It’s a pie!

To be fair Lemmy does allow you to sign up without any email at all (or at least used to, dunno if they changed it), so it’s not surprising that this goes against many peoples expectations.

You say it’s 50/50 based on your own experience/anecdotal evidence. Admins will probably be able to make that determination with a much greater deal of accuracy based on what they see happening on their instance. So it makes sense to leave the choice to them/enable them to make that choice, right?

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.

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

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.