to beat. For those who worked in the project, Gentoo and specially Arch Linux were those references. As you can imagine, transform openSUSE required management support. We had it, specially from Roland Haidl, Operations and Communities Director at SUSE back then. He created the environment that allowed those who worked in his department to be creative…. and take risks.

Simplifying, for the new “development version”, a.k.a Tumbleweed (former Factory), the goal was to implement a model that allowed us to improve the existing Factory one, based on continuous delivery. The target chosen were our core contributors (packagers fundamentally) and the metric was, in summary, to make sure that, no matter how wrong things could go after an update, you would always have a console and network, so you would be able to revert your change. In terms of the process, the resulting integration deployment processes should be transparent, not just internally but also from our community members perspective. It also needed to be simpler in order to gain contributors, not just users. And it needed to empower them to own it.

Instead of following what SUSE was doing back then, the company dedicated resources to challenge itself. As result, openSUSE Tumbleweed is today, not just the best rolling distro out there, with all what that means in terms of excitement among its contributors, but is generating higher value to SUSE, since the company have an outstanding playground at home that allows them to incorporate true innovation into their production process before their competitors do.

openSUSE is discussing nowadays to take a second step, this time focused on its user oriented version. Today is openSUSE 13.2.

In my opinion, based on the previous experience, and independently of the decision/discussion process chosen, the same steps need to be taken. They are unavoidable in any transformation process. It is necessary to define a clear goal, something short that you can explain and understand easily, a clear target and a key metric that helps to clarify the “acceptance criteria” to be used during the whole process.

Like back then, I would like to see SUSE challenging itself, putting in question well established principles within the OS industry. Again, choosing a reference would make the final picture easier to achieve.

Most openSUSE users are desktop users and sysadmin. If, as I conclude from the latest oSC15 videos and factory mailing list discussions, sysadmins are the chosen target, It would be great to see SUSE/openSUSE challenging the assumption that, through a continuous delivery process, you cannot release a stable and high quality (for the target) distribution. That stability is only achievable through a waterfall like model. I would choose CoreOS as reference. It is a project that, based on different questions, is providing innovative answers to new challenges.

I would like to see that, base on the current process (standing on the shoulders of giants) openSUSE/SUSE creates a process that “pulverize” the current mindset, deprecating many of the existing problems, focusing on solving new ones. Imagine the best of both worlds, a new paradigm of OS with the green values.

It took about a year and a half for a dedicated team to release what today is Tumbleweed. I think that this second challenge is bigger than the first one. An even bigger commitment from SUSE will be needed in order to succeed.

But if the resources are there, the creative environment is set, the right steps are followed and the openSUSE community supports the effort, there is nothing that can stop the project to achieve what today are dreams. SUSE has the talent, and the experience, to make it happen.

I wish them all the best in this new challenge.