One week ago, we released openSUSE 11.4 introducing many exciting new features. The result was, as we wrote on Friday: a big splash. The 100.000 downloads in the first 24 hours and large numbers of blogs, articles and reviews all over the world were certainly impressive! So for today, 1 week later, we set out to find out how the stats look right now. Did we keep the momentum going?
openSUSE on Distrowatch
On the numbers
6 days after our previous report, downloads on bittorrent moved to well over 36.000 downloads from the 12.000 in the first 24 hours. Still over 900 people are seeding. Meanwhile, the total number of downloads on the download page has exceeded the 300.000 downloads now.
Breaking the numbers down a little, we can see what images you are choosing. With over 113.000 downloads, the i586 DVD iso is the most popular, followed by 83.000 downloads for the 64 bit DVD. The live CD’s are going fast as well, with over 37.000 for the KDE (32 & 64 bit) and 31.000 for the GNOME one. Quite a few users are even opting for the networked installation CDs, with about 16.000 downloads as well.
After announcing they had openSUSE 11.4 support from day 1, the SUSE studio team let us know last week that they had 1000 appliances build with openSUSE 11.4 in 24 hours. Well, since then, thousands more have been made! On the release day, traffic to the SUSE Studio website spiked by 62%. Right now, SUSE Studio image building still takes significantly longer than usual due to the continued increase in traffic… They also let us know that it is now possible to automatically update your current appliance to openSUSE 11.4 if you want.
Party time!
Launch party pics/overview? !!! Kostas?
Right from the launch date on, there were launch parties all around the world. On planet openSUSE, the first reports are showing up and the dutch release party had a report on connect.opensuse.org!
Reviews and articles
There are many more reviews now on the web. We have not spend much time updating our in-the-press page as there is just too much. Just in Spain, for example, 10 major sites published reviews and notices – that is not including blogs and many smaller sites…
We do want to point to one particular review, the one by The Linux Action show. Both gentlemen doing this are usually not huge openSUSE fans so we greatly appreciate their glowing review of 11.4! And, gents, count on us taking care of the thing you were missing: innovation and fancy stuff! There are several great initiatives upcoming as we reported in this article about 2010 and surely, more will come.
Novell and Attachmate
Of course Novell supported our release with a press announcement, mentioning some of our major new features. Chairman and CEO of Attachmate, Jeff Hawn, conveyed congratulations on the release of openSUSE 11.4 on behalf of his company.
Facebook Interaction
Social media stats
Our Social Media guru Chuck ‘pup’ Payne reports some fantastic participation on our various social networking channels. The top five countries participating in our social pages were the USA, Indonesia (who have created their own page!), Germany, India, and Italy.
Change Your Profile Pix
As a ‘last moment idea’, Chuck posted on the openSUSE spage and group that users might like to change their pix to the Geeko character that Carlos had had created. A fun way to celebrate and promote the release. This was very successful, with 20% of users changing their profile pictures to our geeky, suit-wearing lizard!
openSUSE Facebook Page
Interactions on Facebook
Twitter
Chuck set up a feed so that posts would be sent to Twitter. It’s hard to get exact statistics for Twitter, but over on the day we had a lot of tweets flying. We started mainly twitting and re-tweeting or news. Chuck sent direct tweets to Linux Magazine, Linux Pro Magazine, Linux Journal, which helped because they return retweeted and then created they own tweets with links to they websites. We really appreciated the support from our colleagues in the media!
