On 14.01.2012 13:33, Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 01/14/2012 07:13 AM, Swapnil Bhartiya wrote:

...

Hi,

I have been using openSUSE (with KDE) for a couple of months now since 12.1 was released. I am a journalist and mostly use it as an average Joe. I am working on a series of articles around my experience with openSUSE and to offer it to those who are not happy with a 'particular' Linux based OS. My question to the community here is: is openSUSE recommended for home users?

There is certainly nothing wrong with home users using openSUSE. We try to take the so called "ease of use" (whatever that means) argument into account. However, openSUSE does not go out of it's way to "dummify" the interface such that it is in the end useless.

Agree. openSUSE is meant for every user, is it the writer guy who wants to write his new novel, or the lovely grandma who wants to stay connected with her children and grandchildren via email, or is it the CEO who needs something to work with at home, or the guy who wants to run his servers with. And it's even meant for someone who runs his own open source magazine and tests the distro for that ;-) In short: it's for everyone who *wants* to use it. It seems to be the openSUSE philosophy to keep it simple, but not stupid. I mean, It's easy and simple to install software via YaST, but nobody forces you to do so, you also can use zypper via the shell.

Reading the strategy (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Strategy) my provide the answers you are looking for. Not everything around this topic is necessarily easy to express and as such not everything will be spelled out.

Is that only me, or does our wiki not work correctly? Firefox still loads the page, maybe we got some infrastructure problems again? I'll cc Matt for that.

HTH, Robert

-- Kim Leyendecker, openSUSE Wiki Team GPG Key: 664265369547B825 | leyendecker@opensuse.org http://www.opensuse.org - Linux for open minds -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Swapnil Bhartiya said the following on 01/14/2012 08:16 AM:

In my own experience, I have addressed a lot of issues that I faced when I migrated to openSUSE. It was just that I needed to look in the right direction, which I am learning. I want to share the same experience with other users. I just wanted to make sure that I won't end up targeting the audience which is not the audience of openSUSE. Fedora, for example, can be very challenging to use if someone has proprietary hardware or wants an out-of-the box solution. I was triple booting with Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE but Fedora refused to boot after a certain time some systemd issues. I don't want that with my user :-)

Yes-but ... You need to realise that you are dealing with a moving target. TargetS. Plural. Lots of them. So Fedora had systemd problems. Well what release was that? Well so does openSuse in 12.1, and the problems that openSuse12.1 has don't seem to be there in the Fedora-15 I run on another machine ... and Ubuntu doens't run systemd and it does run other stuff Fedora and openSuse do ... And then there's "Which desktop"? Its not simply a matter of Gnome or KDE. Some people won't run either; some think KDE4 was a mistake and insist on KDE3 being maintained. Some think that all that is overlaoded and want to be minilalist with LXDE or futuristic with e17. In times gone by, journalists made a big issue of this; We had the Motif vs Openlook wars. Remember that? Do you remember who won? Do you remember the battles between Bill Joy and Dave Cutler? What about the uproar about the introduction of what we now call "SysVinit" back when the Unix Systems Group took over UNIX at Bell. many people refused to deal with that and stuck with the older model of init scripts that we still have in the BSD branch. Come to that, what about the copyright wars between Bell and Berkeley? Or the journalists who attempted to show that Linux "stole" code from Andy Tannenbaum's Minix, something they both denied. Sometimes journalists manufacture issues and dissent and problems out of the normal process of living and learning and growth just to make copy and in doing so make those issues seem more (or perhaps less) than they really are. Right now, openSuse 12.1 has problems. So what? Eight months from now we'll have 12.2 No doubt there will be different problems. Perhaps we'll have KDE 4.3 as well. Perhaps openSuse of Tablet will be more newsworthy. Perhaps that your multiboot system wouldn't boot Fedora because of an update that Ubuntu did and has nothing to do with any shortcoming of Fedora. Its all moving target. And like in relativity, where things are all moving, the frame of reference you use can lead to radically different observations and conclusions. I don't envy Robert being a journalist. Pretty much anything he says is going to be misinterpreted or misconstrued or in the class of "yes, but", and many people are going to think he's being unfair. After all, "yes it used to be, but we changed all that". -- The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. --Alfred North Whitehead -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Saturday 14 Jan 2012 15:27:35 lynn wrote:

Hi Swapnil Include your experience of getting recordmydesktop working (or not) with 12.1. To give some human interest slant, quote replies you got from this and Fedora and Ubuntu lists or forums.

Forget record my desktop just run ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1280x1024 -r 10 -i :0.0 -f alsa -i pulse -sameq -r 30 \ test.mpg I use opensuse on all my desktops and have done so since version 6.1 (well SuSE 6.1). My whole family, that includes my 2 daughters and my computer illiterate wife also use it with very few issues. As soon as the laptop arrives in the house it is a wipe of windows and all the stupid restore partitions and opensuse goes on it. My daughter has used it all the way through her degree and had no issues. If they try and force her to use a piece of software that is only on windows she enlightens them into the errors of their ways and has always managed to use an alternative, for example she used the 'r' statistical package instead of some poor (in comparison) and expensive software they wanted her to use. I have also managed to convert many at work. They see my laptop running at 10 times the speed of their windows ones (no virus checker) and the wobbly windows is the clincher (lol) and I do eventhing they need to do on it and they are sold. I often provide them with live CDs and tell them to try it out. Make sure you explain it will not be quite as fast due to the read speed of the CD and they understand. You will have to be prepared for a little piece of consultancy during the install if somethings dont work (for example the digital mic on my daughters laptop which took me about an hour to get the right settings) and remeber when they say windows just works remind them that is because someone else installed it for them and they would have more trouble installing it. You will likely have no problems with installations as opensuse is really great at detecting and configuring all the hardware. All in all Don't hold back in converting everyone you can. Just remeber "The OS is out there; the OS is opensuse". -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org