On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 08:17, Thomas Taylor
Personally, I find the installation to be difficult for a "newbie". I've used openSUSE since version 5 or 6 and find the most recent (11.3 thru 12.1) to be very user antagonistic. Yes, I know how to make modifications during the install process but how many users just starting to experiment with linux (and therefore SUSE) would know that?
Exactly what modifications do you think a new user needs to make? If you assume an average computer (which we have to assume in the installer) and a new user who is first experimenting with Linux.... all they need to do is burn the ISO to CD/DVD or USB stick and pop it in a drive/USB port. Boot it up, take ALL the defaults, and bingo bango, a few minutes later they should have a fully functioning openSUSE install. It's only the "corner cases" where someone has some odd hardware that's out of the mainstream or tries to overthink the installer that things go wrong... and guess what, it likely goes wrong regardless of distro or OS you install. I install openSUSE all the time on multiple machines on very varied hardware (laptops, desktops and servers) and the installer (using defaults) rarely fails to give me a working system. I can think of once on some really unusual hardware and user requirements that I had a problem. A new user doesn't have to think about a separate /home.. the installer creates it for him by default. A new user does not need to think about things like "should I make a partition for /tmp and /usr and /var and and and" These are things that experienced users are interested in... a new user often doesn't even know what a partition is :-P A new/inexperienced user will not be trying to rip the guts out of the install by killing splashy and friends. An experienced user.. .sure, why not. but the openSUSE installer cannot possibly hope to cater to every single possible odd out0of the mainstream requirement that someone has... and seriously, taking out splashy and friends is not mainstream.. this is a very special-needs corner case. For advanced users who don't like the GUI and/or the GUI installer... there is the Minimal install... no splashy included. You get CLI, and you can use the text YaSY to add apps including specific GUI components post-install. Yes there are some spaghetti dependencies (such as some very deep reaching and as yet unexplained dependencies for splashy) and at times... dependencies that don't make sense... it happens... contributors are human... they make what appears to be the best choices that make sense to them, and sometimes it doesn't work. Open a bug report and request it changed.
There is no documentation on the DVD iso's explaining anything about things like what "branding" is, why a separate /home is a good idea, what network settings (during install) are (i.e. loopback device), or even how to handle some of the more common problems during install (video cards, etc.).
So... if you know there's a problem here, and you know what exactly the problem is - you've listed several things here - then... the openSUSE doc team is always in need of help. You do not need to be a C++ developer to write a doc. You can find the Doc Team here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Documentation_team Maybe you could add content to this doc page here: http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse114/book_opensuse_reference/?pag...
And what are we to think when we submit bug reports that don't seem to be investigated during several milestones? The only response seems to be to call them duplicates but not find a solution until enough duplicates are accumulated.
Loads of bug reports are fixed... all the time. Have you ever worked in software development? I don't mean open source, I mean commercial paid development.... I have, for years, and... well guess what, bugs are handed exactly the same way there as they are here - in fact openSUSE bugs are generally handled better than any other commercial or open source project I've worked on (I'm thinking of OpenOffice in particular which had/has hundreds of bugs open/ignored for 10 years or more)... and good luck submitting a bug to Apple or Microsoft - you want to talk about black hole.. there's one. At least with openSUSE you *actually*do* have a say in where things go. If a bug appears to be ignored maybe there's a reason for it... the maintainer has too many bugs to manage... he/she has forgotten about it (I've done that)... there is no maintainer... it's a low priority because it's an unusual or very uncommon thing that a tiny number of expert users might stumble on in rare cases (so an effort vs gain decision is made... something I've had to do countless times). The openSUSE community here is VERY helpful despite the claims made earlier in this thread. Look at the recent help given to the new user who was asking advice.. there were what.. over 100 messages there with loads of helpful advice - it was explained to this user why he might want to add a few extra partitions outside of the default, and it was explained in clear steps how to do this, people took the time to explain the difference between x86_64 and i586/i686.. the list goes on and on, and that's just one discussion... take a look at the useful info D.Rankin posts - like the mysql/BASH tip today... People who make spurious claims about how crap the community is to them will never believe, no matter how much proof you show them, that the reality is, we're doing pretty good - room for improvement, but overall, this community is alive, helpful and encourages participation at all levels. Hmmm... where'd this soapbox come from? I'll just step down from there, and retreat back in to the background again. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org