fr0g

A [Discourse] forum may need an account, but is hosted and straight-forward.

Discourse is also working on a Fediverse integration. So at some point you might not even need extra forum accounts.

As long as people think that a largely volunteer run ecosystem can be held to the very same expectations as products from some of the most wealthy companies on the planet without willingness to contribute or accept setbacks, I’m very glad that Linux isn’t mainstream.

Mobian developed for PostmarketOS? I feel like you are mixing something up here, as those are both distros. Maybe you mean Phosh?

Many people (including me) have run Aeon for years. It’s definitely usable as daily driver. It’s also in RC3 stage right now and should switch to it’s first “proper” release any day/week now.

But, it sounds to me like it’s more adapted for smaller devices and IoT, like the Steam Deck or similar handheld devices.

There are plenty of desktop focused immutable Linux distros. With Fedora Sikverblue/Kinoite probably being the most prominent one, but there are also Vanilla OS, the ublue distros and the one I’m personally using, (openSUSE) Aeon. NixOS technically counts too I think, but that one has it’s whole own philosophy/structure that extends way beyond just being immutable

What were the pros and cons according to you?

Pros: increased stability/less risk of breakage, sepaeation of base system/apps that will be more intuitive to many non-Linux users, (Flatpak) apps tend to always be the newest version
Cons: still some smaller pain points around app integration, some flatpaks might have some features that don’t fully work or you might need to change a permission (this has gotten a lot better already though), less suited for tinkerers

SUSE isn’t owned by Novell anymore though. So this isn’t particularly relevant.

There’s this blogpost but it doesn’t really shed any more light on the thing either

https://blog.sonny.re/retrospective-as-gnome-director

I’d say it’s non-mouse focused. Heavy touch or keyboard focus work pretty well, but the mouse really isn’t intended as anything more than a helper.

That could be a branding strategy, I guess, but the community project behind it will still need a name of some kind obviously. Unless they only want to show up at conferences/have a website url etc as “the project whose name shall not be mentioned”.

There is no “current proposal” at this point.

And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.

Most certainly not in Linux distro community spaces, because those are completely irrelevant for them and their needs.

And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming?

No, I don’t think that. I *know* that because I’m active in the community.

OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise.

That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers. That’s an entirely different demographic from people who care about Desktop Linux or setting up a home server.

Edit:

its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical.

I’m pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.

Editedit: According to wikipedia SUSE’s revenue is about twice as high as Canonical’s

No, there are good reasons for it. A lot of people get confused between SUSE and openSUSE offerings. Often SUSE customers show up in openSUSE places, because they believe that it’s a place they can get official support. And I’m sure a lot of potential customers might get confused in the same way too.
On the flip side there are also a lot of openSUSE (adjacent) users who think SUSE is (secretly or not) making openSUSE development decisions or think they can dand SUSE to do that and that.

So there are some good reasons to consider a rebranding, but also some speaking against it, like the less of recognition it might entail.