openSUSE 11.0 Survey Results

The openSUSE survey results are out now. The survey we made in July/August time frame attracted over 12,000 participants. Here is a short summary on changes compared to the last one we did approximately 1 1/2 year ago with the openSUSE 10.2 release. The summary is in the same order as the questions are.

• meanwhile over 90% of our users have broadband access and 3/4 of them have a flat rate. Percentage of people having slow or no internet connection is below 5%. Anyway we should find a way getting our distro physically to emerging countries as we fear they didn’t even take part at the survey due to internet issues :-(

• usage of an OS called Windows dropped from 31% to 21% which either tells us people do the full step to Linux or we may lose newbies?

• Vista is not there yet, XP usage is approx. 3 times larger then Vista usage

• KDE4 is already adopted by kind of 40% out of all KDE users, this is quite impressive to us as we’re mainly talking about KDE 4.0 which isn’t that mature as KDE 4.1 is today (yes, we know KDE 4.1 still needs some work to be perfect ;-))

• involvement in openSUSE has risen strongly, from 15% to 25% and that’s all over the place - be it openSUSE Build Service, bug reporting, openSUSE Forums or others.

• We’ve seen happily that the main reasons for not being involved in the openSUSE project was no time or familiy. But some people mentioned they don’t know how or it’s not clear where to start. We definitely need to address the latter one.

• openSUSE and the first experience with Linux is down from 11% to 6%, that either tells us users from other Linux distros are joining or we’re losing people new to Linux

• rating for “Ease of installation” climbed up strongly, obviously the streamlined installation workflow was the right thing to do.

• On the question what should be changed for future versions the wish for more software packages declined. So it looks like the openSUSE Build Service and the 1-click installation helps many users to get additional software from.

The things above are for us the most eye catching results. In general the results are pretty similar to the last survey. For comparison you find the old survey on the UX page. As you see those results - at least some times - open room for interpretation in one or the other direction. For feedback please use the opensuse-project mailing list.

We want to thank all people participated at the survey and some of them will receive soon an openSUSE t-shirt or cap.